Okay I've looked through these forums, because I'm considering getting unRAID for an upcoming media server build. I had a couple questions pretty similar to this poster's.
I currently have one 500 gb drive which has the following directory setup:
F:\Pictures\
F:\Videos\
F:\Music\
I would like to keep this format (ie basically the same thing the original poster asked, to have it appear as if it was one drive). However, the only method which I have seen require me to keep creating shortcuts for every single file I have, and then when I record new shows, I have to add more, which means this method is out. I also seem to recall a method in which it would be possible to mount all of the hard drives to one folder. It seemed from the explanation though that that would give me this type of file structure for example:
//tower/videos/disk1/movie1.ts
//tower/videos/disk2/movie2.ts
Is there any explanation someone could link me to that would give me:
//tower/videos/movie1.ts
//tower/videos/movie2.ts
If this is possible, how would writing to the drives be handled anyway, would the system just automatically write to the drive with the most space available, or would I have to set that up on my own with each recording? My last question is a little bit off topic, but I saw something on the forums which said with unRAID, there is reduced write performance compared to RAID since it can't write on multiple disks. Is it still the same write performance as a single disk, or is it reduced from that as well? I'm trying to figure out if this or RAID5 is better for me. I really like the fact that with unRAID, if multiple hard drives die, I only lose the data that was on those drives. However, if I have to personally manage which recordings save where, RAID5 would probably be better for me. My goal is to be able to just pick a directory that spans multiple drives and use Media Center to constantly write to that, until the whole span of drives runs out of space.
This would probably be with two ATSC tuners and one analog tuner, so the write performance of RAID5 might be necessary? I'm not really sure. It would probably be fine as long as all of the tuners were writing to different drives anyway I guess. Anyway, any information that could be given would make my decision that much easier. Thanks.
