Fogey

Thanks you so much for your post - it reassured me that I'd not completely lost the plot! I've decided to go with one share - Media - with all the various categories of media (Movies/TV Shows etc) in subdirectories of media. That is more similar to the layout I had when I was running Plex on my Ubuntu machine. I assume that once I move all the files to the subfolders in the media shares, in effect UnRaid will then manage all the disk space for me under the one share and I'll be able to delete the old shares that I'd created? Thanks Fogey

Hello, I'm a very new user trying to set up UnRaid and then run Plex on it. My question relates to the folder structure I should use - I think I may have already set things up incorrectly. I thought I had to set upp shares for each of the categories on videos I have - i.e. Movies, TV Shows, Home Movies etc. - i.e. I was treating the shares as directories as folders. However, I've seen some setup info that suggests I should set up a single share - say Media - and then hang a bunch of folders under there for Movies, TV etc. Can anybody help me out, and perhaps point me to detailed setup for Plex? Thanks Fogey

Thanks so much for your quick response, Squid. So as I understand your comments, (I'm in my mid 70's so am not as quick as I once was at this stuff) I'll put in my new 8TB Drive as parity, and then another drive as the first data drive. The remaining 3 drives will then be unassigned drives, but I can copy the data over to the first data drive. When I do that and empty an unassigned drive, I can then assign it to the array - and so on. Now it makes a lot of sense. Just one tiny question - can the parity drive store data, or is it reserved for keeping track of the other data drives? Thanks, Fogey

I'm considering switching my Linux server to UnRaid. I built it as a lockdown project, but at present, its only used as a Plex Media Server, so I might as well change it to UnRaid and avoid the regular fiddling about keeping Ubuntu up to date. Currently I have 4 drives formatted as EXT4. When I read the Introduction to UnRaid it says 'Unraid can manage an array of drives (connected via IDE, SATA, or SAS) that vary in size, speed, brand, and filesystem". Yet it also talks about formatting drives. Obviously with 4 nearly full drives, I of around 20 TB I don't want to lose data or take on a massive transcoding job.. My questions are: 1. Am I correct that I'd have to reformat all 4 existing drives, or just the new drive I'll buy as the parity drive? 2. If I have to format them all, is there a way of temporarily hanging them off the system as EXT4 drives so that I can copy from them onto an UnRaid Formatted drive? Thanks for any help you can provide. Cheers Fogey