TheFloyd

Thanks Michael and itimpi, i have to say... i am pretty new to the unraid forum, and so far i would have to rank it as the best environment ever for asking people for help and a general chat. super impressed with people offering solid advice! itimpi, i had not considered the fact that it doesnt split files across drives. I think that is a remnant of too many years playing with other raid solutions in corporate... good call. regarding backups, i have that covered. in addition to raid resilience with my parity, i have it continuously syncing from a crashplan docker to an off-site encrypted cloud storage. I actually have a spare drive floating around asking for trouble, so i might work out how i can cron a nightly task to nightly rsync my most valuable data to it, such that it is out of the array entirely and in a caddy that can be pulled and chucked in a grab-bag. that will be the next thing i look at.... the other thing i was wondering is if there is much of a performance hit from using the drive i just mentioned as a secondary parity drive? seems to me from what i have read that if you are not protecting mission-critical data, the 2nd parity disk is perhaps not that valuable, given the even lower chance of a second drive failure. I currently like my grab-bag idea instead of Parity2.

Thanks Michael, it is reassuring to hear that at least one other person is thinking like me it would be great if this lights up a bit with ideas, views and details that i had not considered. it is interesting that some of that topics that are considered to be uninteresting core functionality, often have the least diversity of information, disucssion and understanding. eg, there is typically the singular 'best' video on the topic and it becomes the default answer for any variation of question. thanks for sharing your individual view on the topic. good suggestion on the timeout setting too.

Hi All, spending some time pondering how/if to improve my servers and the way that shares have filled it up over the years. I should probably start by mentioning that i have watched all of the super-useful spaceinvader yourtube videos, and specifically the one about getting the pest performance out of shares. truth be told, i have no need to change anything, so this is a thought exercise and i would love your thoughts. I have 8 HDD's in my array. I have SDD mirror cache drives, doing their thing, and i have a separate HDD being bludgeoned by my security cameras. as part of my recent renewed interest, i have been looking at my family shares (all my family documents, pictures, etc) and our super precious photos directory and some low value stuff like an isos directory and a temp folder (for my content creator) kid and a busy timemachine share for a few people with macs etc. anyway, i had always used the default high-water "spread it all over the place" default option, which ultimately meant more spindles and (possibly incorrectly assumed by me) more IO speed. the issue is, that i started to think that maybe i was just ageing all 8 of the drives for a very marginal performance increase in a house-setting. I mean, these poor disks literally never spin down. while they are all WD Red drives, i am not in a corporate environment and dont want to unnecessarily increase the time between drive failure, etc. So, I discovered unbalance, and thought "I Know, i will consolidate all my family profiles onto one disk, all my photos and videos onto another disk, any rarely-access stuff onto another disk and leave one disk spinning all the time for timemachine, temp files an dbackups etc. the goal here is to have as many drives sleeping as i can, unless i need them. unless i go on to discover that this has substantially impacted performance, or that i will get annoyed by having to wake up disks etc... i am sure that a lot of people have got to this point. the issue is that if you try any google a common sense discussion on this topic, you end up with a deep-dive into nerdery and an immediate obsession to post links to the same unraid youtube videos that i have watched countless time and learnt a lot from. what i want is some real-world discussion and guidance on how other people manage this. Am i better off prolonging the life of my drives, by consolidating the shares and letting them sleep? - of am i totally misunderstanding this concept? is there a good-enough performance bump for me to spread shares across all the spindles? - (noting that i realise that this also reduces a single point of failure for the data in that share) actually i am somewhat out of questions..... rightly or wrongly, i have done a bit of consolidating recently in my shares and everything is running nicely now, however, i am happy to have someone talk common sense into me if i have done something daft. I cant wait to hear your advice! cheers! Floyd

Hi Encore, At first when i saw your response, i must admit that i thought it was a bit dismissive, because i asked a pretty specific question and wanted something a little better than to just be told to go and continue researching it for my self. I have been watching spaceinvader one for years, and he is absolutely fantastic. HOWEVER... you were absolutely right. I cant believe that this video was released two days ago, and i had not got around to watching it yet, when it absolutely explains what i wanted to know. I completely understand what my server is doing now, as this larger volume is being integrated into the parity-protected array. Thanks for flagging this video quicker than my youtube app did

So decided to increase a 2TB drive in my array, with a 6TB drive and followed the normal process. interestingly, this little drive had been evacuated for the most part and actually only had about 130GB of data on it. The re-build process started and has generally averaged about 130MB/Sec in terms of re-build speed. It got me thinking though... I had no expectation that it would only rebuild the 130GB of data and call it done, as I assumed that fragments of information may be scattered in a non-contiguous way, all over the array. however, after 6 hours, it has now rebuilt 2..4TB of the previous 2TB of HDD, onto the new 6TB drive. if you look at the dashboard, you can see that all 130GB of data is now listed as "used", which would imply to me that the data on the disk has been re-constructed in full. so my next thought was that this was some sort of initialization process for the remaining 4TB of the 6TB drive, as part of the expansion of the array. but this is the bit i dont get... on the main UI, i can see that it is full-time reading from all of the other drives in the array, and full-time writing to the new 6TB drive. I get the writing bit, but what the heck is it reading from the parity and other three drives, when the array only ever knew this at a 2TB disk and it has already "written" 2.4TB to this new 6 TB drive ? i would expect that like me, everyone will have theories about this operation, but i am hoping for general interests sake, that someone knows the exact reason and could enlighten me on this? it still thinks it has 10.5 hours or rebuilding to do... whaaaa?

Hi Squid, 10 out of 10 for being super helpful ! thanks a bunch, i will give this a shot!

Thanks Squid, but i am worried that i am using the wrong terms here, or that i am still a bit of a noob.... you are talking about 'cache pools' and in my mind this is talking about the SSD's that i have as cache drives in the system that i use for some shares and specifically for my VM's etc. the drive i want to pull is a super slow WD purple spinning disk that has no cache drive associated with its share. it just has 8 security cameras bludgeoning it with footage 24/7, and i wanted to take that heat off my parity drive. i was following you with the first suggestion 'new config', but i got confused when you started talking about new cache pools. i was somewhat expecting that i would need to remove the purple HDD, tell the array to forget it and rebuild the parity, then create a new drive array with a single purple drive in it and no parity, then use magic to move the existing share over to this physical disk. using the term 'cache' threw me a little as it means something different to me. where did i go wrong?

Thanks Squid, for the unbelievably quick response. I must admit my degree of terror when reading the simplicity of your solution my main array underpins many TB of storage from many VM's and docker containers etc. following your steps, would the existing share that points specifically to this physical disk in the array, follow it, or would i need to create a new share to it and update any and all references to it? I presume that following this, my parity disk will thrash like hell for a day or so while it rebuilds etc.

Struggling to find my exact scenario. I made the mistake of adding my security camera HDD to my main drive array. At the time i was new to unraid and didnt realise that even though i had a specific spec drive for my cameras, my parity drive would be busy writing all the changes too. The reality is, that couldnt care less about my security footage if the drive failed, so i would rather take the load off the array and jsut have it as a stand alone drive on the unraid server. if you google this scenario, all you find is people shrinking their array and others wanting to remove their parity drive. what i want to do is pull my purple surveillance drive out of my main array and add it as a single drive with no redundancy, then point my existing security camera unraid share to it, in its new location. surely someone has a procedure for this? for such low value, write-heavy load, i want it to be stand-alone and free up the performance of my main array with parity for all of everything else.