JonathanM

It's supposed to reduce the amount of typing by giving helpful information automatically.

SAS is the only external multi disk connection with solid performance. I don't know of a way to reliably use a NUC with external array drives at the moment. Technically USB will work, but you will likely experience reliability and speed issues.

The 'arrs are configured to move the file instead of copying it.

I don't think hardlinks work like that, I could be wrong but I think moving the source file breaks the hardlink. So if you need to use hardlinks I think you will have to set cache: no so the downloads go directly to the array. I don't use hardlinks, so maybe there is a better way of doing things that I'm not aware of. The user share system complicates hardlinks greatly.

Shouldn't matter, /mnt/user/downloads will show all content of /mnt/disk1/downloads and /mnt/cache/downloads, so that shouldn't be the issue. However, why not set the downloads to cache only?

Sure, set that share to cache only. Yes, shares can have folders on multiple array drives and pools. You would set the share to cache: no if you wanted new files to be written to the array, or cache: only if you wanted new files to be written to cache. Mover ignores cache no and only. Yes. When you add new drives the parity will no longer be a mirror, but it will still allow the reconstruction of a single failed drive as long as the other data drives are ok. Previous versions of Unraid only allowed 1 pool, and it was always called cache. The ability to set up multiple pools is new, as is the ability to name them differently. The usage is still the same. There is a restriction on automatic scheduled moves, each share can only have 1 pool assigned for scheduled movement, but if you manually put files on a different specific pool in a root folder, that folder is still part of the user share with that name. Shares with cache: yes and cache: prefer will move files between their assigned pool and the main array when the mover schedule dictates.

What exactly was rude about my response? I have no idea of your level of knowledge, and I couldn't figure out from your question what the end goal was. When you set up a share, you tell Unraid what drives you want to use for the share, how you want new files to be allocated with split levels and file allocation settings. If you set the split level too low and the allocation to most free, then each new file written to the share will likely end up on a different disk. This is a perfectly valid way of using Unraid, so unless you have a reason to change that, there is no need to mess with where files are stored. That's why I asked what you wanted to accomplish.

That's how user shares work. What are you trying to accomplish?

It is compatible, you can format, add data or not, and then add the disk to the array, but you have to set a new config so parity is calculated with that information included. If you want to add a drive and keep parity valid, the new drive must not have anything on it, including a file system, like I explained in the post above.

If any bits are changed after the pre-clear, that's correct.

This. Sounds like you have things pretty well figured out.

I'm not aware of anything like that currently available, but it's a neat idea. The way it's done now is with the notification system, you tell Unraid to send emails, Boxcar, Discord, Gotify, Join, Prowl, Pushbullet, Pushover, Slack, or Telegram notifications.

Clear means the partition contains ONLY zeroes. When you formatted the disk, you changed some of those zeroes to ones, undoing the clear status, so Unraid had to put them back to zero before it could add the drive. Think of the disk as a room to hold papers. Formatting adds filing cabinets and alphabetized folios with labeling and blank index cards. The room is no longer empty, but it still doesn't have any of your papers (data) yet. The file system takes up space, but makes it much easier to organize your papers instead of just dropping them on the floor. Unraid parity works with the whole room, not the individual papers, so it doesn't matter whether your file cabinets are old and small ReiserFS, or modern XFS, or fragile BTRFS, Unraid parity can reconstruct it. To add a room, it must be totally empty so anything added can be computed into parity. If you want to add a room with existing contents, even an empty file system, then you have to rebuild parity instead. BTW, the paper filing analogy works for formatting as well. Reformatting doesn't remove the paper, it just resets the index cards to blank entries. The ones and zeroes are still all there, but the addresses and file names are erased.

If the share is public, ANY user EXCEPT root is accepted. When windows tries to log in to the server with your windows login and password, it succeeds. For whatever reason when windows asked for a password and you typed in root as the user, the server locked you out because root is not allowed share access, and windows stubbornly keeps trying with the user named root until you removed the saved credentials.

Yes, with add on expander cards.