Does it bother anyone else when there is movies being placed on multiple drives like this

Isn't that just based on your settings?

What is that screenshot from? It doesn't have enough context to tell us what you are talking about.

 

Default user share settings will result in multiple disks being used eventually. That is the way it's supposed to work. Each user share has settings to let you have some control on where files get stored.

Aesthetically it bothers me, but functionally it does what its meant to.

 

11 hours ago, tjb_altf4 said:

Aesthetically it bothers me, but functionally it does what its meant to.

 

I find that many of the file are on just one drive, but there is a reference file on the other drives

Ultimately the "Allocation method" and "Split level" settings of a share are going to determine how files will end up on the array.

 

By default files are distributed over the available disks, but the user can change this and tell Unraid how to keep files together on the same disk.

 

Keep in mind: changing the share settings will only affect new files, Unraid will never move existing files.

 

1 hour ago, UtahDeLorean said:

I find that many of the file are on just one drive, but there is a reference file on the other drives

Not entirely sure what you mean, but I suspect you are misinterpreting something.

1 hour ago, trurl said:

Not entirely sure what you mean, but I suspect you are misinterpreting something.

When you look at what's on the different Disk's it will have just like 1kb on multiple disks

But the actually file for the movie will really only be on 1 disk

Individual files can't span disks. I suspect you are using most free, which ends up scattering various thumbnail and nfo files all over. Consider this scenario. All disks are even to within 10's of MBs, so the main movie file gets written to one disk, then it no longer has the most free so the ancillary files that are in the same folder get written to various other disks.

 

Most free allocation method means the drives are constantly filled round robin to stay even, effectively spreading the files all over and ensuring that any browsing will spin up all the drives. Good for free space OCD, very bad for performance and folder organizational OCD.

25 minutes ago, jonathanm said:

Individual files can't span disks. I suspect you are using most free, which ends up scattering various thumbnail and nfo files all over. Consider this scenario. All disks are even to within 10's of MBs, so the main movie file gets written to one disk, then it no longer has the most free so the ancillary files that are in the same folder get written to various other disks.

 

Most free allocation method means the drives are constantly filled round robin to stay even, effectively spreading the files all over and ensuring that any browsing will spin up all the drives. Good for free space OCD, very bad for performance and folder organizational OCD.

For my OCD what would you suggest then? Honestly I was swapping out drives for 10tb drives... Then I got a Disk Shelf and increased my drives to the max. My system has filled the 10tb drives to 88% capacity which drives me nuts cause I have other drives that are still sitting at 1%

7 minutes ago, UtahDeLorean said:

For my OCD what would you suggest then?

Stop looking at the share disk allocation page.

 

Seriously, the only way you are going to achieve total zen of disks being used totally equally while simultaneously keeping all related folders on a single drive is to manually move things from disk to disk. To do this safely without losing or corrupting data means learning how Unraid constructs user shares from disk shares, and using mc at the console or a similar file manager strategy to slowly sort things out. You have a royal mess on your hands OCD wise, it's going to take many many hours, probably weeks worth of moving files to completely reorganize things.

 

The alternative is to let Unraid do everything as it's been doing it. possibly change to high water instead of most free so future additions stay better organized. Unraid is perfectly happy to present all your disks together in the user share structure, and retrieve all the files from all your different disks seamlessly without you even knowing unless you poke your head under the covers.

 

If you really must poke, don't start actually moving things around until you have a solid understanding of what and why you are doing. You were warned, here be dragons. It's not particularly difficult once you get into it, but jumping in without full knowledge will burn you.