I bought the MD-1500 a while ago and it came with ver 4.1.  I used it like that, told my friends about it and raved about it and so on.  You get the idea.  I'm sure lots of you have done the same.

 

Today I upgraded it to ver 4.2 so I could try out spanning of shares across drives as my backup dir was filling up on of my drives.  (everything is still working great, I just have questions)  Its not a true backup.  Its a sync that runs at night. Its just a copy of my Main box that gets maintained on the unRAID server.

 

I'm trying to understand the used/free space numbers being reported by windows.  It looks like its reporting the entire system instead of just the shares I have mapped.

 

My unRAID system consists of 5 x 500GB and one 320GB drive.  (added the last 2x500GB drives today)

My backup dir was disk2 (500GB) and was down to 100GB free.  It was in danger of filling up as the computer its a mirror of still has about 520GB free.  Hence the reason for the upgrade.  (this box fluctuates wildly depending on what video stuff I'm working on so 100GB free on the unRAID side was starting to be a danger).

 

I created a dir called "Backups" on disk2 moved all the sync data into it.  I then created the same "Backups" dir on disc4.  From what I've read this should create a user share that spans both drives (but will have all the data on disk2 simply because of the way I did it). Because disk2 is above the hight-water mark, any new stuff should goto disk4.

 

After turning on the new sharing system, I copied a mp3 to the user share "Backups" and it got copied to disk4 as expected.  Great... so I start a sync.  Not good.  Everything is going to disk2 and nothing it going to disk4, but the mp3 went to disk4, so I wondered what was wrong.

 

A bit more reading and I see the split level stuff is not what I had first thought.  It defaults to 0 which seems to be the opposite of what I thought it was (I had assumed that 0 meant disabled).  I changed it to 999 and it now behaves as I had first expected.  Not a problem now that I know how the split thing works.

 

Now we come to where I have questions.  Mapping a drive to this "Backups" share shows 1.08TB used, 1.02TB free and 2.11TB Cap.  This is odd.  My  "Backups" share only has 360GB of data in it. (I've cleaned the main box up some)

 

Mapping to some of the other shares shows the exact same numbers.  I see now that this is the entire unRAID system.  Not the Share data I would expect.

 

Is this the way its supposed to be?

 

My "included disks" and "excluded disks" are blank meaning that I assume all disks can be looked at.  But I believe that because the "Backups" dir was only created on the root of disk2 and 4 that they are the only drives that are part of this share.

 

Is that a correct statement?

 

But the drive space readings makes me wonder,  will it spill over to any other free space if needed since I have left "included/excluded" blank? or is this just a bug in how space is reported. 

 

 

You'll find another thread on this somewhere here. With the new writable user shares, windows does indeed report incorrect space size. Don't go by that, go by the web interface to the unRAID box.

 

I don't believe using included/excluded disks will affect how windows reports the size.

 

This issue has been reported to Tom and a request has been made to somehow report just the share information. Not sure what the end result will be however.

 

I must have missed that thread when I was looking around.  Thanks for the info about the space reporting bug.

 

So am I correct in that the only two drives in the "Backups" share as described above will be disk2 and disk4.  I further assume that if I wanted to add a third disk in to the spanned share all I'd need to do is create a "Backups" dir on the root of yet another drive due to the way in which shares get created.

 

Hmm.  Just tried that.  After restarting the array,  it does work that way.  Sweet.