A quick hello, and a bit of advice please

[John_in_NZ]

Hey folks,

 

I'm very much a noob when it comes to NAS, but I've been playing around with home computers, and then PC's since the 80's, though my youthful enthusiasm for tinkering has given way to the "if it 'aint broke, don't fix it" mentality, and leaving the more specific areas, like NAS to folks who actually know what they doing ... 😁

I was running freenas until one of my drives started playing up recently, so I was advised to install unraid, and join this happy band ... 😁

I've watched the basic setup videos from Spaceinvader One to the point where I thought I knew what I was doing, but I quite obviously did not.

 

I'm at the stage where I have got the hardware organised, until such time as I can transfer all the data off the HDD and onto the NAS.  With that done, I'll add that HDD to the array.

For the moment, I'm trying to go for a KISS approach, as I'll be the only person with access to the NAS, in the short term at least, and I've broken the array down into a hand full of shares to make it easy to find what I want from whichever PC I'm using.

 

Now that I'm trying to copy the data off the new HDD, I've managed to copy some of the data across, but now one of the cache drives is full, and stubbornly refuses to free up space when I try to run mover.

After playing around with things for a few days (mostly stumbling around in the dark), I've decided to hold my hand up and ask for help ... 😁

As I said, I've just started copying files onto the NAS, so if absolutely necessary, I can wipe the drives and start over.

tia

John

tower-diagnostics-20211106-1339.zip

[trurl]

Many of your shares are set to prefer cache, which means you prefer that they stay on cache. Typically the only shares that should be prefer are appdata, domains, system, at least until you get a better idea if there are any others that it makes sense to stay on cache for some reason. Those other prefer shares should be cache-yes, so they get moved to the array. And you have one share as cache-no that has files on cache. Mover ignores cache-no and cache-only shares, moves cache-yes shares from cache to the array, and moves cache-prefer shares from the array to cache.

 

You can toggle Help for the whole webUI with the Help (?) button on the main bar. You can also toggle help for a specific setting by clicking on its label.

 

There is also a link to the manual (wiki) in the lower right corner of the webUI. The Documentation links at top and bottom of the forum also go to the wiki. Here is a relevant section:

https://wiki.unraid.net/Manual/Troubleshooting#Cache.2FPool_issues

[trurl]

13 minutes ago, John_in_NZ said:

I've just started copying files onto the NAS

Also, better if you don't cache if you are copying more than cache can hold. Mover is intended for idle time, default schedule is daily in the middle of the night. It is impossible to move from fast cache to slower array as fast as you can write to cache. And if you try to write new files and run mover at the same time it is just going to go slower since there will be competition for the same resources.

 

Some people even wait until the initial data load is done before installing parity, since parity updates makes writes to the array slower.