Hi,

 

now with a lot of drives sitting in your unRAID machines, how do you work with them?

 

Do you spread your user-shares (e.g. music, videos, pictures, ...) over all available drives or do you use seperate (included) disks for each user-share?

 

What are the pro's & con's?

 

Many thanks in advance.

Harald

 

I suspect if you spread them, it will take longer to browse a large folder and then you'd keep all the disks spinning.

 

 

I suspect if you spread them, it will take longer to browse a large folder and then you'd keep all the disks spinning.

 

 

 

Good point, thanks.

 

The good side of usershares is that it spreads data across multiple disks, the bad side is that it spreads data across multiple disks.

/Rene

I have enough video that I have no choice but to spread them so multiple disks have DVD as a top level share and then folders with movies below that. Yeah, it takes a second to spin up the drives but the front ends I use already have catalogged the content so the drives do not need to spin up in order for me to choose what I want to view or listen to and unRAId also caches some of the directory information. I setup my shares myself too, no balancing etc. being done by unRAID.

 

For music I have just one drive and it's nearly full. I do not spread media across multiple drives without a good reason, I do however keep an offline backup of my music since it's small enough to fit in a single drive.

The good side of usershares is that it spreads data across multiple disks, the bad side is that it spreads data across multiple disks.

 

Ha!

 

After reading the manual (my ordered system is still ony it's way to Germany) I think that unRAID doesn't spin up all drives during read access (proper split-level required). Currently I own several Buffalo Terastations and these boxes always read all drives on RAID5. So I thought with unRAID I can spread everything over all disks because just the disk containing the DVD/album I currently use is running.

 

But I'm not really sure 8-(

 

Thanks

Harald

 

I have enough video that I have no choice but to spread them so multiple disks have DVD as a top level share and then folders with movies below that. Yeah, it takes a second to spin up the drives but the front ends I use already have catalogged the content so the drives do not need to spin up in order for me to choose what I want to view or listen to and unRAId also caches some of the directory information. I setup my shares myself too, no balancing etc. being done by unRAID.

 

I'm using MediaPortal (http://www.team-mediaportal.com) as my HTPCs frontend. This open source software offers different views to my media. I can look at the music/video/picture/tv-series shares itself or I can scan everything into MPs databases. After adding everything to the databases I can switch to alternate views (interpret, actors, years, albums, ... you get the idea). After switching to the alternate views the shares are not required until starting a playback.

 

My idea was: Instead of calculating drives for the different medias, calculating what drive will be filled first, what slot to place the different media drives - just use all drives for all user-shares and use proper split-levels to avoid unneccessary spin-ups. Does this sound reasonable?

 

Thanks

Harald

 

I use Pinnacle ShowCenters and my own HTML/PHP backend based on Open Show Center.  I do not use user shares.  I use a Samba mapping to Disk-1, and them mount Disk-2 through Disk-8 on mount points off of Disk-1.

I use Pinnacle ShowCenters and my own HTML/PHP backend based on Open Show Center.  I do not use user shares.  I use a Samba mapping to Disk-1, and them mount Disk-2 through Disk-8 on mount points off of Disk-1.

 

That's a fine way to go. Thanks for your tip. Good idea.

 

Harald