February 20, 200818 yr ok, it's not that i haven't done a dozen searches and read and experimented for the past 10 hours straight...but i am really having a hard time grasping the implications of user shares...i think i get the methods/parameters and what they do, but there just seem to be too many unknown factors in how my data is going to end up on the platters and what happens when folders grow past their original disk. yesterday i received all the parts (almost exactly like the MD-1500/LL, but with a dual-core proc and 2GB of memory in case a future updates will enable those)...by midnight i had everything running with 8 x 500GB Seagate 7200.10's occupying slots 1-8, and was a happy camper going to sleep. today i picked up a WD 1TB green drive and put it in slot 15 where i hooked it up as parity drive...and then i sat down and starting reading...and reading...experimented with a few folders, then kept on reading...and now it's midnight again and i feel like i know less than before. ideally, i'd like to just assign all disks to an "unRAID" user share (a tried that and ended up with a nice 3.65TB "drive" that i mounted both on OSX and XP) and fill it up, then start adding 1TB drives, and finally - if necessary - upgrade the 500's with 1TB's when all slots are filled. some of my questions: - if i do that, will all disks always start spinning when i access *any* of the data? - will all disks keep spinning (past the spin-down delay) once the data has been found on any one of the drives? - can i first copy my data to the individual disk1-disk8 shares, using my own directory structure/organization, *then* create top level user shares (i.e. a "Movies" folder on disk1,2,3) and *then* move the data i already copied into those folders? see, say in regard to movies, and/or music, i have a directory structure like this: Chris/Movies/DivX/_split/Alien/disk1.avi Chris/Movies/DivX/_split/Alien/disk2.avi Chris/Movies/DivX/complete/Aliens.avi Chris/Movies/DivX/complete/Babel.avi Chris/Movies/H.264/AppleTV/Episodes/Lost/Season1/Premiere.avi Chris/Movies/H.264/iPod/Movies/Rocky Horror.avi Tom/Music/MP3/Air/10,000Hz Legend/Caramel Prisoner.mp3 Tom/Music/Lossless/Air/10,000Hz Legend/Caramel Prisoner.mp3 long story short...the same type of "category" might sometime be 2 levels deep, sometime 4 or 5 levels deep (or even deeper)...so i feel pretty confused about what split-level to choose, and once i choose it, what it would do for any given scenario that i haven't even yet considered. again, if i could just treat all disks as a growing media-vault and do my own directory-structure arrangements and re-arrangements, i would be totally cool with that...but if that means all disk are always spinning, double clicking on a file will initiate a 8-disk spin-up, etc., then i think i should have just stayed with a RAID5...although i love the prospect of individual per-disk file-systems. sorry for the rant, but i'm tired and a bit frustrated about my inability to fully grasp split-levels and planning my data-storage strategy. any advice to easy my entry into this next phase would be great! g'nite.
February 21, 200818 yr Author aha! i think i'm beginning to get how this works...although i'm kind of approaching it from the other end, i guess...as i said, i have eight 500GB disks for starters, and since last posting about this i have copied various DivX, H.264, MPEG, etc. folders to the first two drives' root...the first drive has a 400GB DivX folder, the second drive has 380GB worth of files in MPEG, DVD and HD folders... after some experimentation i found that if i first move all those folders into a freshly created "Movies" folder in the root (disk1/Movies/DivX and disk2/Movies/H.264 and disk2/Movies/MPEG) and *then* create a user-share called "Movies", it automatically contains all those sub-folders...logical if you know what to expect, but not so much when you first start wrapping your mind around it...my mind, anyway. so i'm beginning to think that in my case it's best to *first* copy all of the files and folders to the individual disks in the hierarchical arrangement that is logical to me, and *then* create user-shares that address the root-level folders i created, rather than the other way around (first creating user-shares and then copying folders to them, not always knowing where they will end up. in my mind it's a lot easier to plan how to copy files/folders to an array of drives, and then sort/share those folders in a logical manner, than to copy them to a "bin" that is linked to various disks that have some sort of "split-level" hierarchy that is determined by high-water and most/least-full levels... your mind may vary.
February 21, 200818 yr If you create the folder hierarch on the disk1, disk2, etc shares... and THEN stop and re-start the array using the STOP and START buttons on the management page, it will create the appropriate folders in the user-shares. At one point a "RE-SCAN" button existed. It created/updated the read-only user-shares based on the disk folders found when pressed. This was before writable user-shares. Tom thought it was no longer needed and removed it when writable user-shares was introduced. Many think a RE-SCAN button is still needed. Only way to force a re-scan is to stop and re-start the array (until he adds the button back) Joe L.
February 21, 200818 yr Author yes, i guess a re-appearance of the re-scan button would make sense then...i foresee a lot of "manual" arranging of folders in the disk-shares (as opposed to the user-shares), simply because it makes more sense to me...or at least it's more predictable until i see the light of user-shares and split-levels in its full glory.
February 22, 200818 yr Rather than put the 'rescan' button back, what we're doing is arranging things so that any object created in a 'disk' share, ie, disk1, disk2, etc., will immediately also show up in the proper user share hierarchy, provided user shares are enabled. So you could use the disk shares to explicitly create files where you want them, and perhaps put the user shares in read-only mode.
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