Hi everyone,

I'm new to unraid so not sure I'm posting this in the right section.

I am wondering what peoples opinions are on how best to set up shares and disks for storage and streaming of media. I will be using the system primarily for plex, I have a lot of shows and movies and was wondering if it is worth using multiple shares with one disk assigned to each for shows? Would this have any noticeable impact on performance given entire folders would be stored together rather than split?

 

Many thanks

Two schools of thought, which you choose depends on you.

 

First, traditionally multiple shares are created, as many as make sense to you, for example, tvshows, movies, pictures, music, documents, downloads, etc. You can assign array disks or pools to contain portions of those shares, assign different user access permissions, as granular as you want.

 

Second, create just one media share that has subfolders for different types of content as well as a subfolder structure for downloads of that content. The advantage (the only advantage IMHO) is that you can optionally keep seeding torrents of content without duplicating the storage needs.

 

If you don't use torrents extensively, or are ok with duplicating files that you wish to seed, I definitely recommend the traditional way.

 

Performance will be similar if not identical with either option. It's just a question of granularity of organization and access control.

For me as a PT user, I usually setup my media as :

 

HDD 1: Movie and TV

HDD 2: Anime and Cartoons

 

each HDD is 8 TB, use hardlink to link the original download files, save a lot of space and can keep seeding