Trying to spread the data from one drive in array to all drives.

[gamingwin2023]

New Unraid user here. I started my server back in December and have been storing the media for Plex in a share. However, when first offloading to the share from an external drive, I guess in the file manager I accidentally navigated through disk1 to get to it. I have read up on how to balance the data, and unbalance came up. The thing is, that when I select the source folder on disk1, I can spread the data to every drive on the array except for disk1. My array is a RAID 5 with 4x20TB and a 1TB SSD cache. Here are the screenshots, and I am ready to be humbled.

[trurl]

Attach Diagnostics to your NEXT post in this thread 

[trurl]

4 hours ago, gamingwin2023 said:

when first offloading to the share from an external drive, I guess in the file manager I accidentally navigated through disk1 to get to it.

Your first screenshot showed you were trying to copy data FROM disk1 TO an Unassigned Device so not entirely clear.

 

Could be you were copying to the user share you intended and not actually copying to a specific disk, and it went to disk1 first because of Highwater Allocation Method. This is the default for good reasons.

 

Why do you think you want files balanced across drives anyway?

[gamingwin2023]

I have been running into r/w saturation while downloading to the array and playing back media on plex. It gets to the point where I cannot stream anything on plex. My thought process was that if I split the data across the three active drives, that reading the data would be faster than reading the data off of a single drive. Diagnostics attached below, thanks for your help Trurl!

deathstar-diagnostics-20240110-1520.zip

[trurl]

Each file in the Unraid array exists on a single disk, so any file will always be read from the single disk it is on. If you have many multiple streams going it is possible for there to be some contention for access to multiple files on a single disk. How many simultaneous plex streams do you typically have?

 

 

[gamingwin2023]

Normally its 1-2 streams and around 15-20MB/s file downloads.

 

[trurl]

Even if you had some of the files on other disks, no way to control which disks will have the files to be accessed so there could still be some contention. You really should be able to handle 2 streams from one disk though. Are you writing a lot to the server while trying to stream from it?

[trurl]

Just now, trurl said:

Are you writing a lot to the server while trying to stream from it?

Or running parity check, for example?

[gamingwin2023]

I mean its about 10-20MB/s for a 4k plex stream, no transcode, and then around 10-15MB/s for the deluge docker. So worst case its around 35MB/s, which I wouldn't think would fully saturate the drive. TBH just kinda spitballing here.

[trurl]

Looks like you have enough cache for the downloads. Maybe set that share to Primary:cache, Secondary:array, Mover action:cache->array

[JonathanM]

On 1/10/2024 at 4:09 AM, gamingwin2023 said:

My array is a RAID 5 with 4x20TB

Unraid doesn't use typical RAID levels in the main array. Each drive is independent.