Question on unRAID as NAS for separate VM, cache drive, and atomic moves

[Circular3928]

Hello All!

 

I'll preface this by saying I have tried searching these forums and Google on my own for answers but haven't been successful. If I've missed something it's likely because I don't know the proper search terms because of my knowledge gaps. Thanks for your patience!

 

I'm working on a project to migrate an existing Proxmox infrastructure to a new host, and part of that is adding an unRAID VM to handle storage. Currently I have a single high-capacity HDD directly connected to a Linux VM that is handling all my Docker containers. I understand that unRAID as a VM instead of baremetal can be controversial here, but please bear with me. I prefer using Proxmox as I think it's better as a hypervisor for my overall requirements.

 

So, currently if I torrent something it gets put in a download directory on the directly attached HDD. When the download is finished it is "copied" (atomic move) to a media folder by the *arrs and renamed accordingly, but the original file is left "as is" to continue seeding due to the atomic move. This allows me to have a properly organized media library, and maintain the original torrent without using double the space for every file.

 

So my question is, when using unRAID as a network share is it possible to retain this same behaviour (for existing files, and for new files)? I would like to be able to configure the folder structure in the same way and attach unRAID as a volume in Docker Compose. Hopefully this would behave the same, and downloads could go to the "download" folder and completed downloads could just be an atomic move to the "media" folder.

 

(Edit:

Just wanted to provide clarity on the file structure, my current Docker settings just dump all downloads into the same downloads folder, and then depending on the *arr it will get moved to a specific media folder and renamed and organized. Both of these directories are under the same parent "data" folder:

 

data
├── downloads
│  └── torrent-blackhole
└── media
    ├── audiobooks
    ├── movies
    └── tv

)

 

That is my main question. Summed up, are atomic moves possible using unRAID as network attached storage?

 

Another question I had is around how a cache drive would work with the above in mind. To the other VM, I'm assuming that the cache drive is transparent and the moving of data from cache to the array is all done within unRAID. So, if atomic moves work within unRAID like I'm hoping, would adding a cache drive have any impact on this?

 

As you can probably tell, I know enough to be dangerous but I'm far from an expert on Linux and its file systems. Any and all help/guidance is greatly appreciated!

Edited January 14 by Circular3928