Exclusive shares -- can it be on a single drive, on the main array?

[nick5429]

My reading of the exclusive shares and 'pools' concepts in the release notes implied that the 'array' was a pool, largely like any other pool.

 

If I have ALL of the data for a share on a single disk, on the regular unraid array (along with the other usual conditions) -- is it eligible to be mounted as an 'exclusive share'?

 

I have several shares which I have worked to reorganize onto a single disk, inside the regular pool.  NFS is disabled both on the shares, and globally. No data for those shares exists on other disks, nor empty directories.  The shares still do not mount as 'exclusive share'.

 

Performance even of browsing directories through shfs has gotten atrocious.  I can't even stream a single moderate-bitrate video through a user share over samba while simultaneously browsing directories on completely separate disks via user share, without the video skipping and buffering.

[itimpi]

3 minutes ago, nick5429 said:

If I have ALL of the data for a share on a single disk, on the regular unraid array (along with the other usual conditions) -- is it eligible to be mounted as an 'exclusive share'?

I think the answer is yes as long as the share only includes one drive and has the array set as primary storage and no secondary storage.    However the performance gain is likely to be marginal as it would still have the overheads of the Unraid parity mechanism on all write operations.   Also the share would not be able to take advantage of the ‘cache’ mechanism.

 

another way to think of this is what ends up being mounted as a single file system directly under /mnt.    Each drive in a the main array is its own free-standing device containing its own file system and is mounted with a name along the lines of /mnt/disk??   Each pool also mounts a single file system as /mnt/poolname even though it might be multi-disk.

[nick5429]

I'm talking above about read-only scenarios where my server has become nearly unusable. The write parity mechanism isn't coming into play.

 

Accessing the data I mentioned above using direct disk shares alleviates many of the problems, but I'm not interested in trying to memorize which shares belong on which disks just to use them without twiddling my thumbs while I wait for a directory listing.

 

 

 

# ls -d /mnt/*/www
/mnt/disk16/www/  /mnt/user/www/  /mnt/user0/www/

 

 

This extremely simple share stored entirely on disk16, and won't mount with 'exclusive access'. Should it be able to, or am I wasting my time trying to get this working with data on the regular unraid pool?

Edited February 16 by nick5429

[itimpi]

You have “Included Disks” set to All so the share is not restricted to disk16 even though that might be where all files are currently stored.

[nick5429]

1 hour ago, itimpi said:

You have “Included Disks” set to All so the share is not restricted to disk16 even though that might be where all files are currently stored.

That doesn't, and shouldn't, make a difference.  After making your suggested change and rebooting:

 

 

 

I don't mean to offend -- but can I get clarity from someone else who confidently knows the correct answer to the core question here? Is this actually possible?  I'm surprised that I haven't been able to find anyone else either asking this question or trying but failing to accomplish this....

 

1 hour ago, nick5429 said:

My reading of the exclusive shares and 'pools' concepts in the release notes implied that the 'array' was a pool, largely like any other pool.

 

If I have ALL of the data for a share on a single disk, on the regular unraid array (along with the other usual conditions) -- is it eligible to be mounted as an 'exclusive share'?

 

I have several shares which I have worked to reorganize onto a single disk, inside the regular pool.  NFS is disabled both on the shares, and globally. No data for those shares exists on other disks, nor empty directories.  The shares still do not mount as 'exclusive share'.

 

Diagnostics attached

nickserver-diagnostics-20240216-1838.zip

[Mainfrezzer]

No you cannot do that since the array is inherently not a exclusive share. Only works for pool devices. You might wanna look into disk shares

[JorgeB]

10 hours ago, nick5429 said:

Is this actually possible?

Like mentioned it's not possible, you can use a disk share.

[nick5429]

On 2/17/2024 at 5:34 AM, JorgeB said:

Like mentioned it's not possible, you can use a disk share.

Thanks for clarifying

 

It would be great to have this documented much more clearly/prominently and explicitly, since in other places IIRC parallels are/were drawn between the prior concepts of 'cache' and 'main unraid array' as 'pools'.  If that were the case, then what I was originally trying to do ought to have been possible

Edited February 23 by nick5429

[JorgeB]

2 minutes ago, nick5429 said:

It would be great to have this documented this much more clearly/prominently and explicitly

It's in the release notes:

 

"if Primary storage for a share is a pool and Secondary storage is set to "none""

 

https://docs.unraid.net/unraid-os/release-notes/6.12.0/#exclusive-shares

[B0rax]

Even if it says that the share needs on the pool, people (for example me) might confuse that with the array and wonder why it is not working. It might be a good idea to add to the description that the array is explicitly not supported. It would save those people hours of troubleshooting.