[SOLVED] confused about min disk space

[hwilker]

I have the following share structure, and am observing some behavior I don't understand.

 

All my media is in a single share called media which sits directly below my server "tower". The media share has the following folders: TV, HD, DVD, XVID, and a folder called COPY which I use as a landing place when copying files to the server so I can copy many files to the server at once even if they are destined for different folders ultimately. I have a cache drive.

 

Inside the TV folder I have folders for each TV show and inside each TV show is a folder for each season. Thus, in the case of 30 Rock I would have the following: tower/media/tv/30 Rock/ 30 Rock S01. Inside that folder would reside the episodes for the first season.

 

I had the split level set to 2 and am using the high-water method of allocation. I mistakenly thought that this would allow unRAID to place individual episodes on different disks if that was required, which is fine with me, but I noticed today that one of my disks had recently moved from having about 20 GB free to having 11 GB free (disk 6) even though all my other disks had at least 250 GB of free space. Upon investigation I realized that by setting the split level to 2, I was probably insuring that all the episodes for a single season were being forced to be on a single physical disk.

 

So I changed the split level to 3 and tried a test. I copied a file to the server and placed it in the folder 30 Rock S01 which resides entirely on disk 6. Of course it physically was residing on the cache disk. I then hit the "move now" button to test the new set up. I presumed since disk 6 had less than 20 GB free it would not write the file there but would create a folder media/TV/30 Rock/30 Rock S01 on another disk and place the file there, but this did not happen. Instead it moved the file onto disk6.

 

Do I need to set the split level to 4 to acheive the desired result? If so would it start splitting up DVD VOB files if they were inside, for example,  media/DVD/The Godfather/VIDEO_TS?

 

Thanks.

[lionelhutz]

3 can split-up those movies already and 4 would be a free-for-all for your media.

 

You either need to live with a higher level and no control or manually shift TV series around if a disk fills.

 

A setting of 4 would be needed to put that file on another disk.

 

Peter

 

[hwilker]

3 can split-up those movies already and 4 would be a free-for-all for your media.

 

You either need to live with a higher level and no control or manually shift TV series around if a disk fills.

 

A setting of 4 would be needed to put that file on another disk.

 

Peter

 

 

Thanks. After rereading some stuff I realized what you said. I still want the level to stay at 3, but what I did to avoid VIDEO-TS folders from being split up was to divide the DVD folder into two folders: DVD-ISO and DVD-TS. The truth is, currently all my dvd files are iso's anyway. That will still leave TV seasons on a single disk but as you say, I can monitor them and move if necessary. The problem comes up because current season tv shows get added one episode at a time. Previous seasons or seasons created from blurays or dvd's can get added as a set, so I'll just need to be observant of where current seasons get placed initially.

 

Thanks for the help.