I didnt realise i would need to allocate disks to sections of media, i understand the principal of it, how does RAID5 handle this or doesnt it ?..with my QNAP, setting up shares was easy as creating a folder, i can just keep adding stuff to it, does that mean that if i want a film it would spin ALL the disks up to find it ?..split level seems it could cause trouble with an ever billowing and shrinking media collection.

 

Does anyone here use XBMC or PLEX ? , i plan to use plex, what are your suggestions for a movie folder and TV show folder, the TV shows are minimal and the drive will eventually have at least 5 2TB drives in it

You aren't required to allocate media to disks. It is helpful if you want to limit which disks spinup or if you lose two disks and wish that you know which files were on those disks (or disk if one is parity).

 

I have a movies share that I use for XBMC. You can also have a TV share. There is nothing special about these shares.

you do not have to assign any disks it will just use them all (unless you select split 0 that has different rules)

 

I would recommend setting split level. the reason is this.. if you toss a multipart file/video, say a DVD rip, with no split setting(or incorrect split). it could put different vobs on each drive. if that happens, playback would pause when it has to spin up the next drive for what should be a seamless  transition.. it is pretty easy to set and forget unraid.. i set mine day one and have not ever touched it again..

 

if you use the  CACHE_DIRS add-on it will .. well, cache your folders/files structure to ram so you do not have to spin up all drives just to browse your menus or filesystem. (it will have to spin up the drive your data is on once you open the data you want).

 

 

Raid5 vs unraid.. well there are a million  pros and cons..

• 
  but the biggest pros for unraid are:
  
  • power savingsonly spinning up the drive you are using instead of all of the drives..raid 5 is spinning all drives whenever your do anything. to get one photo off a 20 drive raid5 would require all 20 drives to spin.. imagine watching 5 movies in a day. all 20 drives actively working all day all day.
    
  • cost, unraid can be very cheap, raid5 hardware can be very expensive
    
  • mixed drive type/sizes.. unraid cares less about drive type size, with raid5, all drives must match
    
  • easy expandability unraid you just stick a disk in and expand (preclearing is suggested though), raid5 sometimes can not be expanded or take days to expand
    
  • if you loose 2 drives at once, you only loose drives of data.. with raid5 you lose everything..
     
    

 

RAID5 basically creates on big disk. unRAID is still a group of individual disks.

 

You can set the split level to 99 and the media will go to the disk dictated by the allocation method. You will eventually end up with files for a certain movie or music artist or TV show spread-out all over the disks. I wouldn't recommend it, but it's your choice.

 

Peter