hi gang... setting up my first server and have a shares question... have tried to research but still not 100%:

 

1.  i have created a share called Media, which has two folders inside of it Movies and TV.  I am okay with both the movies and tv being spread across multiple drives as my collections of each are too large for a single drive.  shall i set the split level to 2?

 

2.  i am in the process of copying data over to this new share, then moving the physical drive out of my pc, and into the server.  copy, transfer drive, pre clear etc.  each time i add a drive to the server, do i have to go into the share and add the new drive to the share?  or is there a way of just telling to the share to use any new drive when needed?

 

thanks, i truly have researched but still a bit unclear!

 

1. I recommend a value larger than 2. Because with 2, your movies and tv folders are going to be on multiple drives, but any folder under them are gonna be on one drive only. For instance if you have an hd movies folder underneath there, that whole folder will end up on 1 drive only. If you want all of your files to span all of the drives, just set the split level to 100 or something really large.

 

2. By default, the shares span all of the available drives. If you like, you can select certain drives to be excluded.

ok thanks!  i didn't realize that the default was that all drives are included... i noticed that the share menu shows that you can specify excluded AND included drives, so i assumed these had to be manually added

 

Did you read the shares section in the unofficial manual in the Wiki?

Did you read the shares section in the unofficial manual in the Wiki?

 

i did read it but find the shares levels very confusing... i think that level of 3 will work for me

 

also, it seems odd to me that new disks are added by default since the share menu has an option to say which disks are excluded AND which disks are included... if new disks are added by default then why is there an option to add disks?

 

If the Included field is not blank then only the drives listed in Included will be included.

Ok so now I've setup a share which includes 2 drives each  I plan to add 10 more...not knowing any better I added both to the included. Can I remove them from the included box and not lose any data?  I guess the alternative is to add the ten future to the included box...I'd rather revert to the default way as long as its safe ie won't lose the data

The include and exclude boxes only effect data writes. They do not effect existing data or the its presents as part of the share.

The include and exclude boxes only effect data writes. They do not effect existing data or the its presents as part of the share.

 

please forgive my newbness but does this mean that it would be okay to remove the two disks from the 'included' box thereby having the included AND excluded boxes blank?  i'd like to do this so that when i add future drives (in a couple of days or so) then they will automatically be included in the share

That will work fine. Setting your movies to level 3 may allow files for individual movies to reside on different drives, so for instance if you had:

 

Media - Movies - 300 - 300.avi

                                -  metadata.xml

 

300.avi might reside on disk 1 while metadata.xml may reside on disk 2. This would still work but would(depending on the program) make disk 1 and disk 2 spin up for you to watch the movie, whereas if set at level 2 everything in the movie folder will reside on the same drive, only causing one disk to spin up.

 

For TV shows since most people have them setup like this:

media - TV - Series - Season - Episode.avi

 

Level 3 works fine, as individual Series can be on different drives, but each season will be contained to a single drive.

 

You might want to split up the shares so TV and Movies are separate, depending on what your goals are, such as power efficiency.

 

As far as removing the disks from included, that will work, by removing the disks from the included box it unRAID will start using all drives by default, and when you add them they will be added to the mix. Note that having them set as Most Free or highwater will affect if data is immediately written to the drives or not.

cool, thanks to everyone for their help!  deleted disks in the share and seems to be working just fine!  thanks for your patience with a nervous newb

 

as for the levels, i'll have to give this some thought... i really wanted both tv and movies in a single share for purposes of my yamj/nmtserver setup... having two shares seems to mess things up.  but i'll research

If you don't care about the data structure on each disk then use 99 or 999 as the split level. There is no single correct answer. It depends on your data structure and how you want the data sorted per disk and the only thing you posted  about this is that you don't care what goes where.

 

please forgive my newbness but does this mean that it would be okay to remove the two disks from the 'included' box thereby having the included AND excluded boxes blank?  i'd like to do this so that when i add future drives (in a couple of days or so) then they will automatically be included in the share

 

You can even move them to the excluded list and then they will still show up but you just can't write to them.

 

 

Another good solution is doing what is described in the Wiki. If your movies are split between HD and SD movies, you can have your directories look like this:

 

Media - Movies - HD Movies - Movie Folder - Movie.avi

 

Media - Movies  - SD Movies - Movie Folder  - Movie.avi

 

Media - TV - Series - Season - Episode.avi

 

And then set the split level to 3. Everything would be under the same share and it fixes the problem I described earlier.