In these days of expanding SSD storage, I'm considering consolidating eg. music on ssd-storages, but keeping videos on hdd's. I access shares via samba from windows, and would like samba .Recycle.Bin to work for deletions. The .Recycle.Bin does not work if I use softlinks from my hdd-mounted share to ssd-storage, because the samba rename() when across different file-systems. Same goes when mounting ssd folder with 'mount --bind'.

Currently I have m: which is /mnt/user/media, and I want m:\music on ssd and m:\video on hdd. I also prefer not to move musik to different share, because then I have to teach people and update programs to where the new location is. Its not as elegant as just changing a pointer in the filesystem, when I want to change storage-medium hdd <> ssd.

It seems like an obvious think for unraid using its pools and is fuser which sums share from across multiple disks. However if I create share which have only primary storage cache-pool, then it always writes new files to that primary storage, even if folder I write is already on the disk-pool. Likewise if I add secondary storage as disk-pool, I get same behaviour.

I could just let all new files be written to cache, but I dislike that, because then when writing huge files they have to be moved, and writing can fail because of lack of space on the cache ssd-storage. I have learned the hard way not to use the built in mover, and just write directly to the pool where I want it.

So the question is: Can I somehow get control over in unraid which pool it chooses for new files, by simply selecting the pool the parent folder is already on? Might this be a desirable feature request for unraid for others than me ? Are the other ways to achieve the virtual layout of my files that I want, with recycle bin still working, but me regaining control over which (root)-folders go on SSD vs HDD?

Best Alex

Edited July 13, 2025Jul 13 by Alex R. Berg

I've added a feature request now: https://forums.unraid.net/topic/191994-common-virtual-pool-for-all-pools-array-cache-mounted-devices-regarding-split-level-and-choice-for-placement-of-new-files/

On 7/13/2025 at 12:56 PM, Alex R. Berg said:

So the question is: Can I somehow get control over in unraid which pool it chooses for new files, by simply selecting the pool the parent folder is already on?

I think you will only be able to do what you want if different media types are in their own share. You are asking for behaviour to be specified for an individual folder within a share which is not something that Unraid Supports.