I've been using high-water on my server since I built it a couple years ago.  This has left my files spread out over 10 drives, most/all of which have to spin up every time I browse the directories.  As I understand it, you can change the allocation method (to what?) so that files sent to a share will only end up in one of a few specified drives.  The problem is that I already have ~ 12TB of data spread throughout the server.  Is there any way to consolidate it other than manually copping from one drive to another?

i am not sure about after the fact, but initially this should be done by the split level setting. i have my split level set at 2, so it is as follows

 

Blu-Rays

  Movie Name Folder

      Movie Contents

 

from my understanding it goes a maximum of two levels and then everything must be in the same folder, so that all my art, .mkv files, etc are all in the "Movie Content" folder

 

i know this doesn't answer your questions directly, but maybe it will be possible to have future files put where you like them

Yes.  You can manually move the files internally from disk to disk without having to copy over the network and then delete the duplicates.  You'll need a utility like Putty to open a telnet session to your server's IP.  Once you login type 'mc' without the quotes.  This will launch the GUI tool midnight commander. 

 

Using midnight commander you will be able to move (marked as RenMove) files from one pane to another from disk to disk.  Your physical disks are located at /mnt/.

 

Once you consolidate all your desired files onto one drive, you can go into the web browser on the unRaid server and use the "Exclude" option for the user share.  What I have done is exclude all disks that I do not wish data within that share to reside.

 

Attached is a screenshot.  In the shares screen, you'll see that I have excluded all but Disk1 in my setup, as I want the files in the share "computer isos" to be copied only to disk1.  Hope this helps.

 

Great info Tiger!  Thanks!

I have my shares organized by media type. So I have two drives for movies, four for television, and four for other media. For instance, disk1 and disk2 are my movie disks. The user share "Movies" only exists on those two disks, and they're part of the spinup group "Movies".

 

If you only have one user share, with everything organized under that, then you can start by creating the shares you want, on the disks you want. Then comes the long process of moving files from one disk share to another. Midnight Commander is really helpful here.

Thanks for the info, guys.

 

Unfortunately, I didn't really plan this out very well when I set up the server a few years ago.  I basically just created a single share, and stuck everything in subdirectories under that.  It looks like I have a lot of manual moving to do.