Split level question... Is this possible? [Solved]

[TODDLT]

I have been doing some reading today on split level control and it does work differently than I thought.  I may not be able to make this work the way I want it to but hoping someone has an idea how to.

 

Here is the layout.  I have a user share called "Media" and under that Four 2nd level folders: TV Shows, Movies, Music, and Jukeox.  All of these must appear under the same user share for my applications to work correctly.  The attempt is to keep each of these segregated on drives as follows.

 

Jukebox:  This folder only shows up on a SSD, so it cannot share accross multiple disks. There are only two applications that write files into this location and they are currently mapped via the disk share.  So far that seems to be working.

 

Music:  This is on a smaller drive along with some folders outside the user share.  They all get backed up to an external drive and I really don't want them mixed on the same drive as the larger video files.  I don't see any way this will ever take up enough room to have to span more than one drive, so again I can get around the split level question by mapping a drive via the disk share to Music.

 

Now it gets more complicated. 

 

Movies:  this currently spans 4 drives, soon to be 5 and eventually beyond.  Under Movies are multiple Genre folders.  The genre folders can/should span multiple drives and I want unRAID to fill them equally.  So I want unRAID to freely span the 3rd level down as needed, but if there are folders below the genre level, they should not span multiple drives.  I think what I want here is Split Level = 3.

 

TV Shows:  this is a similar situation to Movies.  The only difference is it currently only spans one drive, though this again is about to go to 2 drives.  Under TV Shows are folder for each series, and then each season.  I would be OK with this also being a Split Level = 3, but ideally it would be 4.

 

The trick to all this is, I dont' want unRAID to create the 2nd level folders (Movies, TV Shows, Music, Jukebox) outside of the drives I have chosen to designate them on but allowing a couple of them to span more than one drive each.  Otherwise I could just call it Split Level 3 and be done. 

 

From my reading today, I think I could get it to work where TV Show's was Level 4, and Movies was a Level 3.  I would need to re-read that thread and try it out. If I can get the first problem solved I would work on this next.  At the moment I am having to choose where to write files manually by disk share, which is a bit of a pain.

 

Any assistance is appreciated.

[Helmonder]

The number of control you want inside a user share is not possible, there is only one splitlevel and only one assigned/excluded set of drives.

 

You are working around this by accessing parts directly thru the disk share, this is possible but highly dependent on you configuring everything just right on the client part..

 

You mot probably have allready thought this thru but would it not be wiser to split over different shares ? Then all would be possible...

 

A thought to the super experts though:

 

What would happen if you set up an extra mountpoint manually with links in it to different user shares ? If you then mount that extra mountpoint, how would unraid deal with that ? If it works you would get what OP wants here..

[TODDLT]

The number of control you want inside a user share is not possible, there is only one splitlevel and only one assigned/excluded set of drives.

 

You are working around this by accessing parts directly thru the disk share, this is possible but highly dependent on you configuring everything just right on the client part..

 

You mot probably have allready thought this thru but would it not be wiser to split over different shares ? Then all would be possible...

 

A thought to the super experts though:

 

What would happen if you set up an extra mountpoint manually with links in it to different user shares ? If you then mount that extra mountpoint, how would unraid deal with that ? If it works you would get what OP wants here..

 

The "jukebox" is a graphical media file system that the media players in my house access to create the GUI it displays to select media.  Due to a limitation of the system and SMB sharing, I can only open one SMB share at one time.  Therefore both the "Jukebox" files and the media being accessed must be in the same share, meaning all of it has to be in the same share. 

 

Putting the Jukebox in NFS would get me around this problem, but I have tried a couple times to get NFS working and it never does.  I posted here about it some time ago but never got anywhere.

I would also have to put the Jukebox folders in both NFS / SMB simultaneously so it could be accessed from a Vista machine as well. 

If I could get the jukebox into a successful NFS share, than each of the other groups could be its own user share.

 

If I put the discs containing the "Jukebox" and "Music" folders onto the excluded list, would it just exclude them from writes, or would they not be visible in the share at all?  If it is only write control then I could map drives to those via disk share direct and exclude them from being written to via the user share.  Then if I let TV shows and Movies mix on drives, the rest would work out.  This could be fall back if I can't get it to work the way I want it too.

[Joe L.]

use split level 0.

 

split level 0 requires that YOU create the folders on the individual physical disks desired.  It will then use those folders.

 

You can, for example put the Media/Music folder only on one physical disk (to keep it all together) and put "Media/Movies" on multiple physical disks.

 

Joe L.

[TODDLT]

use split level 0.

 

split level 0 requires that YOU create the folders on the individual physical disks desired.  It will then use those folders.

 

You can, for example put the Media/Music folder only on one physical disk (to keep it all together) and put "Media/Movies" on multiple physical disks.

 

Joe L.

 

AWESOME.  That is exactly what I needed!

 

If I missed that in the Wiki explanation I'm sorry, if not it should be added. 

[Helmonder]

use split level 0.

 

split level 0 requires that YOU create the folders on the individual physical disks desired.  It will then use those folders.

 

You can, for example put the Media/Music folder only on one physical disk (to keep it all together) and put "Media/Movies" on multiple physical disks.

 

Joe L.

 

Wauw.... did not know that !  What happens if you set split level 0 and do not create a directory ?

[lionelhutz]

use split level 0.

 

split level 0 requires that YOU create the folders on the individual physical disks desired.  It will then use those folders.

 

You can, for example put the Media/Music folder only on one physical disk (to keep it all together) and put "Media/Movies" on multiple physical disks.

 

Joe L.

 

Wauw.... did not know that !  What happens if you set split level 0 and do not create a directory ?

 

It will create it for you.

 

If you want to get technical, it will keep any data on disks where the directory structure or parts of the directory structure exist. But, it will create directories when they don't exist.

 

Say in Media you write a movie to HDMovies which doesn't exist. unRAID will use the allocation method and pick a disk. Now, HDMovies exists so any new movies written there will be locked to the disk where it was created. You have to go and manually create a HDMovies directory on another disk to split those across 2 drives.

 

Same thing happens no matter how may directories deep you go. unRAID will create the directory structure as needed and then anything new written to that directory structure is locked to that drive. This allows unRAID to pick one of multiple drives to place a movie folder and then lock all content inside that folder to the disk it was placed on.

 

Besides putting Movies on each disk the OP will also have to create the Genre folders on each disk. Same with TV, the TV series folder will have to be created on multiple disks to allow a single series to split across multiple disks.