Hi,

 

Built my media server a couple of days a go and half way through installing and configuring unRaid server.

 

I've been following the configuration tutorial http://lime-technology.com/wiki/index.php/Configuration_Tutorial#First_Boot and I am doing OK so far with help from other posts as well. I got it all up and running configured but after reading some posts I realised I had missed setting the disks partitions to MBR-4kaligned so I went back and changed that and this left me with 4 partitions with both drives being duplicated in the unMenu main such as /dev/sda and /dev/sda1. Hope this doesn't matter as I've just carried on. Bought the Pro Licence and added it to the USB added a parity drive and data drive and started the array and I am now upto the server doing a parity check which is going to take 600mins.

 

Parity - Hitachi Deskstar 2TB

Data - WD Caviar Green 2TB

 

What I want to do now is get the shares setup correctly and find out what will be the best way to transfer my data from my existing NAS (Synology DS210j) which has ran out of space. I set the NAS up with RAID 0 and I'm just wondering if I will run into problems as I want to add both of the drives in my NAS into my media server. My NAS has 2 x 1.5TB Samsung Spinpoint F3 HD154UI in it.

 

As for shares I currently have 3 different folders for Media and I am a little confused and don't know how I would setup the folders I currently have onto the media server using the shares.

 

Movies -> Genre -> Title -> Prequels/Sequels -> Movie --- (Movies -> Sci Fi -> Matrixs -> 1. Matrix / 2. Reloaded / 3. Revolutions -> .avi)

TV Series -> TV Show -> Season -> Episodes --- (TV Shows -> The Wire -> Season 1 / Season 2 / Season 3 / Season 4 / Season 5 -> .avi)

Music -> Genre -> Artist -> Album -> Songs --- (Music -> Rock -> Muse -> Absolution -> .mp3)

 

Sorry for the long winded post but wanted to explain my situation and thanks in advance for any replies!

 

The simplest solution is to make 3 shares: Movies, TV series, & Music.

Hi and welcome to Unraid. I have been using it for a few months now and its great and the forum support is very good so read lots and it will all come together.

 

For shares i agree with the share by topic approach so for you 1-movies 2-music 3-TV etc

 

The next thing is to get your head around split levels, this is simply at what point in the tree does unraid allow stuff to be spread across disks and what must be kept together. This can take some understanding but there is some good info on here about how to set it up so i wont repeat it. What i would say is it helped me to write the tree structure down on paper and draw a line where i wanted the split to happen i.e. for you do you want films to only be on one disk, probably not. Do you want the genre to only be on one disk, maybe but again probably not. Do you want all "matrix" films to be on one disk, possibly but this is down to choice. Do you want all the files for any given film to be on one disk - absolutly to stop there being any delay when it switches from one disk to another. Some people like to keep things on a single disk to avoid spin ups but i dont go that far.

 

If it helps as an example i do not have films by genre (i dont always think its clear - where would you put a horror film set in space which was also funny? i think a lot of films are hard to pigeon hole .... just a view): Anyway i have movies by title only and grouped together in alphabetical files to keep the number in each folder down to a reasonable level for searching (and just as an addition while i am brain dunmping i move "The" in any film title to the end so i would file "the hunt for red october" to "hunt for red october the" so i dont have lots of "the" films stored under "S-T-U" folder, just something that works for me. For mine i have set the split level to "2" - my logic is:

 

Movies > split 0 - any disk

      A-B-C > split 1 - any disk

            Armagedon split 2 - i have mine set here so A-B-C can be on multi disks but any specific film and all its files must stay together

                  File 

                  File

            Billy Elliot > A-B-C can be on any disk so Armagedon and Billy Elliot "could be" on different disks but all needed files are kept together

                  File

      D-E--F

 

Of course when i look into the movies share i just see the overall structure which is the great things about shares :-)

 

Just use the same logic of what is ok to spread about and what do you want kept together - its a bit personal. There is lots of info about this so just search for split levels

 

Hope that helps a little and gives you something to think about? think it through well so you dont have to try to change it in the future.