Allocation Method Best Practices?

[wickedathletes]

Just wondering what people use for this with their User Shares. I am new to unRAID and finally setup my box this week.

 

My setup is 5.0RC5

1 2TB Parity

1 500GB Cache

1 2TB, 2 1.5TB, 1 1TB drive in array

 

I am using this strictly for media sharing to XBMC HTPC and Boxee Box. Installed I have SAB, Couch, Sick and CrashPlan. Everything downloads to my cache and then Sick and Couch move it to the array.

 

When setting up the shares I picked High Water, with a split at 1 (Movies\MovieName\File) is my setup. Is High Water fine? If not can it be reset without breaking everything? Just wondering what people use?

 

EDIT: Search is a wonderful thing: http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=9908.msg94650#msg94650 for answering changing it. Still wonder if High Water is the best.

[JonathanM]

It's all personal choice. There are positives and negatives for any particular allocation method. Filling drives all the way up tends to slow things down, but spreading data all over the place can make figuring out what drive holds what more difficult. Unraid recovers from only 1 failure at a time, so more drives = higher statistical chance of multiple simultaneous failures and data loss. Personally I fill drives up by writing to the disk shares, I don't let the allocation method make the choice for me. I prefer more hands on management. Hidden disk shares to add content, read only user shares to access content from media devices.

[jamerson9]

Really depends on how much effort you wish to put into it. I went with high water in the beginning with couple of empty drives. Didn't like having files all over the place so after some tidying about went with writing to the disk shares directly.

 

I now tend to fill up and close up drives with permanent stuff and leave one drive for temporary data.

[lionelhutz]

Using fill-up can be an issue if you do TV shows and want to keep a complete series or season on a disk. Stay with high-water unless you fully understand what using fill-up means.