Split Levels

[tucansam]

So... I have some drives coming and will have my system up and running, finally, and ready for data.

 

I plan on placing movies and TV shows on the array, plus redirects for my family's various "My Documents" folders on all of our Windows machines.  I also want a redirected "Downloads" share where all clients will store downloaded files so everyone has access.

 

I personally have several TB of files collected over the past 25 years, and part of the array's purpose will be for me to finally get these files organized.  It will take weeks, and I can see having nested directory structures a dozen (or more) deep, for the sake of organization. 

 

My family's music collection will also need a nested directory structure of a dozen or more.

 

I'm wondering what split levels to use for my various shares.

[dgaschk]

It depends on how you want the files to be spread out across the data drives.

[tucansam]

It depends on how you want the files to be spread out across the data drives.

 

 

Any suggestions?  If I spread the data across all of the drives, then any two-drive failure would only result in the data on those drives being lost, right?

 

Will disks that are added to the array later inherit the same split level?

[Influencer]

Correct. And correct on the second part as well. As long as you don't specifically include disks, any disk that is NOT excluded(there are two separate fields) will be used and inherit the same split level.

 

For Movies & TV I'd make a share named "Media"

Media\

..........Movies\HD\Movie Folder\Movie.avi

..........Movies\SD\Movie Folder\Movie.avi

..........TV\Series\Season\Season.avi

 

I'd make the split level of that Share Split level 3.

This would allow the directories HD, SD and Series to reside on any disk. Each individual movie folder and Series folder will reside on the first disk they are placed on.

 

Personal\

..............Mom\

..............Dad\

..............Susie\

..............Downloads\

..............Pictures\

 

That would take care of the redirects. I'd set split level as 2, so each redirect can reside on every disc, but anything further would reside on the same disc. For example, "Mom" would reside on every disk, a file "Chores.txt" would reside on any disk. The directory "Tax returns" could be created on any disk, for instance, disk 2. After the directory is created, anything further (Tax returns\2011\)" would reside on disk 2 as well.

 

Music and your collection would be harder to figure and would be based off of how its organized and how far the nested directories go.

 

[tucansam]

Awesome... Thanks!!!  As far as music, we could keep it simple, like a folder called "Music" with subfolders of each artist, sorted alphabetically, and then album names inside those.  Or, we could go absurd, and catagorize by type (classical, rock, metal, electronica) and then go from there.  But I'd like to keep it simple, because simple is good.

[Influencer]

Hey don't call that absurd, its how I have mine structured! It was a pita to organize but I love it. Whatever mood I'm in I can set an appropriate playlist.

[tucansam]

What's your split level set to?

[Influencer]

My music is setup like this:

 

Music/Genre/Artist/Album/song.mp3

 

I set it to split level 2, so that all genre's can be across discs but all albums for each artist are together.

 

I also organize all of my music by hand because I'm particular about it and haven't found a program to do reliably what I want done.

 

What I do is dump all new music in a single folder located at /Music/New/. Every once in a while, usually once a month I'll manually tag, rename and move the music to its home.