I should start by saying that I am new to this, so please bear with me!

 

I finished my first unRAID build this past weekend.  I'm using version 5.0-rc8a in a system with two 1 TB drives and one 2 TB parity drive.  Both of the 1 TB drives are part of a share called "Data".  Everything went very well and the array is online and functional, but I have run into problems trying to copy all of my data to the new array.  Right now all of my data is on a separate 2 TB drive that will eventually be a part of the array.  This drive is connected to a Windows PC and I have been copying all the files through my network to the NAS.  A little while ago, with about 500 GB left to copy, Windows stopped and told me that there was not enough free space on the share.  This should not be the case.

 

Upon further investigating, I realized that I had an incorrect value for split level on my share.  I did not realize that a top-level folder would be created, so I used a split level of 1.  I suspect this is why I "ran out of space".  However, even though I have since changed the split level to 2 I am unable to continue to copy files to the array.  I even stopped the array and rebooted the server, but that did not help.  I am really trying to avoid cancelling the copy in Windows and starting over again.

 

My folder structure is relatively simple:

- Root

|- Documents

|- Movies

|- TV Shows

|- Music

 

But each folder could have any number of sub-folders.  I don't really care where the data goes on the physical drives so long as it all remains accessible though the share that includes all the drives.  I have read in other posts that I may be able to manually create the folder structure on the second disk to make this work, and I have tried creating the top-level folder structure, but there way WAY too many folders for that to be feasible.

 

So I guess I have two questions.

 

Is my understanding of split level correct now?  Using a level of two should create each of the top-level folders on each drive files/folders can go wherever they need to go to fit underneath them.

 

Is there any way I can resume the currently paused file transfer from Windows?  Or will I need to start that over for the split-level changes to properly take effect?

 

Thanks!

 

- Eric

I don't people are going to be able to help until you describe exactly what you are trying to do.  I assume that you have read the following portion of the WIKI:

 

      http://lime-technology.com/wiki/index.php/Un-Official_UnRAID_Manual#Split_level

 

As I understand it, the split level was implemented for a specific reason.  I will give you an example of the reason.  DVD's have a folder (VIDEO_TS) that usually contains a few small control files and a group of .VOB files that are about 1GB in size.  It usually takes about 5 of these .VOB files for the average movie.  As you might guess these files are played one-after-the-other.  Any delay in loading a file results in a pause in the movie. 

 

What can happen is that the disk allocation method can cause these files to be split between disks.  Even this might not cause a problem but most users spin-down any disk not being read from (or written to).  This causes a problem with a really, really pregnant pause in playback until the disk spins up. 

 

Second usability issue is when there is metadata for media files which is often used display information about movies and TV shows.  Browsing through an  large media collection looking for something can easily result in an entire array being spun up.  This might not seem a big issue to you as you have only two data disks (now).  But think of the poor user with twenty data disks...

 

What you have to determine is exactly what your expect your data structure to truly look in the future.  Draw a chart like is shown in the WIKI.  Think it through.  If you are storing both movies and TV shows, play close attention for how you set up the levels so you don't end up with a situation where any split level you assign will be wrong for one or the other! 

 

Final thought, you don't care where anything ends up, set the split level to 999. 

 

Hope this helps...