Split levels - Advice/Help

[DiCe!]

Afternoon all,

 

For the life of me I just cant get my head around split levels. It is driving me mad! I have set up the server and at the moment there is no data on it what so ever, I have 2TB of data to transfer. Once all the data is transferred I will add my current 2TB disk to the array.

 

I currently have:

Parity disk 2TB

Data disk 2TB

Data disk 1TB

 

At the moment my file structure is as such:

 

Media (root)

-All Movies

--Movie name folder

---Movie file

 

-All Series

--Series name folder

---Season number

----Episodes

 

-Music

--Artist

---Album

 

Could someone point me in the right direction, as what I should set? How I should set up my shares? I have read the un-official guide and any other bit of info I can find online, I just cant wrap my head around it.

 

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

 

Alex

 

[lionelhutz]

I would use 3 shares.

Movies - SL = 1

TV - SL = 1 or 2

Music - SL = 1

 

For TV, SL = 1 keeps each complete series on a single disk and SL = 2 keeps each complete season on a single disk.

[DiCe!]

Thanks for the advice lionelhutz

 

Really appreciate it!

 

 

My final question re split levels, I am going to set up a share to record tv too, I cant imagine I will use it that much possibly 300 gig max, do you think I need a split level on it? or just create a share and let it do its thing.

 

Many thanks!

[mr-hexen]

to be clear lionelhutz is also recommending that you create a share for Movies, Music, TV separately not under one big "Media" share.

 

is the Record TV share going to hold permanent recordings or temp? Might be easier to just use the cache only option. I say this because pvr functions are fairly time sensitive and i'd be worried about the recording missing some parts (or failing) while waiting for the array to spin up.

[lionelhutz]

I would either set the record share to be cache only or limit it to a single array disk.

 

[DiCe!]

Thanks both, yes I have created 3 separate shares and have set the split level accordingly.

 

I think I will limit the TV share to a single drive as I dont have a cache drive, Thanks again.

[garycase]

Limiting the TV share to a single drive doesn't really help with the performance issue =>  writes will still be relatively slow, since each write requires 4 disk operations (2 reads, 2 writes) on the protected array.

 

For live TV recording I would NOT use UnRAID as the target.  Since you don't want a very large data store (300GB) just use a dedicated disk on the PC that you're using for the recordings.  If you want them stored on your fault-tolerant array, just copy the recordings AFTER they're complete.

 

... or you could add a cache drive to UnRAID and make the recordings share a cache-only share (of course you wouldn't get fault tolerance with this).