Ok folks, couple of questions for the gurus out there...

 

When I initially set up my unRAID box (years ago) I did not completely understand split levels and I now understand a wee bit more (thanks to lionelhutz and Joe L among others).

 

What I'm aiming to do is to re-organize my files to accomodate not only split levels, but I'd also like to "reserve" some free space on the drives (to avoid them hitting 99% full and degrading speed).

 

So, my plan is to have my "movies" share be split level 1 and my tv to be split level 2. I think that will keep files organized properly to obtain spin down properly...

 

So, my question is, if I setup *new* shares (movies2, tv2) and set them to be split levels 1 and 2 respectively, with "high water" and free space of 100Gb, will that then put new additions in the correct order? (I think that will work).

 

The other question is, what's the correct method to move the existing data to the new share structure (to respect the new split level and free space rules)? Can I simply use "mv" in the shell, or should I use Teracopy to move them from an outside Windows machine? I know that would take longer, but I'm not sure if the "mv" acts more like a "rename" on the "mnt/user" share?

 

Hopefully this is something that's possible to achieve and allow my disks to spin down and not get as full. I thank you for your assitance and apologize for the "newbness" of these questions...

 

 

I am reasonably certain that using the mv command will try and leave files on the same disk but with a new path.  It should be easy enough to do a test with a few files to check out any differences in behaviour between the approaches.

I'd set the split levels you want -- whether 1 or 2 is the "best" for movies depends on how they're organized (ISOs vs. DVD folders) -- but wouldn't bother to move everything around unless you're trying to move them off of a specific disk.    If that's the case, I'd just "move" them from a specific disk to another specific disk -- NOT writing to the share.    They'll still be "in" the share (as long as you store them in the share folder), but YOU can choose where they go rather than depending on the UnRAID logic.    You most likely won't need to move very many to have the structure to your liking;  and afterwards UnRAID will maintain that via the split level you've selected.

 

By the way, I have NOT found that full disks have any performance impact for READS -- so if you're dealing with static data, there's no problem filling up a disk.  I've done this manually for several of my disks -- these are no longer involved in writes (which DO slow down a lot if the disk is really full);  but stream movies just fine.