Help with User Share(s) and Split Levels

[ghart999]

Hi all. Newbie here setting up my first array and need help with user shares. I have about 2.5TB of media to add to a 6TB array with 3TB parity drive.

 

I have 5 main folders for movies, music, photos, software dev stuff, and downloads.  I have attached a mockup of the hierarchy.

 

I really don't know if I should do a single share or one for each folder.  Ideally it would be nice to map a drive to the entire single share and then see all my 5 main folders.

 

But I am wondering if this could cause issues.

 

If I go with 5 shares, will I have to map a drive letter to each individual share and not be able to see all 5 main folders as a single view?

 

Also I don't really know what split level to use for this.  All I care about is performance of playing 1080p movies.  If individual movies are on different disks, I can't imagine if this would be an issue whatsoever. I just want to make sure I won't take performance hits.

 

Thank you all for any suggestions you may be able to provide.

 

Gregg

[Necrotic]

Please see this for more info on split levels. I believe it does it only by folders, so having so many movies in one folder will limit it to only one drive (instead of spreading). I would go ahead and move all those movies into their individual folders, its best in the long run from what I have heard.

The shares will show up individually, so if you map the network drives you will have to do each individually. I believe there is a way to create "links" in one of the folders linking to the others and it may be a way to solve your problem, but I dont know if that affects the split level thing if you try to go through one of these and transfer files.

[itimpi]

You have to decide how many levels of folders (including the top level share folder) you want to allow to be replicated across disks.  If you put all the folder under one share then you would want at least a split level of 3.  If you put each category under its own share then you can tune it to what works best for you.  Once the path has the number of folders in it equivalent to the Split level then all further sub-content is constrained to the disk in which the next folder level is created.

 

Note also that the Split Level only applies to deciding what disk new files are created on, and has nothing to do with reading them.  This means it is perfectly feasible to change the split level on a share at any point.

[lionelhutz]

You forgot to mention the most important part. What directories/files in that list do you want kept stored on a single disk?

 

I would 100% recommend you use a share per type of media.

 

I have individual shares and I just go to Network\Mediaserver and all the shares are listed in a single view. Why bother with drive mapping?

 

[ghart999]

Thanks all. I think I will do what lionel suggested. Now I think the only thing I would like to have on a single disk would be the Photos and Software Dev folders. So for those I assume I would create individual user shares for each of these and assign them split level 0 or 1 so they stay on the same drive?

 

Now with movies and music, I don't really care if they are on the same drives or not. I guess I would atleast like each music album on the same drive, but don't care about artist. So I am thinking split level 2.

 

Yes I guess I don't not need to map to drive letters, just be able to see them all from Network\Mediaserver as suggested.

 

Thank you all.

[itimpi]

For any particular share you can specify which disks it is allowed to use. 

[lionelhutz]

I think level 1 would work for Movies and Music. Just put the disk you want to use for the other shares so they stay on it.

[garycase]

I've found that split level 1 is far too restrictive.  I'd use level 2 for movies & music.

 

In reality is makes almost no difference -- UnRAID never "splits" a copy across multiple disks EXCEPT when the allocation method indicates it's time to switch disks ... which is fairly rare.

 

You can also precisely control where everything's at by always writing to a disk share instead of a user share;  and simply reading from the user shares.

 

e.g. if you have a Movies share, you can write to Disk1\Movies  instead of just Movies => it will be written to Disk1, but will still be accessible via the Movies share.

 

Finally, r.e. your comment "... If individual movies are on different disks, I can't imagine if this would be an issue whatsoever ..."  ==>  You're absolutely right.  It makes no difference if different movies are on different disks.  What CAN make a difference is if the same movie has components split across multiple disks (e.g. VOB1 on one disk, VOB2 on another).  In that case, IF the 2nd disk isn't spinning when it needs to read from it, there will be a pause in playback while the disk spins up.