I currently have a 1TB drive that I have dedicated to backup of other systems in the house as well as a public Share folder that I use when I want to send my wife a large file or vice versa.

 

I'm going to be upgrading this drive to a 3TB drive, but I don't need 3TB for what this disk is dedicated to. It would be perfect if I could keep 1TB of the new drive dedicated to its current purpose and use the remaining 2TB for media storage. It seems like having multiple partitions would be the cleanest way to accomplish this, but I don't see any way to do that in unRAID.

 

If I just let multiple user shares access the entire 3TB, then media storage won't stop at 2TB, it will keep going until it is full and I won't have any space left for my backups. I could obviously have the backups span multiple drives, but I like how I'm able to access it directly through the disk mount instead of through a user share. Is there any other way to accomplish what I want to do?

 

I just moved from 4.7 to 5RC16b, but I don't think this is a question that depends on version.

 

No, you can't have multiple partitions on a disk when using it in your unraid array. Why don't you just keep the 1TB drive in your system and keep using it for what you're using it for now? Then the 3TB can be used completely for media storage. That seems like the obvious answer here.

No, you can't have multiple partitions on a disk when using it in your unraid array. Why don't you just keep the 1TB drive in your system and keep using it for what you're using it for now? Then the 3TB can be used completely for media storage. That seems like the obvious answer here.

 

Because my array is full so I can't add any new drives, I can only upgrade the old ones.

Set min free space in share settings to 1tb for the 3tb that way Unraid will stop writing to it and consider it "full"  at 2tb leaving you with 1tb free to use for whatever you like

 

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Set min free space in share settings to 1tb for the 3tb that way Unraid will stop writing to it and consider it "full"  at 2tb leaving you with 1tb free to use for whatever you like

 

That's along the lines of what I was thinking, but it seems like you can only set the min free space for the overall user share. So I think if I let my Movies user share have access to the drive, it will potentially use more than 2TB on this drive, as long as the overall Movies share has at least 1TB available on some combination of drives.

There is no simple or easy way to accomplish what you're trying to do. If you're out of space in your case you can buy a cheap $10 eSATA card and an eSATA enclosure for your 1TB disk and have it sitting outside your case but still part of your array.

There is no simple or easy way to accomplish what you're trying to do. If you're out of space in your case you can buy a cheap $10 eSATA card and an eSATA enclosure for your 1TB disk and have it sitting outside your case but still part of your array.

 

Ok, well it was worth a shot. I guess I'll just let my backups span an additional disk if it runs out of space. Thanks

Set min free space in share settings to 1tb for the 3tb that way Unraid will stop writing to it and consider it "full"  at 2tb leaving you with 1tb free to use for whatever you like

 

That's along the lines of what I was thinking, but it seems like you can only set the min free space for the overall user share. So I think if I let my Movies user share have access to the drive, it will potentially use more than 2TB on this drive, as long as the overall Movies share has at least 1TB available on some combination of drives.

 

This is not correct. Min free space is per drive, e.g., if Movies is configured with a 1TB min free space, it will only write to drives that have more than 1TB of free space.

Set min free space in share settings to 1tb for the 3tb that way Unraid will stop writing to it and consider it "full"  at 2tb leaving you with 1tb free to use for whatever you like

 

That's along the lines of what I was thinking, but it seems like you can only set the min free space for the overall user share. So I think if I let my Movies user share have access to the drive, it will potentially use more than 2TB on this drive, as long as the overall Movies share has at least 1TB available on some combination of drives.

 

This is not correct. Min free space is per drive, e.g., if Movies is configured with a 1TB min free space, it will only write to drives that have more than 1TB of free space.

 

Fair enough, I didn't realize that. Still, it can only be set once per share, so it would leave 1TB on every drive used by the share, right? I only want it to leave me 1TB on 1 of the 10 or however many drives used by the share.

I actually think I've found a solution for this. I can manually put 2TB of movies on the drive but not add it as an included disk in the "Movies" share. My understanding is unRAID will see the Movies directory on the disk and add it to the files shown by the Movies share, but it won't make the disk available for new content on the share (except for auxiliary files that might be added to the existing folders based on split level).

 

Woop! 

Yes.