If I start shuffling the files around between the drives (while connected over telnet) how is that going to affect unRaid? Does unRaid keep a database of all the files scattered over all the drives?

 

The reason I ask is initially, (when I started using unRaid) I just started dumping data on it, and let unRaid decide where the files were going, but now I would like to arrange the data a little neater so that I have movies on one disk, and music on another, etc.

 

I am wondering if this has any effect of people accessing the array while data gets moved around between the drives.

If I start shuffling the files around between the drives (while connected over telnet) how is that going to affect unRaid? Does unRaid keep a database of all the files scattered over all the drives?

 

The reason I ask is initially, (when I started using unRaid) I just started dumping data on it, and let unRaid decide where the files were going, but now I would like to arrange the data a little neater so that I have movies on one disk, and music on another, etc.

 

I am wondering if this has any effect of people accessing the array while data gets moved around between the drives.

Your question is a more general unix question.

 

The "database" you describe is the file-system.  On unix/linux, the last "reference" to a file, once removed, will free the data blocks associated with a file.  As long as there is one reference to the file, the blocks will still be available.

 

So... If you had somebody watching a movie, and you moved the file to a different disk while they still had the file open for reading, its directory listing on the original disk would be deleted (removing one reference to the blocks) but the open file pointer (another reference to the same blocks) would still exist until you finished playing the file.  The data blocks on the original disk would be freed once the movie finished playing and its pointer to the file closed by the OS.

 

You can move the files as you please, to any folder or disk you desire to get them organized, at any time.    You can remove empty directories if no longer needed.

 

Joe L.

Just as an aside this question is becoming more prevalent. Hopefully plans are still in play for an enhanced highwater that should bundle files in a much more elegant way. No timescales but it should happen eventually as the premise is fairly well ironed out now.