Most of my drives are very near max capacity. Is this something to worry about (other than not being able to store stuff)?

 

Coming from a Windoze background, I know that it gets a little edgy when disks get near capacity - it that a concern with unRAID (or Linux in general)?

 

Well, I'm not an unraid or linux expert, but since the disks are for data only, and the OS itself runs from the flash drive, i think your only issue is running out of room for your media, etc.

any writes to the full disks may have some delay at the start while the drive firmware finds the empty space it needs.

As noted above, writes will be notably slower on a very full disk, but reads aren't impacted at all.    [Actually the writes aren't any slower ... but they don't start right away, as the file system is "thinking" about how to allocate the data  ]

 

But for the typical purpose of an UnRAID system, there's no reason to waste space and not fill up the disks.    12 of the 14 disks on my media server are over 99.9% full (just like yours).

 

Well, since I have a cache drive, I'll never notice it thinking at 3:40am.  And, since I use high-water to distribute the data over the one new disk at a time I've been adding, there probably won't be much time spent in thought anyway.

 

I didn't really think it would be an issue, but I figure it never hurts to ask.

 

Thanks, guys!

Yep ... with a cache there's virtually NO difference, since the extra time to "think" about the allocation is happening when you're safely tucked away catching some Z's