Looking for some ideas.

 

I have a structure:

 

/TOWER/

------------TV/

-----------------A/

-----------------B/

...

-----------------Z/

 

My share is /TOWER/TV/

 

I manually rationalise letters to small sets of drives to recover from highwater splitting accross 10 drives but i now want to force each letter onto specific drives.

 

Since this is level 2 im not sure i can do this... any ideas?

Just a simple idea, perhaps too simple, can you direct the writes to the specific disk drives and folders you want, but read from the TV User Share?  Seems like you could if you have separate applications for saving the files, from applications for playback.

I could but it would be a pain to manage manauly. I would have to remember where each letter was for Tv and movies etc

 

I suppose i could script something up to remember it for me but i was hopeing for something slicker.

 

The way it currently is every couple of months i have to manually merge all letters cause unRAID would have one drive spinning up for a 4kB nfo file and another for a 50kB jpg

 

Another approach would be to just let unRAID be unRAID but have some sort of optimising script that runs to merge folder and reduce the number of drives per letter

polite bump so it doesn't get lost

 

the forum is really quite busy these days ... good sign

 

Can't you use level 1 and then manually create the "A" to "Z" directories on the drives you want them to be on?

 

I'm of the understanding that using level 1 means multiple same-name sub-directories will not be created automatically. But, you can still do it manually and if you do then both will be available.

 

I know you can still read a share spanning two drives even when the settings have been changed to use just one. I had a share split across two drives and I changed the setting back to use one drive. The whole share was still available before I moved the files all to the one drive. So, I'm betting if you use level 1 and manually create the sub-directory "A" on two different drives that it will still highwater fill just those 2 drives with the "A" movies you copy over.

 

If that's not what you're asking then I'm not understanding the question.

 

Peter

 

I could use Level on but its really not that neat... that would be over 100 alphabetic based folders.

 

ah wait perhaps were talking about differernt levels....

 

Will need to check the wiki but i thought level 2 is //tower/TV/A/ and level 1 would be //tower/TV/.

 

I currently use level 1 but that means i cant have includes and excludes per level 2

 

 

 

You are talking about a user share called "TV" right?

 

Yes, level 1 means no directories under TV will split automatically. But, I'm still betting you can manually create them where you want to get the splits you're looking for.

 

If you use level 2 then the directories under TV will be created wherever they feel like (well, wherever unRAID decides they need to be to best fill the drives) and you have no control over where they go. They will be created on any and/or all the drives you allow the "TV" share to use.

 

Peter

 

Thats exactly the problem. I have 15 drives to hold the data but if i let unRAID decide after every couple of weeks each letters has data on 10+ drives.

 

I could create a structure like:

 

//TOWER/TV - A/

//TOWER/TV - B/

...

//TOWER/TV - Z/

 

But as soon as you have movies, comic, tv HD, movies HD, Music following the same letter scheme i end up with literally hundreds of level 1 folders which is at best inelegant

 

So, why can't you create the share called "TV" and set it to split level 1. This should mean that the TV directory can span drives automatically but any directory under the TV directories can not.

 

Then, manually create your directory structure on each drive. Put a directory called TV on each drive and then create the sub-directories under on the drives where you want them. When you write to those sub-directories they will stay with the drive you created them in. Does that not work? If not, then where is the problem happening?

 

For example,

Go to //tower/disk1

Create a directory "TV"

Enter that directory

Create directories "A", "B" and "C"

go to //tower/disk2

Create a directory "TV"

Enter that directory

Create directories "D", "E" and "F"

etc

 

I believe you can even do this;

go to //tower.disk3

Create a directory "TV"

Enter that directory

Create directorie "F"

And then that directory "F" will work with in combination with the one on disk2. I haven't tested this but I suspect it will work.

 

 

It's not perfect because you still have to manually adjust for, say, sub-directory "T" having way more movies than the others and filling the drive it is on, but it's still probably the best solution. Creating a share for each letter means you have to add each of those shares into your video browsing software which sounds like a huge pain in the ass trying to manage say 50 to 100 shares.

 

To me, it seems that you have to take some control of the way that unRAID fills the drives. It's probably not possible to create an automatic drive filling scheme that works for everyone. This is why a lot of people just use the disks to fill the array and then access it via the shares.

 

Peter

 

Thats an extremely interesting idea and may in fact be the perfect solution !

 

Let me ponder, test and get back to you.

 

Kudos

The other part I didn't touch on is that if you say want "TV" to only be on 5 of the disks then put those 5 disk names in the include spot just to make sure.

 

If you manually create the sub-directories and unRAID is set level 1 then it should never create a new sub-directory, meaning it will never create another TV directory to hold that subdirectory, meaning it should never begin using a new disk even if you don't exclude it.

 

Peter

 

Yup i think we have a winner. Experimentations will tell.

 

Will get to that asap ... have to recover from massive highwater splitting before i can proceed