Question about Split Level / other drives not being used

[Falc410]

I installed a new unRaid Server at my father and now I'm migrating the old NAS using rsync to copy everything to /mnt/user/Media

 

Media is my User Share, which is set to split level 2, the directory structure is like this:

Media/Pictures/Year (so 2014, 2013 and so on)

or

Media/Videos/Year (again 2014, 2013 and so on)

 

I wanted to keep each Year folder on one disk and not split across multiple disks. I did not create any folders by hand on the disks and just started rsyncing to the Media folder. Now it copied already 500GB to it but it only writes to disk 1. There are 3x 2TB drives installed + Parity (which is not yet added to the array).

Also it's set to HighWater - will it automatically write to another drive by itself or do I have to manually do something? I was under the impression that it should at some point write to another drive but it doesn't seem to do so. Is it safe to manually move files from drive to another later on?

[garycase]

With the High Water setting it will write to a disk until it's 1/2 full;  then to the next disk until it's 1/2 full;  etc. ... and when they're all half full it will write to the 1st disk until it uses half of the remaining space (i.e. until it's 3/4 full; etc.)

 

So ... it'll start writing to the 2nd drive after you've used 1TB of the 2TB of space 

[garycase]

Note that if you specifically want to put different folders on different drives, you should simply write them to the drive you want using the disk shares.  As long as they're all part of the same User share, they'll all be seen just fine under that share.

 

For example, if you simply create a folder called Media at the top level of each disk, then all of those will be included in your Media share.    You can then write specific folders manually to the disk where you want them.

 

e.g. you can write to \\Tower\disk2\Media\Videos\2013  if you want to force the 2013 videos to be on disk2 ... and you could write to \\Tower\disk3\Videos\2014 to force 2014 videos to go to disk3; etc.

 

Once you've forced a specific year to a specific drive, subsequent writes to that year [e.g. \\Tower\Media\Videos\2013] will automatically go to the appropriate disk due to your specified split level.

 

[Falc410]

Ah, I didn't knew it writes until 1/2 of the space was used, I thought it was 1/4 (that's why I monitored the 500GB).

I know that I can create the folders by myself, but I used this as kind of experiment to see what is happening if I don't manually create anything and just write to the share.

 

Thanks a lot for the clarification though.