Hi,

 

I'm new here so be gentle :-) I'm looking at unraid for my new storage system but I have a question (a few actually).  I record a lot of HD TV from DVB-S via MediaPortal.  I generally record and then watch back from the same directory.  With multiple HD streams being written (approximately 9Mbit/s streams, I want to ensure that parity is not calculated on this share as really it is not required.  Is is possible to exclude these directories from the parity process?

 

Also, if I want to permanently keep these recordings, I will move them from Recorded TV to another share... Is there a quick way to move from share to share, or is it best to drop these in to a cache drive? If I don't use a cache drive, how does parity work in this case?

 

Finally, does unraid have an autobalance across drives?  For example, I have two drives that I am testing using the basic version.  At the moment, I have a 1TB drive connected and running fine but for me to add the 3TB drive I need to clear it which means I have to backup the data first.  Assuming that my only other drive is the 1TB drive, does unraid balance the pool if I load up the 1TB with data from the 3TB before adding the 3TB to the pool?

 

 

Edit 1: Also, how easy is it to extract HDDs from the array, i.e. I want to upgrade a HDD to a higher capacity... Can I simply ask Unraid to remove the drive, let it shift the data off the drive to the remaining drives (i.e. a balanced approached asked above) and then unmount that drive?  Obviously if the array is full, that becomes more awkward but I'm assuming in the plus/pro versions you can set a reserve space limit for such events?  OR does it simply rebuild the data on the removed drive from Parity information?  If so, does this take the array offline every time you try to upgrade HDDs?

 

Cheers,

 

Chris

You could use a cache drive for your recorded tv in a cache only share then move the ones you wanted saved to a share folder on the cache drive and allow the mover script to move them to the array at a later time. You could also mount a drive outside the array.

 

To upgrade I think it's best to remove the old drive then add the new and let unraid rebuild and expand.  You data and array will still be available and if something happens you still have the old as a backup.