UnRAID Newbie

[Danilo_Thann69]

Well just powered up my first unRAID box last night.  Everything looks good so far already have my pro key installed.

 

Now the hard part, waiting for the drives to be ready lol.

 

While I'm waiting I'm trying to decide on how best to setup shares/etc for the Movies/TV Shows for my media server.

 

 

Any suggestions?

 

Danilo

 

 

[CaptainSpalding]

I don't know how good your skills are, but I would have had a lot of help if I would have known that you can move files to a disk share and not through some top share folder like 'Movies' that is spread on all disks. I had a lot of empty folders on one disk (or just some subtitle file) and the same folders with files on some other. It's very time consuming to rearrange everything afterwards.

 

 

[bkastner]

First and foremost, there is really no right/wrong way to do this. It's going to come down to what makes sense for you.

 

Personally, I've just created two root folders /TV and /Movies. I primarily use XBMC on my clients and for my daughter's movies I have added a tag so that I could create a playlist of all movies with that tag so I am only scrolling through her 200 movies with her rather than the 2500 total.

 

Others will create multiple root folders /Movies /Movies-Kids /Documentaries or whatever. Again, if you are using XBMC (or Plex) you can aggregate these into a single share, or be very specific on what gets shared as /TV and /Movies and create other playlists for kids movies or documentaries.

 

I do have smaller shares that are only on a single disk /Pictures /Music /ISO which I restrict so they don't roam around, but the main two (TV & Movies) pretty much have free reign.

 

Regardless of what folder structure you choose here are a couple of suggestions:

 

- Assuming you are creating root shares (i.e. /TV / Movies and not /Media/TV and /Media/Movies) you will want to set a split level of 1. This will ensure that all seasons of a TV show are on the same disk, and all Movies files (i.e. xml, jpeg, etc) are all on the same disk. If you do opt to use /Media/TV, etc then set a split level of 2 to achieve the same thing.

- I would try and create folders/shares without spaces (i.e. /TV rather than /TV Shows). Either will work, but the space causes a few more headaches in Linux when working via command line, and some clients treat shares with spaces a bit strangely.

 

If you have a lot of media to move onto your UnRAID server once it's up and running then you may want to start the array without assigning a parity disk. While this leaves your data unprotected until you add it, you will be able to copy data around 3 times faster. Then once moved, add your parity and it will do a parity build and you can then do a parity check to make sure things are good.

 

CaptainSpalding's post is talking about the fact that you can mount /tower/disk1 instead of /tower/TV. The benefit when moving files over is that you can determine exactly where you want them to go. If you don't care, then you can move to /tower/TV, but having the choice is useful.

 

Lastly, are you looking at running 5.0.5 or 6.0-beta? If 5.0.5 then the filesystem will be Resierfs, however in the 6.0-beta series there are now options (xfs, btrfs, and rfs which is Reiserfs). If you are building on 6.0 then you may want to format these new disks as xfs as rfs is being slowly phased out (not that there is any issue with using it, or rush to get off of it). The benefit of selecting xfs immediately is that if you have rfs formatted disks and are looking to change, you need to completely empty a disk to reformat it as xfs and then copy data back onto it. It's not the end of the world, but is a bit time consuming.

 

If you are looking at 5.0.5 then stick with Reiserfs and don't worry about it. You will only have to consider the xfs suggestion when you are ready to move to 6.0 - which may be when it's ready to release.

 

Many of us had recommended just jumping into the 6.0 wading pool for new users, but we've recently had a hiccup with the 6.0-beta7 and -beta8 versions that have caused many to recommend new users stick with 5.0.5 to get your feet wet.

 

Since you likely have hours/days to kill before your disks are ready, feel free to get clarification on any other questions you may have before you start up UnRAID with disks to help make sure you are as informed as possible before having to learn anything the hard way.

[Danilo_Thann69]

Thanks for the tips.

 

Yea, I built my unRAID box due to having a media server that currently is running with 10TB of storage (one 4TB and two 3TB drives) my intention is once I get the 4TB and one of the 3TB drives data moved over to the unRAID box, and am comfortable with it, I"m going to pull those two drives and add them to the unRAID to give me 15TB of usable space. and toss the other 3TB into my ESX for some extra space.

 

I had started copying data from the server to the RAID last night after the drives were all checked out.

My original intent was to do

 

Share: Movies, under that each movie has a folder with the video and Metadata/etc

 

I take that back, the movies are organized as Share: Movies, then under that are categories (horror/scifi/etc) then the movie folders, so I'll probably leave the movies share at a split of 2.

 

Share TVShows, under that each tv series has a folder (with a folder for each season, etc)

 

but I had set the split at 2 not 1.

 

I'd rather get it done right now so I'm going back and am going to purge what I copied and rebuild the shares as split 1 and continue with the format I was using.

[bkastner]

Thanks for the tips.

 

Yea, I built my unRAID box due to having a media server that currently is running with 10TB of storage (one 4TB and two 3TB drives) my intention is once I get the 4TB and one of the 3TB drives data moved over to the unRAID box, and am comfortable with it, I"m going to pull those two drives and add them to the unRAID to give me 15TB of usable space. and toss the other 3TB into my ESX for some extra space.

 

I had started copying data from the server to the RAID last night after the drives were all checked out.

My original intent was to do

 

Share: Movies, under that each movie has a folder with the video and Metadata/etc

 

I take that back, the movies are organized as Share: Movies, then under that are categories (horror/scifi/etc) then the movie folders, so I'll probably leave the movies share at a split of 2.

 

Share TVShows, under that each tv series has a folder (with a folder for each season, etc)

 

but I had set the split at 2 not 1.

 

I'd rather get it done right now so I'm going back and am going to purge what I copied and rebuild the shares as split 1 and continue with the format I was using.

 

What you have should work fine, however the movie metadata will likely include categories, so you could search just horror on the fly from XBMC and Plex instead of creating sub-folders, but again, it's just a personal choice thing.

[jbartlett]

I have my Movies share with a split level of 1 to keep all the movie files together but a split level of 2 for the TV share. A split level of 2 keeps all the files for each season together but spreads out the seasons on different drives. The only delay most people are concerned about is going from one episode to the next and not from one season to the next.

[mr-hexen]

I have my Movies share with a split level of 1 to keep all the movie files together but a split level of 2 for the TV share. A split level of 2 keeps all the files for each season together but spreads out the seasons on different drives. The only delay most people are concerned about is going from one episode to the next and not from one season to the next.

 

Mine is setup this way as well.