User shares, number of files, and growing pains

[TonyTheTiger]

Hello all.

 

 

I generally organize my disks by user share and I have a bit of a problem accessing files as the drives fill up. For instance, the "Movies" share spanned three 4T hard drive and windows 7 would often timeout before I could access anything. Adding a fourth drive and "balancing" the files across the drives solved the problem. It's time to think about a fifth drive. Is there any limit to the file structure in a particular user share or hard drive? I had a similar problem with another disk that had a single user share named "eLiterature", that contained a very large number of relatively small sized epub, mobi, and pdf books and magazines. Creating separate "fiction", non-fiction", and "magazine" user shares helped a lot.

 

 

Should I use smaller user shares? Upgrade to v.6 and change file systems? Ditch user shares altogether and just export all 12 drives (NOT what I want to do)? Does anyone have a different organizing scheme for 16-20T of Movies that seems to work well (besides just HD, SD, and Kids)? Would packing bigger or smaller files at the beginning of a hard disk matter? Or should I just give up and get a relaxing beverage?

 

 

Thanks in advance.

[megalodon]

I have one user share for myself and one for guests that is read only. Across my drives I have Movies, Kids Movies, TV Shows and Concerts. All my Movies have a structure like this:

Movies/The Hobbit/ The Hobbit - Blu-ray.mkv

TV Shows/24/Season 1/24 - 10.00am - 11.00am - Blu-ray.mkv

 

Its works fine for me and I have 24TB.

[TonyTheTiger]

Thanks megalondon for replying.

 

 

I may have misspoke in my first post. I was referring to a directory-style user share [aka share]. I believe you were referring to is user level security [aka user]. If I have my terminology is wrong, I apologize.

 

 

I use the same structure to my movies (17T) and my tv shows (13T). My audiobooks share (3T) is more like Author/Book/Book.part1.mp3; and the music share (3T) is Artist/Album/Song.mp3. Those epubs and pdfs were just lumped in one share (3T) as Book (Series #), by Author.epub; and I would use the search function to find something - and hope I didn't misspell anything.

 

 

 

One of the posts, from a couple years back, suggested more RAM to hold a larger file tree; but that was a problem in v.4.something. Would that help in my case? Its frustrating to wait for a directory or share -or anything, really - to load. Timing-out is magnitudes worse

 

 

Thanks in advance.

[megalodon]

If you have 16GB by the look of your profile then that is plenty. User shares are designed to work around user names for access and not share names like documents, photos, movies etc. I have my user name set to private and read and write access to all shares. I have another called guest which has only read access to movies and TV Shows for guests staying over. it always takes a few seconds to access my share folders but it takes much longer if Im writing to shares from the same machine and trying to access other shares at the same time. I would have a folder for e-litrature under a documents share and setup a user share for whoever needs access, be it read only or read and write.

[FreeMan]

I'm willing to be that your timeout issue is because Windows gives up waiting for unRAID to spin up drives as it tries to build the directory structure. Try running cache_dirs - I'm willing to bet that will help immensely. I have a Movies share spread across 9 of my 10 disks with over 1400 movies, and don't have any issues browsing. Sometimes there's a pause when I'm accessing a specific file, but not just browsing the directory tree.

 

You could do a simple test:

Step 1:

- Spin down all your drives, making sure there's no other activity

- Open Windows Explorer to your Movie share and see if it crashes/hangs/times out/whatever

Step 2:

- Spin up all your drives

- Open WE again and see if you have issues.

[Brucey7]

Common problem when writing to nearly full disks, this will fix it

 

1.      On the Windows machine, open Regedit, and go to \HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\LanmanWorkstation\Parameters\

2.      Add a DWORD value called SessTimeout and set it for something like 3000 seconds

3.      Restart workstation service or reboot your PC