I have my shares setup to high water now so that all my drives are sitting at about the same amount of free space remaining across all my drives as of right now. I am about to more than double the amount of storage in my array as I am basically completely out right now. I would like for my drives to re-high water themselves (a term i just made up) after I throw the precleared drives in. My reasoning is that at my current setup of High Water, once I throw in my two 3 or 4 TB drives, ALL the new content i put to my array will go to these new drives while my old data stay on the old drives. If my old data fails, or my new drives bite the dust, i would like my content to still be spread out among ALL the drives in the array. OCD perhaps, but what can I say. I would like to make the best of the space that I have across all disks, instead of leaving the drives I have currently remain completely full. Is this as big a deal as I am making it out to be? I know that i can move things manually across the disks but I was just wondering if anybody else knows of some utility or file management to perform this. Arguments against doing this are welcome as well. I was just thinking about this last night while I was doing everything except sleeping. I have large amounts of movies or shows on my old drives and if one of my older drives fails, I could have HALF of my collection of movies or entire show series just vanish all at once. I am wondering if splitting content between drives is a better option. This is why I originally went with the high water option. I have rebuilt my array before in case of a disk failure, and I was still able to watch content from Plex because the content was split very evenly between the disks. When I was watching a show series on random during that disk failure for about a day or two, I was able to skip an episode or two that was on that failing disk and just keep on rolling. I did not have ALL the shows in a particular series, but I had most of it since it was split to the other disks. I hope this makes sense to somebody.....

 

thoughts??

Not clear from your description if you really understand how unRAID works. In particular, each file is stored completely on a single hard drive, unlike some other RAID-type systems you may know about. The only thing that happens when you have one drive disabled is it gets simulated by all of the other drives plus parity, the same way unRAID gets the data to rebuild that disk.

 

If you don't have backups, then what gets lost in the event of multiple drive failures is pretty much a crap shoot depending on which drives are involved and what specific files those drives contain. So I don't think there is any point in trying to plan where to put things for that reason, though there may be other reasons to distribute your files.

 

There may be some performance issues for any drive that is too full, but other than that I don't know what to recommend specifically, since I don't know anything about how your shares are setup or your split level, etc.