Hey everyone,

 

I am new to unRAID, I have just finished preclearing my two 6TB drives and am ready to create my first user share. Can someone please review my logic regarding user/disk shares and confirm I am thinking correctly or kindly educate me?

 

My Disks

• Cache = 500 GB SSD

• Parity = 6TB WD Red drive

• Disk1 = 6TB WD Red drive

• Disk2-24 = don't exist yet but will be bought on a as-needed basis

 

My Priorities:

• Minimal number of disks running at a given time

• Primarily using unRAID for torrents and plex

 

My intentions:

• Restrict all torrents to disk1 to minimize number of disks running at given time. To do this I create user share "Torrents" and make it include disk1 only

• Restrict media to disks2-24. Since I only have disk1 currently, I should create temporary user share "temp media," and when I buy a hard drive for disk2, move contents of "temp media" to respective user shares "Movies," "TV," "Music," and "Pictures," all of which excludes disk1. OR, reassign my parity drive as disk2 (I know I'll be without parity protection until I buy another disk) to avoid the entire "temp media" share.

 

My desired hierarchy for media:

LVL 1              LVL 2                  LVL 3                  LVL 4

Movies      --> Movie Folder  --> Movie Files

TV Shows --> Series Folder  --> Season Folder --> Season Files

Music        --> Artist Folder  --> Album Folder  --> Album Files

Pictures    --> Year Folder    --> Year Files

 

My desired Split level:

Movies = split level 1 (to keep an entire movie folder on a single disk)

TV = split level 2 (to keep an entire season on a single disk)

Music = split level 1 (to keep an entire artist on a single disk)

Pictures = split level 1 (to keep an entire year on a single disk)

 

I would ideally like to have just a single user share called "Media" and have everything underneath that, but I can't think of a way to have a compatible split level with everything in a single user share. Please let me know if there are better ways to arrange hierarchy.

Is there any reason the torrents should not run from the cache disk (i.e. due to size)?  The moment you use a data drive then all write operations involve a read and write to both the parity and data disk (i.e. 4 I/O operations and 2 disks spinning).  If you use the SSD then the torrents would not spin up any data drives.

I typically keep my torrents running for a while, so 500GB may not be enough.

 

I was planning on writing new torrents to the cache, and the mover would move completed torrents to disk1 at 340am. Since seeding torrents is a read-only operation, I don't think the parity drive will be running ... but not too sure.

I ended up removing my parity so I can have 2 disks for storage in the array. Both drives have completed 2 preclear cycles so I'm pretty confident that I can buy another drive in the next couple weeks for parity and I'll be ok ...

 

I created a user share "download" that only includes "disk1." Am I correct in that split-level does not matter since the user share is exclusive to disk1?

 

I'm still unsure about the split level for my media files. I'm now changing the music structure to this:

 

LVL 1              LVL 2                                    LVL 3

Music        --> ArtistName - AlbumName --> TrackNumber - TrackName.ext

 

Since that is how Plex handles media structures. This would still be a split-level 1 to keep an entire ArtistName -AlbumName on a single disk.

bump