After months of debate I've finally purchased unraid to replace Windows Server 2003 running a bunch of disks in software RAID5 (I wanted to be able to add and remove various sized drives and didn't need to buy a non-networked drobo)

 

So I've got 6x500gb drives in my unraid doing a parity check for the next 600 minutes. Time for some thinking.

 

 

I don't really want to have to mess around with shares and disk spanning user shares very much as my data sizes shift around. I've always just had a share called DATA and 9 or 10 root folders under that. 3 of those folders consume over 500gb and the rest are under 100gb.

 

Are there any negative reasons to just make a DATA folder in each drive root and set that user share to "Fill-Up" with a few gigs of "Min Free Space"

 

I dont want to worry about my "movies" share running out of space and later needing to add a drive that that share can consume. Just one big pool.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It is all personal preference.  I use a method similar to Fill-up but since I do not run the latest beta I do it manually, via disk includes and disk excludes.

 

BUT, I also limit which data goes to which drive(s).  I want to try to keep all my music on one disk so that only that one spins up to access the music, keep all the torrenting related stuff on one drive for the same reason, and then fill up in the order I feel like for my expanding DVD library.  I try to control which disks have what content so I am not spinning up and unneeded amount of drives.

The spinup reason is a good one. I'm going to have to put some thought behind that. When I'm actually sitting using the computer it's probably safe to say that all the disks would be spinning anyway due to my data usage patterns.... I might do it manually....

 

 

More thoughts please

I use specific drives for specific tasks (music, data, backup), however movies spans all disks, it is most used and most likely to cause issue (stuttering). I always write new movies to disks not in use.

 

Writing to disk shares is faster and requires only minimal effort.

I use specific drives for specific tasks (music, data, backup), however movies spans all disks,

Writing to disk shares is faster and requires only minimal effort.

 

Also sometimes drive speed matters, which is why specific drives are segregated.

For example, I use high rpm drives for small files that I access frequently,  Photos, documents, torrents, music

I use lower green drives for the movie files as they are usually access sequentially and sorting through directories is not a big deal for movies.

 

 

I also use includes and excludes to specify on which disks my data resides (I'm using unRAID version 4.4.2, so I don't have the 'fill up' option).  I also keep in mind the worst case scenario - if unRAID suddenly dies (meaning the software fails, LimeTech goes out of business, and this wonderful support community disappears) and I have to perform data recovery on each individual disk (granted, this is very, very, very unlikely....knock on wood).  So I consider that if I had to go through this loathsome chore, I would want all of one type of data to reside on as few disks as possible (hopefully just one) so that I could recover all my photos, music, etc. as one big folder and not have to aggregate them from multiple disks.  So for any of my data types that are small enough to fit completely on one disk I force them to use only one disk.  So my photos, music, and backups are all forced to use only one disk each (not the same disk).  For data that I consider to be particularly important (my backups), I force it to not use the cache drive, since I consider my cache drive to be my least reliable disk (since it is outside the protected array).  Everything else I allow to use the cache drive.

 

For my data types that are simply too large to be contained to a single disk (movies, TV, documentaries, etc.), I try to force them to use as few disks as possible.  This addresses the spin up issue previously mentioned.  So when I browse my movies or TV directories, there are probably 3 or 4 disks that have to spin up to allow me to do so (since I do not yet have cache_dirs installed...one of these days I'll get around to it!). 

 

Also, contrary to what Kaygee said, writing to the disk shares is only faster if you are not using a cache drive.  If you are using a cache drive, then writing to the user shares is much, much faster (4-6x faster in my experience).  Behind the scenes, there is still a slow transfer from the cache drive into the protected array occurring, but this happens in the middle of the night and shouldn't bother you.

 

In response to what WeeboTech said, I understand that depending on your usage drive speed can matter in some cases (he uses his server for torrents and some higher-end functions, whereas I don't).  If you just treat your unRAID server as a massive data storage pool, essentially a networked external hard drive, then drive speed doesn't really seem to matter much.  I have a mixture of slow, green drives (5400 RPM) and fast, black drives (7200 RPM) in my server and all of them are plenty fast enough to handle streaming HD video (since the network is the bottleneck, not the drive speed).  Granted, all of my drives are SATAII, so if you had a mixture of SATA and IDE drives then I could see this being more of a concern.  Actually, I prefer to store my video files on the green drives since they will use somewhat less power when spun up for several hours while I watch a movie as compared to the black drives.  The only drive where drive speed really does matter is the parity drive, since a faster parity drive can reduce the amount of time it takes for you to perform parity checks.  Even still, reducing your parity check time from 8 hours to 6 hours isn't really a big deal, to me at least, since I always perform my parity checks overnight.

 

Edit: Holy wall of text, Batman.  Parsimony is not my forte