Best practices for split level on user shares

[tmchow]

Based on all the historical threads I've read, there is definitely a set of different schools of thought on how to setup the shares and how hands on to be with their locations and split levels.

 

I'm more trusting of Unraid and wand to be hands off. For example, I don't want to mount any disks outside the array (other than cache and parity) as I want unraid to manage all of them completely in it's "supported" config.

 

Having said that, I see lots of discussion about the split level of user shares.  I'm inclined to leave them all to "Automatically split any directory as required" but I'm still confused on exactly why you'd choose other options.

 

Most of my media is movies, kids movies, tv and kids tv. 

 

I originally had user shares for each one of the above, but realize it's far easier if I just created a single "media" share and put all the aforementioned folders within it.

 

However, given the depth of movies is different than tv (TV has seasons), the use of split level changes if I want to control it.

 

For example:

 

/media/movies/movie1

/media/movies/movie2

/media/tv/tvshow1/season1/

/media/tv/tvshow1/season2/

 

Based on what I've read for this arrangement, people prefer to split level 3 for movies and level 4 for tv shows. 

 

I'm not exactly sure why if it really matters at all that seasons would be split across drives.  in what case is that helpful?

[Helmonder]

Basically it does not matter at all.. If you leave it at automatic and only use the user shares you will not notice the difference but for one tiny thing..

 

That tiny thing is that:

 

lets say you have all episodes of a season of a tv show on one drive, then if you start binge watching that show only one drive will spin up, if you fully let unraid decide what drive it might be that 4 drives need to be spun up to play one episode.. One for the movie, one for the subtitle, one for the cover of the movie that is shown on your media player and one for the background shown on your media player...

 

That however is an extreme scenario... If you combine "fully automatic" with "fill up" it will actually still keep all that stuff on one disk.. Should you choose "high water" in combination with "fully automatic" it is more likely that stuff belonging together gets scattered..

 

So: if you want maximum no effort / let it do its thing / dont want to worry about it, then set it to "fill up" together with automatic split level..

 

The real reason most people keep there shows together on a disk is that they have the desire to "keep things in control" ( I do it also by the way)..

[itimpi]

The real reason most people keep there shows together on a disk is that they have the desire to "keep things in control" ( I do it also by the way)..

Another reason to keep things grouped is that if anything goes badly wrong so that you have to resort to restoring from your backup then you have a better idea of what needs restoring if you have kept material together rather than scattered randomly across all drives.  I have mine organised so that if I completely lost a drive and all its data I know exactly which backup disk(s) I would need to use to restore the data.

 

Having said that with the advent of dual parity support in 6.2 maybe the chances of things going that badly wrong have become so low that this consideration is not one you really need to worry about.