Good morning!

  I'm new at this, having just built my first unRAID server. I've precleared the three 4 TB HGST drives, and added them to the array. To migrate my old NAS data over, I used ssh into my unRAID and using screen + mc, am downloading the directories onto my unRAID.

  I've set up my directories to "automatically split as required" for several collections of unconnected items (documents, etc), and auto split the top two and top three directories for movies and TV shows, respectively. Unfortunately everything is only going onto disk1 after about 320 GB of copying. So I thought I'd stop before I get too far down this process.

  Caveats--I'm still in the free license, as I'd like to see parity and balancing work for me before I buy, so I don't have a cache disk set up. My first parity pass is still running while I'm adding the initial data. And also, I've set the cache setting on the user shares to "Yes," since I'd like to add one after everything is working and I buy the full license. My understanding of the setting help dialogue is that, with no cache available, it will just move the data to the array (which it is doing, but only to disk1).

  Any ideas why this might be doing this? My global shares settings are Enable disk shares: Auto, User shares: Yes, include: All, exclude: None.

 

Thanks!

J

unserver-syslog-20160705-0803.zip

You probably still have the allocation method set to high water instead of most free. Hit the help button at the top right of the webgui for an explanation of how that works.

 

Also if whatever process you are using to move files creates the directories first, then unraid will use those directories on whatever disk they were created.

 

Evenly spreading your data may not actually be what you want in the long term, but that is for you to decide. Different personality types seem to prefer different disk usage strategies. Highly organized people tend to want to group like things on the same disk, so the fewest number of disks need to be spun up to access any given media type.

... I'd like to see ... balancing work for me ...

There is no balancing in unRAID. Once a file is written to a disk in the parity array it will not be moved.

What is it that you are hoping to achieve? If you are expecting your data disks to fill up evenly that won't happen, even if you have high water mark selected because the algorithm is not as fine grained as that. With only 320 GB of data written you would expect it all to go to disk 1. Only when disk 1 is half full does disk 2 start to fill up.

 

EDIT. It's explained here, along with the other allocation strategies: https://lime-technology.com/wiki/index.php/Un-Official_UnRAID_Manual#High_Water

... My first parity pass is still running while I'm adding the initial data.

 

I'd wait for the parity sync to finish before adding your data.    Writing to the array while doing a parity sync or check will cause BOTH operations (the parity sync and the write) to be MUCH slower than they would otherwise be.

 

As for the data all going to disk #1 => that's been explained already ... it's simply due to your allocation method.    If you want all drives to be used fairly uniformly, use "most free" for your allocation method.    With all drives being the same size, this will result in very uniform utilization of the drive space.

 

jonathon, John and gary,

  First, may I just say "Wow!" A reputation for community responsiveness is one of the things that drew me toward unRAID. Validated.

  John_M, you got what I've missed here-I misunderstood the high-water mark, and your link clears that up. garycase and jonathonm, thanks for the advice, I will hold the rest of the data dump until parity completes and keep dumping in the TB's in high water.

  Thanks for the help!

 

Josh