I want to add another 4TB HDD and rebalance all data across, all of my drives. During this process I will be changing my split-level as well so I can keep my movie directories and their album art, etc, etc on the same drive.

 

Now I've read I can copy files to a new temp share and then rename the temp share back to Movies. I tried to accomplish this via MC so I can get the best throughput but sadly MC doesn't trigger any share level attributes (split level, Most-Free, etc.) I tried to do the transfer via VM but with 16TB worth of data that will take close to a week to complete (50MB/s transfer speed).

 

Has anyone else tried this? Any suggestions? My main goal is to rebalance and spread the love across all my drives. Rather than all new content hitting my new 4TB HDD, which will in turn cause it to get flooded when users are streaming content.

Now I've read I can copy files to a new temp share and then rename the temp share back to Movies. I tried to accomplish this via MC so I can get the best throughput but sadly MC doesn't trigger any share level attributes (split level, Most-Free, etc.) I tried to do the transfer via VM but with 16TB worth of data that will take close to a week to complete (50MB/s transfer speed).

 

Sounds to me like you moved the files in mc rather than copied them, could that be the case?

 

Anyways, copying through a VM on the server should not be noticeably slower than copying through mc.

Yeah - sorry for the incorrectly representing what I did. Yes I moved in MC rather than copied, would that trigger different behavior?

 

The difference I saw was when moving in MC the files were not even touching the new drive, even though Most-Free is enabled. I'm guessing this is due to the fact I'm transferring to /mnt/user/movies_temp and not a samba share. However, In the Windows VM I'm moving files between mapped shares, so this in turn triggers Most-Free and Split-Level as expected.

 

In short, I'm just trying to get my Movies share to a different split-level and rebalance the files across all drives. If there is a more efficient way of achieving this, please let me know. Thanks for the assistance.

I got it figured out and cut my transfer time in half. Here is what I did:

 

• Stop any and ALL automation that reads the shares in real-time or any dockers that may look at the directories. (ie Sab, CP, Sonarr etc.)
  
• Stop the array and unassig the parity disk. This took my write speed from 30MB/s to 50MB/s (WARNING: This will leave your array unprotected during the next steps!)
  
• Setup a movies_temp and tv_temp share with the split-level you want. This will be the shares you move your files to so they can be re-split and balance across the drives. (NOTE: DISABLE YOUR CACHE DRIVE)
  
• Create a Windows VM on unraid or dedicate a standalone box in your environment for the transfer. I'd recommend a VM as you get a 10GbE connection and the transfer times should be better.
  
• In your Windows VM, map the original movies and tv folders along with the temp ones you created.
  
• Download and install Teracopy. Initiate a move from the original to the temp directories. (NOTE: Teracopy may or may not say you don't have enough space to complete the operation. While in my case I only have 4TB free and I'm "Moving" 16TB, we can safely ignore this error. Why? Because we are simply moving files from the array and back. This means the free sapce that Teracopy is seeing is irrelevant to this procedure.
  
• Grab a case of beer and wait a few days for the data to finish transferring.