6.2.4 Allocation Method not acting correctly without cache drive

[SmallwoodDR82]

I've had my primary system (currently on 6.2.4) for a few years now and my split level is set to Top 2 Levels and my allocation method is most free. 

 

My tree is like this.  Share (Media) > Movies > Title > .mkv and .srt

 

This has worked perfectly and I have never changed it.  This system has always had a cache drive in place and the mover moves at 2am every night.

 

Now for the confusion.

 

I've been building a second system (6.2.4) and I'm using LimeTech's Sync container to sync my Media share between the 2 systems. 

 

I tested a few small shares first with using the cache drive and everything acted correctly.

 

But with the Media share, due to the large transfer size (30TBs or so) I have temporarily disabled the share to use the cache drive as the cache would be full in a matter of minutes.

 

I started the sync and everything seemed fine but when I checked up on the sync progress the sync and unRAID OS was dumping everything into the same disk.  I now have 1 disk at 80% full.

 

I played around with other allocation methods but nothing seemed to make a difference.  I'm ok with High Water or Most Free but neither seem to work.

 

I've currently paused the sync as I'm afraid it will max this drive out and who knows what happens after that.

 

Anyone have any ideas?

 

Thanks in advance!

smcii-unraid-syslog-20161128-1104.zip

[trurl]

I don't use Limetech Sync, but when I used rsync to copy to my backup server, I noticed it would create all the folders before copying the files, and once the folders had been created the location of the files was already determined.

 

Maybe something like that is happening here.

 

[SmallwoodDR82]

hmm so I noticed the folder count going up much faster than the files getting created (obviously) but each empty folder kept going to disk1.

 

My understanding with allocation method was the unRAID OS would determine the appropriate disk on any file or folder creation.  Maybe its only any file?

 

Which is just as you stated.  When the empty folder goes to disk 1 it's already too late. 

[trurl]

The way I handled this was by going to the destination server and moving the empty folders to other drives before the files started getting copied into them. Sort of defeats the purpose of user shares though. For my use it wasn't that important since I only had a couple of user shares that were larger than one drive.

[SmallwoodDR82]

man that will be a pain in the butt.

 

I'm seeing some very odd folder allocation within the share also. 

 

These are lists of each movie folder.  Obviously the list is too long to show but here is a snapshot of a few of them.  Seems like Disk 1 is heavy used but other disks also? Split level seems to be doing odd things also.  I literally match my primary system settings to this system.  Like I said when the mover/cache was involved it worked fine. 

 

 

manually moving all this would be a massive PITA.

 

Thanks!

[trurl]

If the assigned disk sizes were the same in each server you could just copy disk to disk instead of getting user shares involved. I didn't do it that way because my backup server has smaller drives and doesn't backup everything.

[SmallwoodDR82]

that would be too easy

 

They are very different.