This is just out of interest. I am just doing a parity check after doing some MAJOR changes on my unRaid box (set up Q parity, removed a redundant copy of all my media in favour of an offsite backup (finally!), and pulled some very old (7&8 years) drives) and it got me thinking about how my shares are set up on my disks.

 

I have 4 shares on the system: backup for our other machines, music, TV and movies; each share has specific disks assigned, but i'm starting to think there's no real need for it. Each time i add a disk, I have to assign it to a specific share, and keeping the free space distributed across the shares is a bit of work. I'm thinking I may assign the backups to one disk and let the other shares use all disks except the backup disk.

 

I have a feeling most of us are Option 2 like me because we're here because we are looking for organized solutions, and keeping clean control of what's on each disk is part of that, but let's see what's what.

 

Please comment below if there was any specific reason you do it a certain way.

 

EDIT.. this was supposed to go in the Lounge forum but I'm a but hungover... sorry 'bout that.

 

Happy New Year everyone - this one's gotta be better than the last.

I use the free-for-all option mainly because

 

- I've got way too much to even care whether or not I lose a particular episode / whatever in the event that I have a catastrophic failure of multiple disks at the same time.  I would probably never even notice the data lost

 

- In the event of a catastrophic multiple disk failure that affects the stuff that I would really rather not lose that I do NOT have backups of, my opinion is that I would rather lose some of the files instead of all of the files.  Relegating shares to specific disks does not give me that option.

 

- I am not so anal that waiting 5 seconds for the next episode to start playing because its not on the same disk as the first doesn't bother me.  Music is the only exception to this rule.  I do make sure that music is all stored on the same drives contained within the same spinup group

I hadn't even thought of the drive spin-up delay between episodes.... interesting.

My Music and Computer Backups (via Crashplan) are all on one disk.  Everything else is spread out on all other disks, but I do use split levels to keep all episodes of a TV Show on the same disk.  When I first started with unRaid, I had specific disks allocated for Movies, and for TV Shows, and it got to be too much of a hassle as disks filled up and I add new disks to my array.  So I eventually just removed all excluded/included disk settings except for the Music and Computer Backups shares.

My Music and Computer Backups (via Crashplan) are all on one disk.  Everything else is spread out on all other disks, but I do use split levels to keep all episodes of a TV Show on the same disk.  When I first started with unRaid, I had specific disks allocated for Movies, and for TV Shows, and it got to be too much of a hassle as disks filled up and I add new disks to my array.  So I eventually just removed all excluded/included disk settings except for the Music and Computer Backups shares.

 

That's where I'm at now... was there much to switching? I'm thinking I can jut change the settings, but I might have to shuffle a few files.

Free for all => UnRAID is designed to manage the use of its disks without the need for user involvement -- that's the whole point of the user shares -- so I let it do it 

 

Which specific disk something is on makes no difference ... when you access it it's transparent to you where it's coming from.  I DO use split levels to ensure that media files aren't split across disks, so, for example, a DVD playback isn't interrupted when switching to the next .VOB segment => but that's automatically managed by UnRAID as long as your split levels are set correctly.

 

I hadn't even thought of the drive spin-up delay between episodes.... interesting.

The whole reason split levels exists.