Shares and Allocation Method

[DigitalDivide]

As I'm making changes to my system I have a few more questions.

 

Right now my array mostly consists of blu-ray movies, music and photos.  When copying to the array I usually copy to an individual disk.  The reason I do so is so I know exactly what disk the a specific movie is on.  Why?  When using JRiver or Kodi, I point my movie to that specific drive rather than a share called Movies.  I figure that when I play a specific movie it will only spin up that drive.

 

Maybe I'm wrong  here, if I point to Movies in my library and it includes all disks, will all disks still spin up or just the one drive that movie is on? 

 

Last question, being most of my movies are blu-ray, each is about 25-30GB in size, could you give me a recommendation as to what to set the for the allocation method?  I did read the help, but to be honest not sure what would be the best settings.

 

Thanks

[Helmonder]

There is a plugin called "cachedirs" that will actually make sure that disks do not spin up at all untill you actually access a file.. So if you combine those you can have all your movies in the user share movies but only the disk the movie is really on will spin up when you play it..

 

Without cachedirs you are right, the system will spin up all associated disks to be able to show a directory listing.

[kizer]

I personally do exactly what you are doing. I put all my movies in folders like so.

Disk1/Movies/All/*

Disk2/Movies/All/*

Disk3/Movies/All/*

 

Movies is a Share I have on all 3 Drives. I have a couple of other folders under /Movies like /uploads and other various things, but all of the movies I want seen I put in the /All folder under /Movies I point Kodi which is my client and it sees one big drive with all 3 Drives as one.

Like mentioned I also use Cache_dirs so that way none of my drives spinup while looking for new content.

 

As well under shares I list Disk1-3. I just don't copy anything to user shares everything is done directly to disk shares.

[DigitalDivide]

Ok I'll take a look at the plugin.  How about the allocation method, split level?  What do you recommend for that?

[trurl]

Ok I'll take a look at the plugin.  How about the allocation method, split level?  What do you recommend for that?

The default allocation method of High-Water is a good compromise of using all the disks without constantly switching disks.

 

Split level depends on how you want things. The point of split level is to keep things together if they belong together, so another disk won't need to spin up to get to all of it.

 

For example, you might keep all the songs on an album together (if you still think of music that way like us old-timers) or you might keep all the shows from a TV Series season together so you can binge-watch without delay.

[DigitalDivide]

I'm going to preface this with a warning..lots of qeustions...

 

So, for my Movies, Music, Tv Shows, and Photos shares I should set them all to High Water Mark.  Then what about Minimum Free Space? For my Movies share, since each movie is on avg somewhere around 25GB, should the Min Free Space be set to 25GB?  I assume that would mean that the system would look for a drive that has a Movie share on it with at least 25GB free before writing.  Is that correct?

 

For my Photos and Music shares, the files are a lot smaller, Music is usually flac and about 40MB per song, where as my photos are even smaller.  Do I change the Minimum Free Space for those shares to those smaller sizes?

 

Still not sure how to read the Split Level, there are a lot of options there. 

 

If I want to keep all my albums together (I'm old enough to think of it that way as well) and my structure is

Music>Lana Del Rey>Honeymoon>songname.flac and I want to keep all songs together for a given album, is that Splitting using the Top Two option?  What happens if that drive is full and I copy a new Album to the Music share and Lana Del Rey folder?  Will the system now create another Music>Lana Del Rey folder on another drive and copy the new album there?

 

For Movies my folder structure Movies>Amadeus>Amadeus.mkv.

 

For TV Shows it's TV Shows>Game of Thrones>Season 1>Episodefile.mkv

 

 

[trurl]

Split level has precedence over minimum free and allocation method, so if you fill it up and it isn't supposed to split it the write will fail.

 

Min Free should be larger than the largest file you will ever write. It doesn't look for a disk that is large enough since it doesn't know how large the file will be. Instead it looks for a disk that has more than the minimum free on it. If a disk has more than the minimum free, then it will start writing to it until it writes the whole file or until it fails due to running out of space. After it has written the whole file, if the disk then has less than minimum free it won't choose it again. Except as already noted split has precedence, so it will still try to write any files that belong together to the same drive whether it is too full or not.

[DigitalDivide]

Ooohhh my head hurts.

 

How about this.  Does this make sense

Movies Share - High Water Mark, Minimum Free = 40GB

Movies Share - High Water Mark, Minimum Free = 50MB

TV Show Share - High Water Mark, Minimum Free = 12GB

Photos Share - High Water Mark, Minimum Free = 15MB

 

Still not sure what to select for Split Level for each of those shares...Any suggestions?  Also, can I set those values above even if I'm already copied data to my disks.  By change the the value from Fill Up to High Water Mark, it won't cause any issues with the data on my drives already will it?

[John_M]

What ever you set them to the changes will only affect future writes. Files already on the array disks won't be affected at all.

 

[lionelhutz]

No-one can suggest a split level setting unless you BOTH give the file structure you are using AND the sub-directory level where you want everything below to remain on a single drive.

 

For your music, you say Music\Artist\Album is the directory structure and you want Album to remain on a single disk. Well, this means Music and Artist can both split to multiple disks so the split level setting is 2.

 

The best allocation method can somewhat be dictated by the split level you use. For example, I keep each complete TV series on a single disk. So, I don't want a bunch of new series all being started on the same disk so that as new episodes come out the disk gets filled. So, I use most free to spread the new series around and start them where there is the most room for future expansion.

[Helmonder]

Ooohhh my head hurts.

 

How about this.  Does this make sense

Movies Share - High Water Mark, Minimum Free = 40GB

Movies Share - High Water Mark, Minimum Free = 50MB

TV Show Share - High Water Mark, Minimum Free = 12GB

Photos Share - High Water Mark, Minimum Free = 15MB

 

Still not sure what to select for Split Level for each of those shares...Any suggestions?  Also, can I set those values above even if I'm already copied data to my disks.  By change the the value from Fill Up to High Water Mark, it won't cause any issues with the data on my drives already will it?

 

The most important thing to remember is that it basically does not make a difference... There will be no difference in how you will view the data or how efficient your drives get filled.. From outside of the array it all looks the same. It becomes important when you are expecting to want to "rearrange" the data within the array. But there are not a lot of reasons to do so to be honoust..

 

One moment where you would need to do it is when you are actually shrinking your array (removing drives), this will make it necessaro to combine the data from two drives onto one and that sometimes can be a pain if data is split over a lot of drives..