I have a pretty small array with 2 WD Scalibility 4TB drives and a WD Black 4TB drive. But it seems out of the two drives that are not being used as the Parity drive only the first in the array is being used up first which slows down the performance of the array when multiple users are accessing it via plex or otherwise. Is there something I am doing wrong?

 

Thanks!

You need to give more information such as how full the drives are and what settings you have for your shares before anyone can give any sensible advice.

unRAID is not RAID, writes are always to a single drive at a time (plus parity) based on the allocation method selected for that share, default is "high-water", in your case it means that it will only start writing to disk2 once disk1 is >50% full, you can change it to "most-free", this way it will write to both disks alternatively (split level permitting).

But note that high water is the default because it is a good compromise between spreading your files without having to constantly switch disks.

 

Can you divide up the way files are used? Such as some users are running plex and so need access to media, but other users are working on documents. If so you could have different user shares using different disks.

 

As johnnie said, unRAID is not RAID. There is no striping like you may be familiar with on RAID systems.

4 minutes ago, trurl said:

But note that high water is the default because it is a good compromise between spreading your files without having to constantly switch disks.

 

Correct, and I forgot to mention that the most-free setting will slow down writes to the array because of parity write overlaps caused by the constant disk switching.