August 24, 20178 yr I'm at a crossroads where I have enough free space to migrate to Split Levels for my media. I read the help, I understand what it does and how it works. Question I'm asking myself is should I? So I'm asking anyone out there who's done it, whether they do today or they have in the past, what was your experience? Why am I even considering it? I already have each media type as it's own individual share. Each share has a common folder structure that supports split level as described in the help section. Each share I've also always used the 'Included Disks' option, so each share has it's own pool of disks. When I had less than 4 drives in a share, I used to manually try to move directories among those 4 drives to be in alphabetical range on the same disk (ex: directory started with the letter # - F would go on disk 1, G - P on disk 2.... but after awhile my OCD habits moved on to new things. De-duplication was the main reason I did that, and now I just use tools to find dupes. The benefits Split Level as I understand it are: Organization of common directories and their sub directory and files within a physical disk -- but to what value does this bring beyond that? 0 value! Disk spin-up of all disks of that same share are going to spin up during a media scan of the library + Value! If you're watching media that spans multiple files, like Music or TV, you may save one or more spin ups if that Season or Album is spread across disks + Value! Duplication of data is less likely, or rather more easily identifiable What negatives does it bring? Complexity -- Ok it's really not much complexity, but it still is adding an additional layer of logic Reduced efficiency of maximum space utilization? Maybe this is not true... This is really caused by me using the 'Include Disks' to limit the same media type to the same disks. Should I stop doing that if I switch to Split Level? I'm not seeing much else?? Is there? Have you tried it, are you using it now? Would you do it again? What's your thoughts?
August 24, 20178 yr I used to have my Videos sorted By share's, but I would copy files to "The Disk I wanted them on" via Disk Shares. After a while I'd guess 3 or 4 years of it I decided I would simply just copy files to Shares and let unRAID deal with it. So glad I did because its so much easier just dumping files to my SSD and magically they are whisked away to where ever they end up. Of course sometimes I'll mess around in Shares via the GUI and happen to find a stray folder that has files listed on two drives, but its pretty easy to use MC to merge them. I do a lot of Ripping of Videos from Large format to a lower format so I have Duel copies in my house for HD players and SD players so as you can see it gets rather cumbersome to manually do things when I can simply use User.Scripts and shares to manage where my files go and since I'm often ripping to a SSD it just works out perfectly. Here is my current layout. -Parity -Disk 1 TV -Disk2 TV -Disk3 HD Movies -Disk4 HD Movies -Disk5 HD Movies -Disk6 SD Movies -Disk7 SD Movies -Disk8 Everything else -SSD -USB Drive via Unassigned Devices for system backups I use Cache_disk to limit multiple Drive spin ups and typically the only thing that is spun up is my SSD drive or a source drive that I'm batch pulling files from to do some ripping. My 8 Year old loves Plex so he has a way of keeping my SD drives spun up because for the life of me he can't start a movie and actually finish it without scrubbing through the video and then changing to 5 other Movies within an hours time. Lol I'd set your remaining space as low as possible according with the largest file you plan on storing on each disk so it can maximize space on each drive and not freak out like I used to worrying about how much space I had on each drive when between 3 drives I'd easily have a TeraByte. Personally and I do mean personally I would not store stuff in folders by Letter. You will end up moving letters around and drive yourself a bit Mad in the end unless your OCD simply can't do it any other way.
August 24, 20178 yr 46 minutes ago, kizer said: I have Duel copies Do they fight to the death? Best file wins?
August 24, 20178 yr I would do it, in fact I'm not sure I'd be willing to do without split level. I have the following setup: Movies - Split at top level TV - Split top two levels This means that each season of a show can be on a different drive, which really helps pack data onto drives as you don't have to figure out which shows are "Active" and will need more space when you have disks that are nearly full. A much safer way for those with automatic media additions (NZBGet, Sonarr, Radarr).
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