Hello Everyone,

 

Although I have been using UNRAID for several years with no major issues using all the default settings, it is time to build a newer faster server and upgrade.

 

My setup is a i7 4790k and with a Asus MB and 6 x4TB drives and 1x1TB SSD Cache drive.

 

My question is this.   By trade I am a Network Engineer and I always tend to over think things.  I primarly use UNRAID  for my Plex server to serve my family and friends.   While thining about the best way to setup my shares I have completed confused myself.   My first thought was Option 1 which was to setup a share for each folder and only assigning it to 2 drives.  Example TV Shows would be a share only using disk 1 and disk 2 and/or Disk 3.  Movies would be another share using Disk 4 and Disk 5.  My biggest confusing now is what Split level would be best for performance. 

 

My Option 2 was to create 1 share called "Shares" and assigned it to use all the drives.  In This share create the Sub folders such as Movies, TV shows and so on.  At this point again trying to find what Split Level would fill the drives equally but also keep files together without speading them apart is my confusion.

 

 

My main goal is figure out how to setup UNRAID shares so that my performance is at it's highest while both movies and tv showes are bein streamed.  Which is why I considered doing seperate shares. however when I have to move files between shares this takes longer.  

 

So I would love to hear others opinions on what they recommend and which split level and Allocation medthod is recommended for this setup for the fastest read and write times.

 

Thanks in advance.

 

 

Dont worry about that. While Streaming, the HDDs read just a few MB/s.

I did a Test with 6 transcoded Streams @1080p/12MBit on "one" Disk and there is no performance problem at all.

Calculation: 6x12Mbit = 72Mbit or 9MB/s - a modern HDD can read about 130-180MB/s.

The same test done with Direct streams gave me ~180MBit or 22,5MB/s - thats also nothing for the Disk - The disc laughed at me

Next point for performance: The Plex client caches ~5% of the Stream which is played, so you have a fairly large "puffer" - enouth time for the Disk to find

the content and sent it to the client(s).

 

I have only 2 shares: Movies and TV-Shows set to all HDDs - thats it.

Unraid take care that a Movie or a TV-Show will be always stored completely on "one" Disk so the files itself will never be splited.

But what i did with my TV-Shows, i splited seasons to different Disks.

 

Season 1 ... Disk 1

Season 2 ... Disk 2 and so on

 

My Movies share is devided into sub-categories like Action, Thriller, Horror and so on - also spread over the whole array and there were never a

performance problem at all, even with 8 concurrent streams.

Edited October 12, 20178 yr by Zonediver

Thanks for the reply.  So what split level and allocation method are you using for your shares?

I dont really use a split level - i deside by myself, to which Disk the files are going so i dynamicly change the affiliation of the Disks to my shares.

At the moment, i send all my TV-shows do disk 4 and all Movies to disk 10 because both are the most empty disk.

Edited October 12, 20178 yr by Zonediver