For those of you who store your TV show metadata with your media files, how do you handle split level?  There is general TV show metadata that gets stored at the series level and then there is season data that gets stored in each individual season folder.  Right now I have my split level set to 3 but I'm seeing the metadata data for a single season of a series being spread across multiple disks which is not ideal.

I use 1 for TV so the whole TV series in on a disk. But, at most you could use 2 so that a season of episodes plus the season metadata all remains on a single disk. The series metadata could still end up wherever though.

15 minutes ago, lionelhutz said:

I use 1 for TV so the whole TV series in on a disk. But, at most you could use 2 so that a season of episodes plus the season metadata all remains on a single disk. The series metadata could still end up wherever though.

 

Yea that's the dilemma.  I want to keep the metadata all together but it's just not possible unless I go with a split level of 1.  But with that, I wind up with very large series' filling up a single disk faster than I'd like.

There is the option of setting the split level to manual. This actually means that once a directory is created it won't split.  This means you'd have to create a series directory on multiple disks if you want it to split a season to a new disk. You'd have to create a new season folder on another disk if you want a season to split to that disk. This means that unRAID can place the directory on an initial disk automatically but gives you the ability to split the the directory if you so chose.

 

Still, it's not hard to transfer series between disks if it's required. You can even use a plugin to do it. Use most free as the allocation method so new series will always start on the drive with the most free space to begin with. Doing this, I don't have to shift files around very often. I don't even think I do it once a year. I do keep a fair bit of free space on my server. Right now, my TV drives are all >700G free. Trying to keep series all together with mostly full disks can be tricky since a disk can end up completely full if you mostly fill it and then attempt to write a new season to it,.

 

I have over 250 Series' so that would be quite the manual process.  I think I'm just going to stick with keeping all the seasons of a series on one disk and just use the unbalance plug in for those time that one series is filling up a disk disproportionately. 

I put all seasons in the same disk. If you have 250 series, if you set "Most Free" distribution then should not be needing unBalance. It should distribute quite evenly.

20 minutes ago, testdasi said:

I put all seasons in the same disk. If you have 250 series, if you set "Most Free" distribution then should not be needing unBalance. It should distribute quite evenly.

 

It will for the most part.  The one downside is that since an entire series stays on one disk, if that series grows to say 10+ seasons, that disk's space will get eaten up fast.  I've d that happen where a certain disk had a lot of "active" shows and thus it was getting filled up disproportionately compared to others.  It's just something I need to monitor every now and again.