As I get ready to copy all my data back to upgraded array of larger disks, I am of course contemplating how I have my shares/directories setup because now would obviously be the ideal time to make any desired changes.  Currently I have a good amount of User shares as follows:

 

Backups

Documents

Downloads (cache only)

DVR

Movies

Music

NVR

Software

Televsion

VMs (cache only)

 

I'm thinking of consolidating my shares down to the following:

 

Data

- Backups

- Documents

- NVR

- Software

Downloads

Media

- DVR

- Movies

- Music

- Television

VMs

 

What else would I be losing other than the granularity of being able to set permissions on each share?

Edited November 17, 20178 yr by IamSpartacus

I went through a similar exercise recently and I went for the more shares option e.g tv_shows_kids/ rather than media/tv_shows/kids as it made it easier for me to control split levels and spin up groups for noise purposes to minimise how many disks are spinning at one time e.g:

 

- disks 1,2 have only tv_shows_adults/ so only spin up at night when I'm not at the keyboard, and never during the day as new shows go to cache

- disk 3 has tv_shows_kids/ on.  My kids tend to flick around a lot so having one series per disk wasn't sufficient as otherwise they make all disks spin up!

- disk 3,4 has movies_kids/ on, so max two drives spin up when kids home

- disks 5,6 have movies_adults/ on, so again spins up only when not at keyboard

 

It's working well for me and it means even though I have an 7 drive (6+parity), i have total silence for 95% of the time I'm at the machine and then only 1-2 drives spin up.

One thing to consider is whether any of the old shares that are being consolidated to a single share currently have different split levels set .... when consolidated they will all have to use the same split levels.

6 hours ago, DZMM said:

I went through a similar exercise recently and I went for the more shares option e.g tv_shows_kids/ rather than media/tv_shows/kids as it made it easier for me to control split levels and spin up groups for noise purposes to minimise how many disks are spinning at one time e.g:

 

- disks 1,2 have only tv_shows_adults/ so only spin up at night when I'm not at the keyboard, and never during the day as new shows go to cache

- disk 3 has tv_shows_kids/ on.  My kids tend to flick around a lot so having one series per disk wasn't sufficient as otherwise they make all disks spin up!

- disk 3,4 has movies_kids/ on, so max two drives spin up when kids home

- disks 5,6 have movies_adults/ on, so again spins up only when not at keyboard

 

It's working well for me and it means even though I have an 7 drive (6+parity), i have total silence for 95% of the time I'm at the machine and then only 1-2 drives spin up.

 

Noise isn't an issue for me as my rack is in a different room that I can't hear from any of the bedrooms.  I wouldn't be able to keep say movies or TV shows on a single disk as I have over 40TB of data and my disks are 10TB each.  I also don't spin down my drives because there doesn't seem to be much merit to that other than the noise factor which I mentioned isn't really much of a concern.

 

 

22 minutes ago, remotevisitor said:

One thing to consider is whether any of the old shares that are being consolidated to a single share currently have different split levels set .... when consolidated they will all have to use the same split levels.

 

Yes that is a given.  One thing I'd like to do is cut down on the amount of mapped drives that show up for me in Windows.  If I can consolidate some shares I can map less drives and clean things up since you can't map the root share \\TOWER even though it's fully accessible through Windows explorer.

Disk 1 TV/Home Videos

Disk 2 TV/Home Videos

Disk 3 HD Movies

Disk 4 HD Movies

Disk 5 HD Movies

Disk 6 SD Movies

Disk 7 SD Movies

Disk 8 MP3', Downloads, ISO's, Dropbox Backup's, E-books, User Personal Folders, Photo Backups

 

SD Movies, because I purposely converted all my Movies to SD for iPads and whatnot to make it way easier to for Ipads and whatever. So whom ever in my house using Plex just points at that Library in Plex and my server just shrugs off the Trans-coding responsibility. Of course now that I have my Xeon online I'm starting to question the need, but no way I'm going to dump years of script writing and converting on a whim. Lol

 

2 hours ago, IamSpartacus said:

 

Noise isn't an issue for me as my rack is in a different room that I can't hear from any of the bedrooms.  I wouldn't be able to keep say movies or TV shows on a single disk as I have over 40TB of data and my disks are 10TB each.  I also don't spin down my drives because there doesn't seem to be much merit to that other than the noise factor which I mentioned isn't really much of a concern.

 

 

I guess back to your original question, if you're not worried about noise then the only drawback I can see is split-levels.

 

BTW I also have my movies split across disks - disks 3,4 for kids and 5,6 for adults with unRAID using high-water to decide where to add new movies to the shares

Yup split levels were a consideration for sure.  I haven't figured all the shares out yet but with regard to Media, all the sub-directories will use the same split level anyway so it works.

I do do data a similar way, but I would not combine my media into a single share. I have 12 user shares but only 6 are exported so they appear on the network.

26 minutes ago, lionelhutz said:

I do do data a similar way, but I would not combine my media into a single share. I have 12 user shares but only 6 are exported so they appear on the network.

I forgot to add that - having more shares allowed me to better control who sees what e.g. putting all movies together means my 4 year old might watch 'bride of chuckie' by mistake, or decide that the terminator sounds cool

14 minutes ago, DZMM said:

I forgot to add that - having more shares allowed me to better control who sees what e.g. putting all movies together means my 4 year old might watch 'bride of chuckie' by mistake, or decide that the terminator sounds cool

 

That's not an issue for me.  I just map the shares to my docker as /media/tv, /media/movies, etc. and then choose the correct directory for each folder in Plex/Emby.  Only certain libraries are shared with certain family members/friends.

It's really rather easy to re-organize shares. Do it via disk shares and just move the directories. Only takes seconds to drag and drop the directories on each disk.

 

I'm not sure why you actually map any shares in Windows. But if you want to get to Movies you have to click into it eventually so does it make much difference in accessibility if you click into My Computer\Media\Movies to get to the mapped drive or Network\Movies to get to the share?

25 minutes ago, lionelhutz said:

It's really rather easy to re-organize shares. Do it via disk shares and just move the directories. Only takes seconds to drag and drop the directories on each disk.

 

I'm not sure why you actually map any shares in Windows. But if you want to get to Movies you have to click into it eventually so does it make much difference in accessibility if you click into My Computer\Media\Movies to get to the mapped drive or Network\Movies to get to the share?

 

Everything I'm talking about is for ease, not for necessity.  I map drives in Windows per GPP (group policy preferences) because it just makes it easy for me to access them instead of having to type in the paths to Windows explorer.  And my OCDness is what drives me to limit the number of mapped drives to a more "manageable" number.