I know the main benefit to having different shares instead of one main share with sub folders is that you can define different options. Outside of that, do many people think it is better to just go with one share in the end? 

26 minutes ago, Simontv said:

Outside of that, do many people think it is better to just go with one share in the end? 

 

That "outside of that" is really the whole point, and I would say almost no one has just a single user share. I guess I can see doing it that way if you don't ever intend to have a cache drive. But of course any of your dockers and VMs will suffer if forced to use parity-protected storage.

 

If you intend to run dockers and VMs, you will want user shares with different options for those. Possibly it would make sense to have a single user share for everything else, with no network access to those user shares set aside for dockers and VMs. Do you know much about those "options"? There is help in the webUI for most things.

 

I do know of some who don't do user shares at all, preferring to manage each disk instead. But I think it is easier and more versatile to have user shares, and restrict the disks each will use if you want to do that for some reason.

1 hour ago, Simontv said:

Outside of that, do many people think it is better to just go with one share in the end?

 

It really depends on what you want to achieve and, of course, everyone is different. I don't have just one share but I don't have many. If you ignore 'system', 'appdata', 'domains' and any other user shares that I don't export, I only have two that are available outside of the server. One is a private share, for my own files and one is a public share, for everything else. Some people have a share for movies, a share for TV shows, a share for photographs, a share for music, etc. I san see why that might be useful if they want to apply different split levels to the different types of media, but I don't do that. It's really up to you to decide what best suits your needs.

7 minutes ago, John_M said:

I san see why that might be useful if they want to apply different split levels to the different types of media, but I don't do that.

 

Another reason for special media shares is that these shares are often used with media players - and the credentials used for the media players should have limited access since it's hard to know the actual security level of the media player. The media players just might have huge back doors that haven't been found yet.

2 minutes ago, pwm said:

Another reason for special media shares is that these shares are often used with media players

 

Yes, I can see that as a valid reason. I only use Plex, which provides a unified interface for all my media types.