How to access my shares from another computer on my network

[zprewitt]

Hi All!

 

First-time poster here. I'm rebuilding my Plex media server after a hard drive crash, and have decided to set up Unraid on my PC. I'll be reading the setup guide and doing a lot of research once my new hard drives arrive in the mail next week, but there's a couple of things I'd like more info on that I haven't been able to figure out via googling:

 

1)Will I be able to access my drives from my Mac (which will be on the same network as the Unraid box) so that I can transfer movies and episodes that I rip from my blu-ray collection? I imagine the answer is yes, but I'd like to know what the process is.

 

2) I'll be setting up a cache drive on a SSD and am unsure as to whether I should include my media drives in that cache, or just the apps I'll be using (SAB, Sonarr, etc). 

 

Thanks in advance!

 

Z

[wgstarks]

9 hours ago, zprewitt said:

Will I be able to access my drives from my Mac (which will be on the same network as the Unraid box) so that I can transfer movies and episodes that I rip from my blu-ray collection? I imagine the answer is yes, but I'd like to know what the process is.

Unraid is very flexible with regards to exactly what you want to share over your network. Typically you would create a share (example=media), specify what protocol is used for sharing (SMB, AFP or NFS) and define users that are allowed to access the share if you wish it to be secure. I set a static IP for my unraid server so to access the share I use smb://<static IP>/media for access from the finder Go menu (or command-k).

 

For a complete step-by-step check out the unraid 6 manual.

 

9 hours ago, zprewitt said:

) I'll be setting up a cache drive on a SSD and am unsure as to whether I should include my media drives in that cache, or just the apps I'll be using (SAB, Sonarr, etc). 

 

When I did my initial transfer of media it was fairly large (TB's), so I left the cache drive disabled until the transfer was complete to avoid issues with the cache drive over filling. After the initial transfer was complete I enabled caching to improve transfer speed. Writing directly to parity can be slow. Whether you use cache or not would probably depend on the size of your typical transfers and the size of your cache drive. There are plugins available now that allow tuning of mover settings and largely avoid any issues with cache size though. Again, make sure to check out the manual for configuring cache settings. Some people are confused by the terminology used in the settings.

[zprewitt]

On 8/24/2018 at 7:30 AM, wgstarks said:

When I did my initial transfer of media it was fairly large (TB's), so I left the cache drive disabled until the transfer was complete to avoid issues with the cache drive over filling. After the initial transfer was complete I enabled caching to improve transfer speed. Writing directly to parity can be slow. Whether you use cache or not would probably depend on the size of your typical transfers and the size of your cache drive. There are plugins available now that allow tuning of mover settings and largely avoid any issues with cache size though. Again, make sure to check out the manual for configuring cache settings. Some people are confused by the terminology used in the settings.

 

I use Sonarr and Radarr to download my movies and episodes. It's hard to nail down how many gigs of media I download on a daily basis, but my episodes range from 2-4 gigs and my movies can get big, up to 25 gigs for 1080p rips and 50 gigs for 4K rips. I have a 128GB SSD that I would be using for the cache drive. What would the performance difference be for, say, one of the big rips? Would I be waiting 5, 10 minutes longer without a cache drive?

[Squid]

13 minutes ago, zprewitt said:

Would I be waiting 5, 10 minutes longer without a cache drive?

Its the unpacking / repairing that will significantly add to the time without a cache drive.  What many (most) people do is forget about caching the actual media shares, as the copy time to it isn't particularly long, but use the cache drive instead for the downloads share (incompletes)

[zprewitt]

7 minutes ago, Squid said:

Its the unpacking / repairing that will significantly add to the time without a cache drive.  What many (most) people do is forget about caching the actual media shares, as the copy time to it isn't particularly long, but use the cache drive instead for the downloads share (incompletes)

 

Perfect, thanks so much!