I am sorry to bring up the user share and split level discussion but I would like to reflect on my personal situation. I have created a user share "Video" with the split setting set at 2 and 20GB of minimum free space and using the most-free allocation method.

 

My user share is organized this way:

 

Video/-Movies/--Movie A

      -- Movie B

      --Movie C

        - TV Shows/--TV show A/--- Season 1

    --- Season 2

    --- Season 3

-- TV show B

-- TV show C

 

I'm at version 4.5 and using Unraid for almost one year now and I'm a happy user.  When setting up my server the first time I was making sure to create user shares and setting the split level correctly right from the start. Unfortunately, I see my files scattered all around my 5 disks.  Some of my movies are spanned across 3 drives, the mkv, the nfo and the fanart pictures.  This is something I wanted to avoid from the beginning. I like when everything is neat and bundled together. I'm at the point now where I'm manually moving content around, basically doing the work I trusted Unraid to do.

 

Another thing I mentioned is that Unraid is stubbornly creating folders with some episodes of a TV Show under disk1-4 (which have like 20-30GB of free space) while I manually created the folder for that TV show on disk5 that has 800GB of free space. How is this in line with the most-free allocation method?

 

Lastly, the 20GB minimum space rule is constantly being broken on disks 1-3. I'm moving stuff around myself to achieve this.

 

Is there an easy way to see which directories are spread across several disks?

 

The thing I would like to see improved over time is exactly how the content in user shares is being spanned across disks. There should be some way of active monitoring, when for example the split level is changed or when minimum space threshold is crossed, the server moves content around itself from disk to disk, ensuring that directories that should not be spanned across disks will not be.

 

I have an idea, not automated - but maybe preferable for the sake of control, that could help users achieve keeping their folder structure neat.  The concept is that users would get a tree structure of their user shares (like in windows explorer) and next to every directory and subdirectory a calculation of the space available for that directory if you want it to remain on the same physical disk. Knowing for example you only have 5 GB left for season 5 which you just started filling with 720p bluray rips is needed because sooner or later it will span across 2 disks. You could select the option to move it to another disk which has the available space you think you need. You could switch on the automatic pilot by setting the minimum free space for this folder before being moved by unraid itself to another disk.

 

This would be an analysis tool for existing users to detect which folders are spanned across different disk as the disk number would appear next to each directory as well. Users would get an idea of the fragmentation of their directories/files.

 

Sorry for the long post, I hope I am expressing myself clear.

Try using high water and see if it works better. I tried the "fill-up" I believe it was called and that did not work.

 

Or else use split level 0 and then create the folder structure yourself. Described here;  http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=3760.0

 

Your structure doesn't really properly allow a split level to be used. It sounds lik you want 2 for the movies but 3 or 4 for the TV shows.

 

Peter

Thanks for the answer. I created a new user share for my TV shows and am copying all my content to it. I have set it at high water, split level 2 and I see that the files are being allocated correctly.

 

I will be reorganizing my movies as well. I will rename the Video share in Movies and move all the content one level up. I will go from Videos/Movies/Movie A to Movies/Movie A. A split level of 1 should keep all the individual movie related files on one disk, right?

Everything you're doing sounds good.

 

Your TV structure will keep each season together.

Your movie structure will keep each movie together.

 

FYI, fill up for me ignored my split level setting. High water seems to recognize the split level correctly though so that's why I recommend sticking to it.

 

Peter