Hi all

 

just set up unraid last night and really liking it, using 4.5.6

 

currently using the free version to see how it performs on my home network.

 

Parity is: Seagate 1.5TB SATA - cc71 firmware

Disk1 is: Samsung 1TB 7200rpm

Disk2 is: Seagate 500Gb 7200.12

 

i have created only 1 user share called "Media" through the Unraid Web Gui

 

and in the Media Folder i have manually created "TV", "Home Movies" and "Films" folders.

 

so here how it looks:

 

\\Media\TV\series name\Season1\seriesname1.avi

\\Media\Films

\\Media\Home Movies

 

id like to keep the Home Movie files and TV files on one disk as they have lots of split files, but would like to spread the Films folder across my array as they are all .mkv files so dont mind these splitting.

 

so what split level would i use? i take it i would have to create a separate user share for Films  and set that to split across the disks.

 

Also, File transfer speeds, ive searched and read alot about it.

 

i have a Gb network and my unraid server supports Gb and is currently running Gb speeds (ethtool eth0). with my parity disk unassigned, i can get and impressive 100MB/s transfer speeds through windows to the shares.

 

but with the parity assigned and synced (took 6 hours!) the speed goes down to about 30MB/s. would these speeds increase if i was to use a cache drive (pay for the plus version) and add another 1.5TB to the array

 

so i would :

 

Parity is: Seagate 1.5TB SATA - cc71 firmware

Disk1 is: Samsung 1TB 7200rpm

Cache is: Seagate 500Gb 7200.12

Disk2: Seagate 1.5TB SATA - cc71 firmware

 

Sorry for all the questions and thanks for looking

There is no split level number that will work correctly for what you ask. So, you can use split level 0 and then create the folder structure yourself or create a separate Films share.

 

Level 0 is described here;  http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=3760.0

 

Share the disks and go to each one and create the top level share folders you want on each one. Then, using 0 will force unRAID to put the data into those to level folders without creating new ones.

 

In other words, create directories something like this.

 

Disk1\\Media\TV

Disk1\\Media\Films

Disk1\\Media\Home Movies

 

Disk2\\Media\Films

 

In the long run though, you might be happier with 3 shares, one for each type of media. The only good reason I have read for a single share is using a media player that only supports a single network media location.

 

Yes, your transfer speed is typical and a cache disk would help speed it up to maybe 60Mps or for large files. Remember, you can transfer quicker to memory for a bit but then the final limit is the HDD speed and that 500gig probably isn't real quick.

 

Peter

Many thanks for the reply