Maybe I'm confused

[Keebler]

So I am new to Unraid and have been using it since around December 1 or so. What I'm confused about is that I thought the data was divided up amongst the array.

 

All the shares are set to use all the disks but it seems that it fills one disk half way then starts filling another disk instead of evenly through the array. Is it supposed to do this?

 

 

[JorgeB]

Depends on the allocation method select, default is high water.

https://wiki.unraid.net/Un-Official_UnRAID_Manual#High_Water

[Frank1940]

3 hours ago, Keebler said:

What I'm confused about is that I thought the data was divided up amongst the array.

Assuming you are using the default (High Water), this method of loading the data is much more advantageous than scattering the data evenly across all of the drives.  Let's take the case of a data backup on a certain date.   The backup has more than a 3000 files in it and requires 10GB of store space. 

 

Now, at some future point , you want to retrieve some of those files from that backup.  Using High Water, the odds are that all of the files on one disk.  So you only have to spin up one disk rather than wait for every data disk in the array to spin up.  (And I might add, it seems like the disks as spun-up sequentially, not all at once!)    In fact, a few years ago, a problem of splitting   .VOB   DVD video files onto separate disks prompted the introduce of the split-level setting which forces saves to a single disk.

[Keebler]

I am using High Water. Thanks for explaining it as it makes sense now.