So far I have used the config page to set up my server and things have gone pretty smooth. I am at the point where I have added 2 data drives to the array (seagate 2tb total of 4tb of space) I have not assigned parity which will be my WD 2tb ears. The data drives show up in finder under tower as disk 1 and disk 2. So far I think I am where I should be. I believe I am ready to start assigning user shares. My first question, is it better to set up one share an name it media and then sub folders named pictures, videos, music? Or separate shares for each category? I think now would also be a good time to describe what I want to do with unraid or what I will use it for.

1) house digital media Example: pictures, family movies, gopro sports movies, music off cd's, ripped dvd's from my personal collection, tv shows.

2)run transmission for torrents

3) run an FTP server

4)Stream digital media to set top box, iphones, i pad, i pod touch.

5) Back up the Mac mini and the macbook pro possibly using time machine.

6) Rss or news groups using sickbeard and sinbadz? Although I haven't done any reading up on these two yet.

 

Right now  have a mix of windows and mac set up. The router is still set up for windows and I have the P4 machine running XP Pro. Eventually everything will be MAC.

 

I also have a WD blue 500gb 7200 rpm drive I was going to use as a cache drive but I am having second thoughts as my unraid box is sata. After I transfer all my media over I will really just have bits and pieces adding to the array, ie a eyefi card uploading pics like on Christmas and the torrent D/Ls, and the backups which shouldn't be that big once the first backup will be the biggest. Right now I only have a bout 1 to 1.5 tb of media to transfer not to include the back ups.

So should I cache or not. And for you all that have been there done that and set up may unraids how would u suggest I set up the user shares and which settings should I use. I have other questions but this will start me in the right direction. I will ask the other questions in the more appropriate forum/topics. Thank you to all who have written either add on software or the very detailed config guide. I would not hve gotten this far if it had not been for all of you. Sorry about the long post but hopefully there is enough info to help me make the right choice.

 

Thanks

Bags

Wow, you've got a lot of questions here, so let's take them one at a time.  As for your user shares, you can set them up however you like.  However, I would recommend that you configure one share for each of your major categories of data (as you've written: pictures, family movies, gopro sports movies, music off cd's, ripped dvd's from my personal collection, tv shows, etc.).  The reason I recommend this is that you can then assign different user permissions to each share as appropriate.  For example, say you have a share that contains your personal files and documents.  That share could be off limits to everyone except for you, whereas your media shares could be read-only or read-write for everyone as appropriate.  If you decide to use a cache drive, you can also disable the cache drive for critical data (family photos, movies, etc) and enable it for less critical data (ripped DVDs, etc).

 

Regarding the cache drive, first read this then let me know if you have any further questions.

 

Finally, I recommend using one of your Seagate drives as a cache drive and your WD EARS as a data.  The Seagates are marginally faster (5900 rpm instead of 5400 rpm), so in certain rare cases you'll see better write performance.  This is a minor thing, though, not a big deal if you've already assigned it the other way and don't want to mess with it.

 

Let's start with these and get to your other questions later.

Thanks for the answers. So the EARS drives are 5400 rpm? Just to be clear I have 2 x 2tb seagates the ones one sale recently, 1 WD 20EARS 2tb and 1 WD blue 500 gb 7200. You think I should use 1 of the Seagates as the Parity and everything else as data if I decide not to use a cache drive. um you are the man, I kind of got the impression the WD ears were the way to go. You did answer most of my other questions in the post.

In the movies share do I need to make separate shares of genre if I am going to use plex or xbmc?

In the movies share do I need to make separate shares of genre if I am going to use plex or xbmc?

I think Plex and XBMC don't care where you put your movies as long as you follow the naming standards and then it will download all the meta data based on that.

 

I do have different shares setup, but that's more for my own convenience. In Plex, I put them all into "Movies" so they will show up all together.

Yes, EARS drives are 5400 rpm, therefore slightly slower than the Seagate LPs at 5900 rpm.

 

XBMC will sort your movies by genre based on the data it pulls from IMDb or whatever other database you tell it to use.  No need to have separate shares for each genre.

 

As for all the Add-Ons that you want to run (torrents, FTP, etc), I would suggest searching the wiki first and the forums second for help.  I don't use any of them, so I can't really help you there.

I did not know what speed the WD drives were as it did not appear on their website. Maybe I should have picked up another seagate when I had the chance. Im sure it will still be fast wenough to stream blue rays. Thanks for you help.

Seagate is currently the only company that makes 5900 rpm drives.  All other green drives are 5400 rpm.

 

5400 rpm is still plenty fast enough to stream bluray, so no worries there.