What would cause Unraid to allow a drive to fill up to an errored state when other drives are available and working?

[kennelfort]

Hey folks,

I'm a bit of a novice, but I've managed to get my Unraid system up and running pretty well with help from you all.

Unfortunately I'm now seeing something that I just don't understand.

 

I got an Unraid error this morning that Disk1 was 100% full. There are 10 disks in my system (including the parity drive).

 

Disks 2-5 each have about half TB free.

Disks 6 & 7 have about 4 TB free each.

Disks 8 & 9 are both empty.

 

Is there a threshold I can set that prevents Disk1 from hitting a state that yields this Unraid error?

Is this something I should just ignore?

[Squid]

Split Levels, Share Include settings, Allocation Method, Share Min Free settings.

[kennelfort]

Ok. 

 

My Min. Free was set to 0, so I bumped it to 50GB. I did the same for all the other shares except appdata which I set to 10GB.

 

Anything else look amiss? 

 

 

 

 

 

[Frank1940]

You might want to start by reading this:

 

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

 

You should particularly  read the section on Split level.  Even when everything else is set up correctly, this one can still force the system to try to put files on a full drive.

 

[kennelfort]

15 hours ago, Frank1940 said:

You might want to start by reading this:

 

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

 

You should particularly  read the section on Split level.  Even when everything else is set up correctly, this one can still force the system to try to put files on a full drive.

 

You know, I remember reading this page when I first set up my server nearly a year ago, but most of it was Greek to me. Reading through it again now I can understand a LOT more of it. Thanks for reminding me this exists. Sometimes the old adages are correct: RTFM. 🙂

[Frank1940]

I almost hate to see people using  Split level   as eventually, they will either violate the split level parameters they used when they set it up or they had set it up wrong to begin with.  With the tremendous storage capacity of the hard drives that many people are using today, Split levels are virtually unneeded. If they set it up wrong, it will probably months to years when the first problem shows up and they will have forgotten they ever even used the setting. 

 

And furthermore, what are the odds that the .VOB files of 9GB (max) DVD are going to be split across two 12TB drives? And even if it does happen, the only result will be that the video will freeze for a few seconds until the second drive can get spun up.

Edited April 28, 2020 by Frank1940

[testdasi]

If you use High Water allocation, there's basically no need to set split level (i.e. split everything) cuz it's exactly like what Frank said.

 

If you use Most Free for media storage then you do need to pay attention to split level, otherwise almost all accompanying files (or at least a large proportion of them) will be on a different drive.

[trurl]

And the thing to remember about Minimum Free. Unraid has no way to know in advance how large a file will become when it chooses a disk to write. If a disk has more than Minimum, the disk can be chosen, and if the file is too large for the remaining space, it will fill until it errors.

 

The usual recommendation is to set Minimum larger than the largest file you expect to write to the user share.

 

Note that this doesn't mean the space will never be used. If you set Minimum to 50G, the disk still has 60G free, it can be chosen. If you then write a 40G file to it, it will only have 20G after that, so some of that space was used. But the disk won't be chosen again since it no longer has more than Minimum.

 

Also remember that Split Level has precedence. I always user Highwater and let it split anything, since the only consequence of splitting is a slight delay while another disk spins up. Basically same points testdasi and Frank1940 made.