Hey there
I'm about to setup my first unraid server and I have a question
In fill-up method it says that you should set min free space a little more than your biggest file
What if my files are about 50 GB but a folder size for a TV show is bigger than that at about 500 GB
What should I set my min free space to?
100 GB or 600 GB

and if i set it 100 GB does it mean that for example for a TV show half of the season would be on one drive and the other half would be on the next drive?

thank you

The Minimum free space setting applies to individual files, not the total size of the content of a folder.

 

in your example the folder contents would end up spilt across two drives as Unraid would switch to using the other drive for further files once the free space dropped below the minimum free space.

Your question seems to be related to Split Level. Split Level overrides Minimum Free so if your Split Level is trying to keep those TV Shows together then it will keep writing to the same disk despite Minimum Free.

 

So, you can set a large Minimum to get the whole TV Show on the same disk. Once the disk goes below Minimum the TV Show will keep going to that disk according to Split Level, but other things in the share will go to other disks.

 

Note that Split Level can make you overfill a disk if everything in the split will not fit.

Thank you all 

That was very helpful

For initial setup I'd use the most free allocation method and set the split level to 1 or only split the top level. That way, each new series will start on the most empty disk so it has the most room to grow but it will all stay together on that disk. I've used that setup for years and it's worked well. Only had a disk run low on space a couple of times and require manual intervention.