[wsume99]

So I set the split-level on those shares to 1, and then each bluray, each directory with movie/subtitles, and each single file movie will never span across disks, correct?

Exactly.

It seems like setting everything to split-level 1 will work well for movies of any type, although there will be some efficiency lost with large files not always able to perfectly fill a disk. Is this an accurate assessment?

Yes. I'm assuming that you set the min free space value so that it is larger that the largest size movie you would ever copy to that share. For example I think mine is set to 30000000 (which would be 30GB). Basically I'm left with 30GB of free space on a 2TB disk, so at full capacity my disk would be 98.5% full.

I was thinking for other misc shares I will simply set the split level high and let the system spread them out. Then these smaller files will fill gaps and get back some of that lost efficiency, correct?

That should work as long as you set your min free space value to an appropriate size based on the largest file size anticipated for the different categories of shares. If you don't setup a min free space value then eventually you will get an error when trying to write a file to the server because unRAID will try to write a file to a disk that does not have enough space. The point at which you would encounter this type of error would depend on the fill-up method you employ and how much free space you have on your array. It is possible that as long as you have a reasonable amount of free space on the array you would never get that error. Hopefully that is not confusing.

[javier911]

Yes. I'm assuming that you set the min free space value so that it is larger that the largest size movie you would ever copy to that share. For example I think mine is set to 30000000 (which would be 30GB). Basically I'm left with 30GB of free space on a 2TB disk, so at full capacity my disk would be 98.5% full.

That should work as long as you set your min free space value to an appropriate size based on the largest file size anticipated for the different categories of shares. If you don't setup a min free space value then eventually you will get an error when trying to write a file to the server because unRAID will try to write a file to a disk that does not have enough space. The point at which you would encounter this type of error would depend on the fill-up method you employ and how much free space you have on your array. It is possible that as long as you have a reasonable amount of free space on the array you would never get that error. Hopefully that is not confusing.

Thanks and I'm glad I posted because I never thought about min free space. I think I understand the issue, split-level 1 means a directory being written to the array cannot span disks, therefore there must be at least one disk with enough free space to hold that entire directory.

I can only imagine this possibly becoming a problem with bluray since they can get up to around 50GB. I have some in collections, I'll just have to sep into individual discs otherwise the min free would have to be ridiculous.

I'm trying to be very careful in planning this out so I don't screw myself way down the road when it would become a nightmare, but I guess I should prob jump in now and get started. I guess worst case in the future I end up with a full but not so efficient array and have to prematurely buy another hdd to keep it going.