[kristisdad]

I would like to thank everybody for their assistance over the past year, this board has sure been some help.

Well now I'm stuck. Over the past year I have managed to get about 7 hdd's full of media, to the point it has clogged up my network, so in the past week I have built an unRaid server. It's all completed and I'm stuck on the settings. I want it optimized for XBMC, but everyone seems to pay attention to the build and glosses over the settings. Currently I have 2 shares, Movies and TV, and that's where it ends.

I think that the Allocation Method should be Highwater.

I think I should set the Min Free Space to 40000000 for my Movies shares, I don't do many Blu-Ray and I'm thinking maybe 15000000 for TV, but I question this because of large series like MASH or Matlock. Really these are just guesses on my part.

My guesses for Split Level for Movies would be 3 for Movies as my file structure is Movies>Movie(date)>movie.mkv and my Slit Level for TV would be 4 as my file structure is TV>Program>Seasons>Episodes.

Again these are only guesses on my part, my goal would be to keep my in such a way that XBMC don't have to hunt my entire array to play a movie or TV program. What would be my best bet?

I haven't even got to my Music yet...

[wsume99]

For allocation method I'd recommend Most Free. This will ensure that all your drives are filled evenly. Then set your min free space to be just larger than the largest single file you plan to write to the share. For movies 40000000 is reasonable and 15000000 is ok for TV shows if you have BluRay content.

Set your movies share split level to 1. This will force all contents of each Movie (date) folder to be on a single drive.

For TV you can use split level of 1 (this would force the whole series on a single disk) or 2 (this would force an entire season on a single disk). Anything 3 or above would allow the episodes to be scattered around on any disk. I prefer to have a series located on a single disk so my split level is set to 1.

edit - Not sure if your TV share has a Episodes folder or not. Not sure why you would have a folder for the episodes in a single season. Isn't that the purpose of the season folder?.

[kristisdad]

Thanks, wsume99, sounds reasonable to me. I have NO blu-ray in my TV, would you recommend leaving it at 15000000 just in case, or maybe splitting in half. I do not plan on adding any blu-ray.

[sgibbers17]

I would use high water as the allocation method, I left the min free space at the default 0.

http://lime-technology.com/wiki/index.ph...ion_method

"The high water allocation method attempts to step fill each disk so at the end of each step there is an equal free space left on each disk. The idea is to progressively fill each disk but not constantly go back and forth between disks each time new data is written to the array. Most times, only a single disk will be needed when writing a series of files to the array so the array will only spin-up the needed disk. The high water level is initially set equal to one-half of the size of the largest disk. A new high water level is again set to one-half of the previous high level once all the disks have less free space than the current high water level."

The only issue I could see if you left min free space at 0 you would start having issues then your disks start to get really full. All my disks are sitting at about 50% full and when they get to about 75% to 80% full I'll just through another disk in.

[bluesky2006]

I stopped using RAID array setups like unraid and flexraid after the latter cocked up a load of my data. Nothing is as good as regular 1:1 data backups in my opinion, although obviously the cost is greater as you need to double up each drive. But if your data's safety is a concern then the price is still better than a disk full if jumbled raid code.

That's just me tho, and I confess to not being an IT expert so no doubt I was in over my head on the first place!

[00b5]

I stopped using RAID array setups like unraid and flexraid after the latter cocked up a load of my data. Nothing is as good as regular 1:1 data backups in my opinion, although obviously the cost is greater as you need to double up each drive. But if your data's safety is a concern then the price is still better than a disk full if jumbled raid code.

That's just me tho, and I confess to not being an IT expert so no doubt I was in over my head on the first place!

Unraid is not a backup solution, it just adds one level of fault tolerance (so its just a little better than say, having a stack of hdds in your Win7 box).

Backups should be just that, backups, and 1:1 is the way to go. Having a second unraid machine to backup the first IS a backup, or at least copying the stuff you care about to an external drive and putting it somewhere else thats "safe".

Backups are as easy as 3,2,1

3 copies is a real backup (original and 2 copies)
2 of those copies should be on different things, ideally different physical/types of media (IE, don't store ALL your backups on CD/DVD that DO have a shelf life)
1 of those copies should be offsite, either online, or at least at someone elses house, your bank, etc.

Lastly, unraid just uses a linux file format, so even if the the entire system goes belly up, assuming your data isn't actually corrupt/hdd is bad/etc, you can just read the data off the hdd on another machine (though if thats a windows machine, it takes some effort)

[bluesky2006]

Yeah the issue was something to do with the system clock and for some reason that resulted in my computer erasing one of the drives, and FlexRAID failed to recreate it from the other two drives. The whole thing just felt shaky the whole time, as if one wrong variable could screw the whole thing up. Since then I switched from Ubuntu to Debian and to monthly 1:1 backups and i feel generally safer (none of my networked data is so important that I can't afford to lose a month in a worst case scenario).

But your right, unraid is not a backup, though I think it is misrepresented as one quite a bit.

[osli]

The whole purpose of being for unraid is to NOT have a jumble of raid code on each drive. Files are written as contiguous chunks in a standard format, readable on another machine even if you just pull one drive out of the array.

[noggin]

I stopped using RAID array setups like unraid and flexraid after the latter cocked up a load of my data. Nothing is as good as regular 1:1 data backups in my opinion, although obviously the cost is greater as you need to double up each drive. But if your data's safety is a concern then the price is still better than a disk full if jumbled raid code.

That's just me tho, and I confess to not being an IT expert so no doubt I was in over my head on the first place!

Key thing to remember about unRAID is that whilst it offers protection against a single failed drive (by using a parity drive), it stores data on the data drives using a standard Linux file format. This means if your array fails with more than one disk failure you can still read the data on all the other surviving drives outside the array. You never end up with a disk full of jumbled RAID code with unRAID, because it's not using anything non-standard on the data drives. All it does is add a parity drive to allow a single disk to fail, and the contents re-created from the other drives plus the parity drive (or if the parity drive fails, you can recreate that instead).

Many traditional RAID systems use formats that are unreadable outside the RAID system or if the array has failed, losing all of your data. Sure this is traded off against performance in unRAID (as striping contents across disk with RAID systems offers speed increases), but it's a major benefit of unRAID in my eyes.

[alexktz]

Does zfs offer any jbod recovery like unraid does? Or is it just jumbled raid code after your fault tolerance is exhausted?