setting up shares on unraid

[RobTi]

sorry for another unraid question, so i set up my shares after watching spaceinvader one video, but on Facebook i was advised to set it up as one share called data then go into win explorer and set up sub folders in this data share like data/media/movies or data/media/tv series and so on, what is recommended ?
Thanks
setup

 

[andy_mk3]

You can make a share called media for example in unraid, then make subfolders in windows for tv shows, films etc. There's no reason to have separate shares for each type of media. You just want to have different shares for different use cases, that way you can have settings for each share that suits the data. For example for your media share, you might want to be openly accessable on the network and not to use the cache drives. Then you may want a downloads share only accessable to certain users and to use the cache drives for initially downloading to, then mover will move that onto the array. Also you can have a share for your virtual machines or docker image where you can to keep that data on the cache only and not on the array, so it stays on SSD storage.

Hope that makes sense!

So my shares are something like so:

/data/media (Cache: Yes, SMB Share Public)
--/movies
--/tvshows
--/music

/data/downloads (Cache: Yes, SMB Share Public)
--/complete
--/incomplete

/data/backups (Cache: Yes, SMB Share Private)
--/desktop
--/laptop
--/unraid

/data/appdata (Cache: Only, SMB Share Private)
--/docker1
--/docker2

/data/vdisks (Cache: Only, SMB Share Private)
--/Windows 11
--/Uubuntu Server

 

[RobTi]

Thanks for your reply I also asked on the unraid forums and got roughly the same response as you they basically said either way was okay it was up to your usage. I still have my external back up so will pause transferring for the time being till I read some more
Thanks

 

[BigT]

As said, you can do what you like. However I think it is worthwhile reading the Split Level section on this wiki page to see if it influences how you want to do it. It uses a hypothetical media share as a worked example so very relevant.

Home | Unraid Docs

Unraid Documentation

wiki.unraid.net

Split certain ways and using different allocation mechanisms can save you spinning up hard drives if you are the type of person to binge on a boxset for example. Every little bit of energy saved helps in this day and age!!

 

[RobTi]

As said, you can do what you like. However I think it is worthwhile reading the Split Level section on this wiki page to see if it influences how you want to do it. It uses a hypothetical media share as a worked example so very relevant.

Home | Unraid Docs

Unraid Documentation

wiki.unraid.net

Split certain ways and using different allocation mechanisms can save you spinning up hard drives if you are the type of person to binge on a boxset for example. Every little bit of energy saved helps in this day and age!!

thanks atm i only have four 4Tb discs so set up one as parity and the others as an array, so decided that disc 4 will only be used for files and documents so excluded that from the other shares and have set up a media top share with folders below for the other two drives as this will only be for plex. i had a read of that and got confused, but liked the way you said about only spinning up the drive that's needed that was one of the reasons of coming from truenas to unraid