Re: What is Unraid and how to build an Unraid media server
Posted: Mon Jan 27, 2020 8:05 pm
Hi Litlgi74, welcome. Glad to hear you are interested in Unraid, it's a great solution. You've asked some very good questions, and I'll do my best to provide good answers. Sorry in advance, this is going to be a long one...
I primarily use ISO rips, except for TV Series where I primarily use Folder rips. But as the developer of CMC, I have to maintain examples of all media types for development and testing, so I have both movies and TV Series as ISO, Folder, and encoded like MKV.
In general, I do not find that the media type affects my shares so much. Rather, it is the file size that I worry about most, and that is what I factor into my share settings.
First, I find several benefits of splitting my media across multiple shares:
You can think of split levels like this \\Server\Share\Level1\Level2\Level3\Level4. So with a split level of 2, you could have
Which brings us to the minimum free space settings.
Let's say I have a Blu-ray movie box set with 4 discs (crazy, but possible), and I rip all 4 discs to the same folder in my Blu-rays share, i.e. \\Tower\Blu-rays\4Disc_BR_Movie. As I rip them, they all go to my cache drive for the time being, so they actually exist at \\Tower\cache\Blu-rays\4Disc_BR_Movie.
I also rip another 1 disc Blu-ray movie, and that ISO is a large 47 GB rip.
Then in the middle of the night (or earlier if I invoke the Mover manually) the Mover moves the folder 4Disc_BR_Movie from cache to the main array share. Before moving that folder, it will look for the first HDD that has at least 180 GB free. Let's say it finds disk 12 has 195 GB, and moves it there.
Now, each of these 4 Blu-rays happened to be fairly large, around 42GB each. 42 GB x 4 = 168GB. After the move, my disk 12 now has 27 GB free. While that 180 GB min free space seemed really high a few minutes ago, now it seemed like it was barely enough. At this point, the next Blu-ray movie folder to copy, that second 47 GB rip, has to find a new disk, because disk 12 no longer has at least 180 GB free.
Now let's think about this another way - what if I had set my Blu-rays min free space to 50GB - after all, that should be large enough for any single rip, right? But my 4Disc_BR_Movie has 4 discs inside of it, and the split level is set to 1 (which means that the folder will NOT split). The Move kicks in to move that folder from the cache to the array, but this time it finds 86 GB free on disk 4, so it copies there instead. The first two ISO's, being a collective 84 GB, move fine, but then the third one fails when disk space runs out, because I'm trying to movie a 168 GB folder to a disk with only 86 GB free.
So my sizing logic is this: for DVD's, Blu-rays, and 4K, how many discs do I think might be in a single folder, and how much free space do I want left over as a safety net? For Blu-rays, I typically don't expect more than 3 or 4 ever in a single folder (for a box set, perhaps something like Indiana Jones, Lethal Weapon, etc.), so I take an above average size (i.e. 45 GB) x 4, or around 180 GB.
For 4K, I have so few of these (expensive), and typically not box sets, so I have it set to 100GB, which is the max possible size of any 1 4K disc (very rare, most are 75GB or less).
For DVD's, I went higher than 4x 8.5 GB (34GB) as that was getting uncomfortably low on space to me. So I just rounded up to 60 GB (or around 7 discs).
For TV Series, I have DVD, Blu-ray and 4K all mixed together, so I don't really have a 1 size fits all. Instead, what I do is occasionally adjust the min free space setting before doing a rip, especially if I am doing a multi-disc 4K TV series. That's one of the nice things about Unraid, you can change the min free space anytime, and you don't even have to stop the array.
I also might adjust the min free space setting on the other shares too, as needed. For example, if I am ripping something like the 8-disc Harry Potter series on Blu-ray, I'd probably crank up the min free space to 360 GB, then drop it back down to 180GB after the next mover run.
My ultimate goal with the min free space is to be able to rip a disc and not have to worry about the mover failing because a HDD ran out of space during a move. I'd rather have 179 GB of free-space go un-used than to have a folder move fail.
Every so often, when I see a disk gets below the lowest threshold (i.e. 60GB for DVD's), then I start manually ripping straight to a disk, bypassing the share and the cache. For example, say I have 20 GB free on disk 3, I might rip 3 or 4 DVD's, carefully chosen to use up around 18 GB, to \\Tower\disk3\DVD's\. That allows me to fill up and use every last nook and cranny.
Hope that helps.
Paul
I primarily use ISO rips, except for TV Series where I primarily use Folder rips. But as the developer of CMC, I have to maintain examples of all media types for development and testing, so I have both movies and TV Series as ISO, Folder, and encoded like MKV.
In general, I do not find that the media type affects my shares so much. Rather, it is the file size that I worry about most, and that is what I factor into my share settings.
First, I find several benefits of splitting my media across multiple shares:
- I find it quicker to navigate to what I'm looking for when browsing the directories
- It helps identify My Movies folder monitoring mistakes (i.e. Movie 'XYZ' identified as Blu-ray, but stored in \\Tower\DVDs\XYZ)
- I can use a different split level for TV Series (Automatically split top 2 levels, vs. top 1 level for 4K/Blu-rays/DVDs)
- I can configure different minimum free-space for each disc type (except TV Series), making it easier to fill up without issues
You can think of split levels like this \\Server\Share\Level1\Level2\Level3\Level4. So with a split level of 2, you could have
- \\Server\disk1\Elementary\Season 1
- \\Server\disk2\Elementary\Season 2
Which brings us to the minimum free space settings.
- For DVD's, I have minimum free space set to 60GB
- For Blu-rays, I have minimum free space set to 180GB
- For UHD, I have minimum free space set to 100GB
- For TV Series, I have minimum free space set to 100GB
Let's say I have a Blu-ray movie box set with 4 discs (crazy, but possible), and I rip all 4 discs to the same folder in my Blu-rays share, i.e. \\Tower\Blu-rays\4Disc_BR_Movie. As I rip them, they all go to my cache drive for the time being, so they actually exist at \\Tower\cache\Blu-rays\4Disc_BR_Movie.
I also rip another 1 disc Blu-ray movie, and that ISO is a large 47 GB rip.
Then in the middle of the night (or earlier if I invoke the Mover manually) the Mover moves the folder 4Disc_BR_Movie from cache to the main array share. Before moving that folder, it will look for the first HDD that has at least 180 GB free. Let's say it finds disk 12 has 195 GB, and moves it there.
Now, each of these 4 Blu-rays happened to be fairly large, around 42GB each. 42 GB x 4 = 168GB. After the move, my disk 12 now has 27 GB free. While that 180 GB min free space seemed really high a few minutes ago, now it seemed like it was barely enough. At this point, the next Blu-ray movie folder to copy, that second 47 GB rip, has to find a new disk, because disk 12 no longer has at least 180 GB free.
Now let's think about this another way - what if I had set my Blu-rays min free space to 50GB - after all, that should be large enough for any single rip, right? But my 4Disc_BR_Movie has 4 discs inside of it, and the split level is set to 1 (which means that the folder will NOT split). The Move kicks in to move that folder from the cache to the array, but this time it finds 86 GB free on disk 4, so it copies there instead. The first two ISO's, being a collective 84 GB, move fine, but then the third one fails when disk space runs out, because I'm trying to movie a 168 GB folder to a disk with only 86 GB free.
So my sizing logic is this: for DVD's, Blu-rays, and 4K, how many discs do I think might be in a single folder, and how much free space do I want left over as a safety net? For Blu-rays, I typically don't expect more than 3 or 4 ever in a single folder (for a box set, perhaps something like Indiana Jones, Lethal Weapon, etc.), so I take an above average size (i.e. 45 GB) x 4, or around 180 GB.
For 4K, I have so few of these (expensive), and typically not box sets, so I have it set to 100GB, which is the max possible size of any 1 4K disc (very rare, most are 75GB or less).
For DVD's, I went higher than 4x 8.5 GB (34GB) as that was getting uncomfortably low on space to me. So I just rounded up to 60 GB (or around 7 discs).
For TV Series, I have DVD, Blu-ray and 4K all mixed together, so I don't really have a 1 size fits all. Instead, what I do is occasionally adjust the min free space setting before doing a rip, especially if I am doing a multi-disc 4K TV series. That's one of the nice things about Unraid, you can change the min free space anytime, and you don't even have to stop the array.
I also might adjust the min free space setting on the other shares too, as needed. For example, if I am ripping something like the 8-disc Harry Potter series on Blu-ray, I'd probably crank up the min free space to 360 GB, then drop it back down to 180GB after the next mover run.
My ultimate goal with the min free space is to be able to rip a disc and not have to worry about the mover failing because a HDD ran out of space during a move. I'd rather have 179 GB of free-space go un-used than to have a folder move fail.
Every so often, when I see a disk gets below the lowest threshold (i.e. 60GB for DVD's), then I start manually ripping straight to a disk, bypassing the share and the cache. For example, say I have 20 GB free on disk 3, I might rip 3 or 4 DVD's, carefully chosen to use up around 18 GB, to \\Tower\disk3\DVD's\. That allows me to fill up and use every last nook and cranny.
Hope that helps.
Paul