Setting up Shares on Unraid 6.9 for Best Performance

hi guys and welcome to another video so this video is following on from the last one where we were looking at multiple pools so now we're going to be looking at setting up unraid shares to make the best use of our pools and our array sounds interesting then let's get started so you might be thinking well setting up shares is easy you just click on the button to add a share and job done yeah well yeah that's kind of true but maybe if we spent more time planning this we could get better performance out of the server and who doesn't want that hey so in the last video i created four cache pools and i linked up the existing shares unread creates to be able to use them so now it's time to create some user shares and of course we've all got different use cases so we're all going to need to set up different shares i'd say probably 90 percent of unraid users one of the duties their servers does is to be a media server so let's take that as an example how to plan and set up shares for that use case so let's go to the shares tab and add our first share for that purpose so the first show i'm going to start with i'm going to add one for downloads so obviously the first step is to name it obviously i'm going to call it downloads we can put in a comment here about the share if we want to i'm not going to bother but if you remember in the last video when we were setting up multiple cache pulls i mentioned that i didn't want things downloading directly to the array itself to avoid the wear and tear but i didn't really go into much detail as to why well when we write a file to the array it stores that file on the data disk where it does the rights to that drive but it also creates parity information so it writes to the parity drive as well so whenever we write to the array we're writing to two drives at the same time so when we're downloading files using usenets or torrents for example there can often be lots of little parts that make up the file that we're downloading which at the end of the download often have to be unzipped and put together to make up the file so we wouldn't want this activity going on directly on the array that would be pointless so for the download share it's definitely best to have it cache enabled but we don't want to use the setting use cache prefer or use cache only because we don't want our downloads to permanently stay on the cache pool we only want them there temporarily until they're moved onto the array later on so the setting we want to use is use cache yes and if you have more than one cache pool you really need to think about which is the best pool for the downloads to go on to so if you've got more than one cache pool try and avoid the downloads going onto something where you don't want to have a lot of io so i don't want it going to any of my nvme caches because one's used for docker and the other for vms so i'm going to put it on the pool here called cache ssd this is the general cache pool that i use for accelerating rights so you may be wondering if you've only got one cache pool what is it best to have is it best to have less wear on the array or less rights to where your docker and vms are stored well i'd say given the choice avoid writing downloads directly to the array but one thing to note about downloads you don't need a fast ssd to download onto so if you've got an old hard drive lying around even if it's just a laptop one maybe you could add that as an extra pool and just use it for downloads okay so back to these share settings now everything else here i'm going to leave as it is and with these settings here the included and the excluded disks this allows us to choose which disks in our array that the share will actually be allowed to use if it's just left like this obviously it will be able to use any disk on the server because included this is set to all and excluded this are set to none so it can use anything at the moment so before i choose which disks it's going to be able to use let's have a look at the array at the same time side by side so i've got these four disks three of which are data disk so the download share i only really wanted to put stuff onto disk one so i'm just going to select this one here so that's the only disk it's going to use for the downloads well i say that but that's not strictly true because new files because it's cache enabled are going to download to the cache ssd it's only after move has run any downloaded files that are still here in the cache ssd will be moved to their final destination on disk one okay so with that done i'm going to click on to add share and done okay so the next share i'm going to add one for movies now this time i don't want this share to be cash enabled i don't need fast rights to this share because most of the times it's only going to be reads coming from this share now maybe you're thinking well doesn't it just make sense to enable cash enabled rights to all of the shares no matter what well let me show you why that isn't the case okay so people who are familiar with unraid will know that there's various applications that can download things for you and one of those is a container called radar and this will download movies for you it's very useful if like me you've got hundreds of dvds and you've no longer got a dvd player or anything in your server to rip dvds so it's useful to better download what you already own so what radar will do is it will find the movies that you want and then send them to another application which does downloads such as deluge or ncb get it will then wait for these downloads to finish then afterwards it will move them to your movie share so let's just take a minute to think what happens here so radar sends the file across to our download client to be downloaded and the download client downloads into our download share and because the download share is cache enabled and this is a new file it's going to be downloaded onto the cache drive this one here the cache ssd okay so radar is going to see that it's finished and so now it's going to move the file from the download share this file that's on the cache ssd and it's going to move it to the movie share now because the movie share isn't cache enabled it's going to physically move the file across onto the array now this would be different if the movie share was also cache enabled the download client would download it to the cache drive cache ssd radar would see that it's finished and want to move it to the movie share now because the movie share is cache enabled new files go onto the cache ssd so it will put it in the movies share but it will leave it on the ssd because it doesn't need to move it physically it will eventually move later when mover runs it will move everything to the array so obviously it's much more efficient to have the movie share not cache enabled so radar can move things physically when they finish downloading this will prevent your cash drive getting so full up and also it will mean that files are moved quicker into the parity protected array now again let's think about where this share is going to reside what disks do we want it to be on if i was to leave this share using all of the disks and its allocation method being high water as movies were added to the share it would add them to all of the disks and because the allocation method is set to high water it would try and spread them evenly over the three discs whilst this is fine in my opinion isn't the most efficient way to set up this share and the first reason is because of how unraid manages the power usage of disks when they're not in use for example if i go to settings here and then disk settings where it says default spin down delay at the moment it's on never if i set it to 15 minutes any discs that are inactive for 15 minutes they'll be powered down so the fewer amounts of disc that you can fit your movies onto the better if you can fit it onto one disc that's great because if the move is just on this one disc when plex rnb plays a file it will only have to spin up one disc and not three and if i'm watching a movie then i know if i watch another movie it's going to be on the same disc so again because the disc is already spun up accessing that next movie i'm going to play is going to be quicker but if i didn't think i could fit all of my movies on one disc or over time this disc became full i could then allocate a second disk for the movies as well now when wanting to do this with more than one disk then it's better to change the allocation method to fill up setting the allocation method to fill up means as movies are added it will fill up the first disk first this disk too and then when that becomes full it will start on disk three and another thing we need to think about when setting up a share is the setting here where it says minimum free space so this minimum free space basically tells us how much free space to have on the disk before it's considered full so you should always set this to the file size of what you think might be the largest file you'll ever put on this disk for me i would never have a movie that's more than 30 gigs so i'm gonna set it to that okay so how i've got my share set up now is i'm not using the cache pool for new files the allocation method is set to fill up and i don't think i'm going to have a file that's larger than 30 gigs and the included disks are disk 2 and disk 3. well for now i'm actually only going to put it onto disk 2 and i've chosen disk 2 because i know at the moment there's no other shares that use this disk i've set the download share to use disk 1. so that means disk 2 is going to be exclusively for movies ok so i'm going to click on to add share and done and i'm going to set up a very similar share for tv shows this is going to be almost identical again i don't want to use a cache pull and i want to set the allocation method to fill up and for disk this time i'm only going to use disk 3. tv shows they're not as big as movies so i'm going to set this to 5 gigs and click on to add share and done now there's another very good reason why to use specific disks for various shares taking these last two shares the movies and tv show shares most things that happen on this share is reads once a movie or tv show is written it's normally only ever written once so the rights for these type of shares is very low compared to other types of shares so by keeping what i call low right shares to various disks we'll probably actually prolong the life of those particular discs if they had other shares on them that were constantly reading and writing that disc will get a lot more use than it would otherwise so by having movies and tv shows on their own separate discs this can actually help prolong the life of those particular drives okay so before i add any more shares i'm just going to look at what i've got on each disk okay so on disk 1 i've got downloads and iso's disk 2 movies and disk 3 tv shows ok so now let's add another share and where i want to add the next share is on to disk one because this isn't tv shows or movies and this drive will have a lot more rights so let's go to shares and click add share and this share i'm just going to call it data and i want this share to be cash enabled and i want this to use the ssd cache this share i'm going to leave it on high water and for minimum free space i don't know what i'll be storing on here so i'm just going to put 50 gigs and now i'm not going to use included disks to specify disk 1 i just don't want the shares to be writing ever on the movies or the tv shows disk if i exclude these disks now if i add disks in the future this data share will be free to write to them and because i've got the allocation method as high water it will try and equally distribute the data over the amount of disks that will make up this share so okay so i'm going to click on to add share for this one and done okay so if you remember when i created the butterfs cache pool that had redundancy because it's got two drives i'm going to create a share now which is going to have use of that pool now even though there are no containers actually set up on this server yet i know that in the future i'm going to be running an xcloud on this server so i'm going to prepare the share in advance for nexcloud and make a cache enabled share for it with its own dedicated pool so all of the rights to it have totally its own i o and because this pool uses butter fs and raid 1 i've got redundancy should the worst happen in the drive fail so it's going to be very unlikely for me to lose any data with my next cloud instance and so what this should i store the information on well again i just don't want it to be disc two or three anything else is fine so again i need to think about what's going to be the biggest file i'm going to be storing on this share well i very much doubt i'm going to have anything larger than 50 gigs for a single file on next cloud so i'm going to set it to that okay so with that done i'm going to click on to add share and then done okay and so there we are that's all of the shares set up that i want on this server at the moment now in my opinion it's really important to plan your shares and how to set them up right from the start of setting up your server because it's much easier to do now and set things up from the beginning then in a year's time realize you haven't got the shares set up quite how you want to and have to move data around and make a whole bunch of changes and remember have set things up in this video isn't the only way to do it by far every server is different and there's many different use cases you may be using your server for so the purpose of this video was just to show you various kind of ideas about setting up shares so you can take those ideas and keep them in mind when you're planning on how to set up your shares on your server okay so we might have our unraid 6.9 server all set up but there's no data on the server at all no containers on the server at all and also no vms so in the next part of the video series we're going to look at setting up a docker container called crusader so we can transfer existing data we've got on other computers across onto our server quickly and easily but that's in the next video but if you like this video then please hit the like button and subscribe to the channel if you haven't already if there's anyone out there who you think might find this video useful then please share it with them as well as always i want to give a big shout out to all of my patrons and supporters out there i really appreciate all of your help thank you so much guys for supporting me but that brings us to the end of the video and it's time for me to go but whatever you're up to for the rest of the day i hope it's good and i'll catch you in the next video

Channel: Spaceinvader One

Views: 28,573

Keywords: unraid, home server, nas

Id: ZOzW01lrzpM

Length: 14min 18sec (858 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 24 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/Jawless]

Thank you for the great content!

[u/IGetHypedEasily]

Great content.

I have been running my server for ages. And haven't learned about fill up. I used to have many small sized disks so didn't try to separate shares per disk and have rest sleep.

I now have bigger drives but also TBs more data.

If I turn on fill up and specify disks to use now for each media share. Will that only help future data?

Will unraid try to move all the data on its own later?

If it's a manual process then might be a lost cause.