Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[preproman]

Does MC support Windows SMB?  I have a unRaid NAS with shares configured.  I would like to just import one share drive instead of many mapped drives.  Is this possible in MC?

[MrHaugen]

Yes. I've used it for years. Started to use mapped drives more and more though. But there is no reasons why smb/cifs should not work just as well.

[preproman]

Yes. I've used it for years. Started to use mapped drives more and more though. But there is no reasons why smb/cifs should not work just as well.

The problem for me is that my mapped drives don't reconnect all the time after re-boot.  But a smb share should because it's connected to the ip address of the server.  I guess that's how it works.  Now how do I configure it in MC?

[JustinChase]

Yes. I've used it for years. Started to use mapped drives more and more though.

Any insight into why one might be better than the other, other than the reconnect at startup, which I'm actually finding better than I got when the drives were a RAID on another machine on the network, but still not always reliable.

I just finished the week+ of building and setting up my first unRAID box, and got all my data copied over, parity, checked, done.    (was it you that highly recommended it to me?)

so far so good, but I find read and writing to the user shares is painfully slow.  I posted on their forums and read a LOT there and it seems there are some things to do to tweak speeds, but also that my onboard NIC works poorly with the version I'm using, so I'm getting an Intel NIC and have a positive outlook on that resolving that issue.

I mention all that because I'm curious if user shares are really less responsive/fast than disk shares, and if either is better/worse than the smb share; which I know very little about.  I have all copies of MC using mapped drives, and this seems to work fine.  I don't know how smb would change that.

[MrHaugen]

The problem for me is that my mapped drives don't reconnect all the time after re-boot.  But a smb share should because it's connected to the ip address of the server.  I guess that's how it works.  Now how do I configure it in MC?

Try the Move, Copy and Rename tool. Just find the old path and rename it to the new UNC path.

I've changed from UNC paths to Mapped drives for easier access. Nothing else. It's there together with my local disks now, and I access it the exact same way on all my servers and clients. No need to make shortcuts to shares or writing URL's. This was also an advantage in my VMWare setup, even though I have forgotten why.

[preproman]

Try the Move, Copy and Rename tool. Just find the old path and rename it to the new UNC path.

I've changed from UNC paths to Mapped drives for easier access. Nothing else. It's there together with my local disks now, and I access it the exact same way on all my servers and clients. No need to make shortcuts to shares or writing URL's. This was also an advantage in my VMWare setup, even though I have forgotten why.

Well, I have a 20 drive array on a unRaid box and every time I turn my HTPC on I have to re-connect all 20 drives to us MC.  It's painful. I'm not concerned about write speeds because I don't write to the user share. I do all my work ie.. copy, write / maintenance on my iMac I use that as my workstation so I write to a specific disk ie.. disk 1 or disk 20.  The write speeds are good enough for me.  XBMC allows me to use SMB so I can just configure one (share) drive in XBMC and it will span all 20 user share drives on the unRaid array and import any new content that I put on any drive.  So I never have to deal with re-connecting drives.  I really think it's a Windows 7 issue but I haven't found an answer to it as of yet.  So SMB in MC would be a great feature.  I wont have to use mapped drives at all on my HTPC's 

I have to play with the UNC thing, as of right now I have no idea what that is. 

@JustinChase:

You don't have to write to a user share - you can write directly to any one of the drives you want to (mapped).  That way you know where everything is.

[MrHaugen]

I have to play with the UNC thing, as of right now I have no idea what that is. 

UNC is the name of "directory/path" that shares like SMB/CIFS use. Example: "\\NAS\Share1\directory1". That is a complete UNC path. Pretty much like a directory path in windows explorer.

You can use this in MC easily. Try with a few files first. Tools like Copy, Move & Rename and Find & Raplace should work. You need to change the Filename (path) as well as the Filename library field.

[JustinChase]

You don't have to write to a user share - you can write directly to any one of the drives you want to (mapped).  That way you know where everything is.

Yeah, I *can* write directly to a disk, but I really don't want to manage all the drives.  I just have a few main folders (shares) and am happy to let unRAID manage where to put the actual files.  It's one of the benefits to me of a RAID (type) system, not having to have 20 drive letters to manage.

Please report back if you find the UNC shares to work better for you in MC.

I just started my computer from a full shutdown last night, and my mapped drives were all available without me having to reconnect to them this morning, but that's not always the case.  I'm thinking it's just the network stack being faster this time??

I wish there were an easy way to have windows wait until the network is connected before even trying to reconnect the drives

[preproman]

Yeah, I *can* write directly to a disk, but I really don't want to manage all the drives.  I just have a few main folders (shares) and am happy to let unRAID manage where to put the actual files.  It's one of the benefits to me of a RAID (type) system, not having to have 20 drive letters to manage.

Please report back if you find the UNC shares to work better for you in MC.

I just started my computer from a full shutdown last night, and my mapped drives were all available without me having to reconnect to them this morning, but that's not always the case.  I'm thinking it's just the network stack being faster this time??

I wish there were an easy way to have windows wait until the network is connected before even trying to reconnect the drives

Yep - it's an off and on thing with me as well.  Since I have a 20 drive array with only 1 parity drive, I can't afford to have a double drive failure at the same time.  So I have a 1 to 1 backup of each drive on external hard drives, so I have to know what content goes where.  I guess that's just me being overly carful

[MrHaugen]

With 20 drives in one array and one parity disk, you can't be careful enough imo. I'm running Raid 6 (two parity disks) on two 12 Disk arrays which is synchronized. That is being overly careful I think. Better to be safe than sorry though.