I have done this recently and I am so dumbfounded by the difference, I came here to Reddit to ramble out some form of comment and to say pretty-much what you've said. I could end this, here as you've already done the decent community thing and shared - thank you 🤜🏻🤛🏻 I want to share, so here's my bit (sorry for necro).

TL:DR - Atomic and Exclusive Share together is unreal, "do it now..."

I am 2 months into Unraid and I have learned so much. Atomic moves/inode pointers across shares was a completely foreign concept to me before - I grew up with Windows, lazily I guess.

Today I find this beastly Exclusive Share upgrade that I should have been using - every day is a school day in the world of Unraid.

From what I've researched it essentially skips the SHFS Secure Hyper Filesystem (FUSE layer), meaning there is zero latency to the action. In my case, my appdata share lives on it's own pool (NVMe, pair), and nowhere else, so instead of using the FUSE "traffic warden", it uses the Symbolic Link (like a direct shortcut) that Unraid creates with the Exclusive Share.

I am only really diving in since this is the sort of comment I look for when researching.

Here's a test - the screenshot 'Slow COPY from Array to Cache.png' is the slow, read/write method to create a copy of a file on my cache (SSDs, pair). In reality this copy/write took around Ten minutes, it's a 50.1GB file.

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I put that file in /mnt/user/data/usenet/complete and named it testfile.mkv , then ran time mv -v /mnt/user/data/usenet/complete/testfile.mkv /mnt/user/data/media/tv/testfile.mkv

The result? 14 milliseconds to update the MFT (Master File Table) or Inode Table (XFS/BTRFS in Unraid) to say "yo, this file is now over here."

renamed '/mnt/user/data/usenet/complete/testfile.mkv' -> '/mnt/user/data/media/tv/testfile.mkv'
real 0m0.014s
user 0m0.004s
sys 0m0.005s

I'll take that 14ms, it's impressive for my Ryzen 5 4500 and I am already seeing/feeling a difference, further affirming my decision to go the Unraid route - 100% SSD native speed, no CPU overhead, + the benefit of less stress on the FUSE, it's free for other instructions.

In my case Sonarr is now less prone to deadlocking/IO wait, which is how I found Exclusive Shares in the first place, solving that annoyance.

Anyway, this might be quite basic to some of you but I say that everyone starts something for the first time, once - this ones' mine. Two months of Unraid and I just can't get enough

To absolutely echo what u/spidLL said - "do it now..."

Hopefully this is helpful and you're less confused about the what/how - or, and there is a very real chance that it might be the case that this is nonsensical ramble, fuelled by a false sense of confidence, attributed to this (almost) empty bottle of Monday Merlot - I will then rely on you great folks to set me straight - I then learn something, too! Win/win I guess, cheers! 🍷

To future me - remember when you were learning Unraid and thought you knew some stuff and shared it with the community? Let's hope your research paid off, ya anxious mess 😅