5677 - Pool Balancing

DavidG

I'm getting alerts of low disk space on a pooled drive. "Hard Drives" shows my pool drives to have free space ranging from 1509Gb to 22Gb. Hardly what I would call balanced!

Pool condition is 100% with 14.6Tb total and 3.01Tb free.

daveyboy37

Hey Dave...One thought on this cos i have had similar in the past. Did you start your pool from scratch? By that i mean its possible to speed up the process of setting up the pool by simply dragging files on each individual drive from outside of the pool, into the server pool part folders. However it does not balance the drives. To balance you must drag your data directly into the mounted Drivepool folder. Yes its very time consuming(i have a very similar amount of data to you). If u did set up your pool with the recommened method then im really at a loss. Sorry!

Paaland

Note: 100% pool condition only means that all duplicated files are placed on two separate physical drives. As far as I know DP does not have any (re)balancing built-in at this time, but will place files on the pooled drive with the most available space (if possible and still retain duplication on two separate drives).

If you turned on duplication on a share that already contained lots of data you have to "trick" DP to even the "load". Temporarily moves files from on pooled share into another pooled share. This will make DP place the files on the two drives with the most free space. The move the files back again.

I'm not sure if you'll have to move from \\server\share1 to \\server\share2 or it it's sufficient to move from p:\share1 to p:\share2 (given p: is the pool-drive letter).

Anyways I think Alex have stated the he will build a "rebalance" feature into DP later on.

DavidG

@Daveboy37- I did as you suggest when I originally set up the pool sometime ago. It took 2-3 days (and nights)! Best way is not to turn on duplication until after the copy is complete, that way the system is usable faster.

@Paaland - Some sort of balancing is occuring. For example, recently I added a 3Tb disk to the pool and it now has only 500Gb free while I have added a maximum of 100Gb of files. There appears to be some sort of shuffling occuring.

At least, I would expect any new files, including duplicates, to be put on the disks with the most free space but I currently have 7 drives ranging from 1500Gb to 69Gb for a total of 3Tb free. With that amount of free space I would not expect any drive to become so full as to cause an Alert.

It is not a big deal, functionality is not impaired. Personally I do not care where my files are put that after all is one of the purposes of having a pool but I do not want to receive unnecessary Alerts. It is just an irritant which needs to be looked at sometime.