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• ArthurHawkins

  September 2011 Member

  Well.. Got the server reloaded and all the drives hooked up.  The pool transferred over fine..  My question now would be is there a way, or maybe drivepool does this itself, to get the pool to balance out across all the drives that are connected now?
  
  I've seen data balance across the drives on a new install, but this is a first for me - importing an existing pool of drives and adding additional after the fact...
  

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• Shane

  September 2011 Resident Guru

  For now there is only on-write balancing based on absolute (not percent) free space remaining at the time. Re-balancing (e.g after adding more drives) will be looked at later (M4 or release or post-release). See also http://forum.covecube.com/discussion/comment/706#Comment_706 and http://forum.covecube.com/discussion/comment/659#Comment_659 for Alex posts (just a sample).

  
  

  Manually re-balancing the drives DIY-style is possible, but is definitely a hard-hat zone (i.e. stop all DP services; create DP's "xyz.n" folders in the appropriate places on, and move content over to, the newly pooled drives to suit your balancing preferences; restart DP services) where you don't want to make a mistake.

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• ArthurHawkins

  September 2011 Member

  Thanks for the links, Shane.  Guess I could have did a little more research..  I think I will wait and see what happens over the coming releases.. My balancing issue isn't something that I am willing to manually manipulate the drive pool in a chance that I would lose data..  10tb would take quite a while to recoup..
  
  Am I right in the understanding that from now on with data writes it should balance across the drives in the pool though?  The temporary drives that I used for this conversion (6x2tb) are all sitting at 91GB free, the additional/converted drives that I added to the pool after the fact (5x3tb, 9x2tb) are all currently empty..
  
  Or would I be better off removing the current drives with data on them?  I know from past experience that about the only time that WHS v1 ever did a decent balancing was during a drive removal.. Does DrivePool following a similar logic method currently?  Seeing as how the data would be getting "copied" to the drive pool does the standard copy balancing take affect or does the system use a different method?
  

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• Shane

  September 2011 edited September 2011 Resident Guru

  "Am I right in the understanding that from now on with data writes it should balance across the drives in the pool though?"

  
  

  Yes. As noted, DP will write to the drive with the most free space first, regardless of size. Given your setup, DP should therefore start filling your empty 3TB drives until they have about 2TB free each, then it will start filling across your empty 2TB drives as well.

  
  

  "Does DrivePool following a similar logic method currently?  Seeing as how the data would be getting "copied" to the drive pool does the standard copy balancing take affect or does the system use a different method?"

  
  

  Yes. DP should perform its usual balance-on-write routine when you remove a pooled drive. You could also trigger this routine by (1) moving files out of, then back into, the pool, or (2) by moving files from a non-duplicated pool share to a duplicated pool share - not sure about the converse, or (3) turning on duplication for a pool share, or (4) moving files from any pool share to another pool share by any method or program that prevents DP from realising that the files don't actually have to be copied.

  
  

  Note that the third option has the drawback of suspending end-user access to the pool while DP updates the share, which you may not find desirable.

  
  

  You may wish to use a program that verifies as it moves or copies files. One might also want to run StableBit's other nice tool, BitFlock, to check the SMART status of all of the drives, new and old, just in case.

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