Should I rebalance pre-seeded drives?

[JasonC]

As I was migrating from a damaged StorageSpaces pool, I ended up pre-seeding a couple of disks before transferring all my disks to the DrivePool based disk. So I have a couple of disks that currently have the majority of the content on the pool. It's significant, so say, 2TB on each of a 4TB disk, but the total pool size is much larger.

 

Should I explicitly tell it to perform a re-balance now, or let it just get to it when it gets to it? It sort of seemed like from the settings that an automatic rebalance wouldn't bother re-allocating until they were much more full, so I'm wondering if I should actually wait until then or get ahead of it.

 

Thank you!

 

[Christopher (Drashna)]

Well, that depends.

 

If the new data is being written to the pool rather than the underlying drives, then it will balance the data out automatically, placing new files on the disks with the most available space.

 

Additionally, there is a "Disk Space Equalizer" balancer that can rebalance the data to equalize it between the disks, after the fact. 

https://stablebit.com/DrivePool/Plugins

[JasonC]

Well, that's what I was asking about.  Having watched it for a while, I see balance the data out automatically seems to mean that the pre-seeded disks won't have writes on them until the other disks are caught up.

 

Which brings me to my next question...

 

There are 10 disks my pool. 2 disks were pre-seeded.

Data is now only apparently writing to 5 of the other disks in the pool. 3 of the disks in the pool are not getting written to, based on the graph of how much each disk is full.  That doesn't seem to be in line with what I was expecting to have happen. Is that supposed to be that way?

[Christopher (Drashna)]

That depends.  

 

The disks with the most free space (absolute) are the ones that will get new data first.  

 

 

If you would, could you grab a screenshot of the drives in the DrivePool UI? 
If you're not comfortable posting that here, head to https://stablebit.com/Contact and post a ticket there with the images. 

[JasonC]

Hmm my related, but separate threads are starting to blur together a lot more. Requested pic is in this thread:

http://community.covecube.com/index.php?/topic/2595-not-all-disks-in-the-pool-being-used/

 

Maybe lock this thread and just continue in the other?

[Christopher (Drashna)]

Either is fine, actually.