Mr Ethernet

Wait a second... No it doesn't! My bad! Sorry for any confusion. I was in a bit of a rush earlier and had apparently clicked on All In One when I intended to install Disk Space Equalizer. I hadn't installed what I thought I had. Either would have worked. I am a minimalist, so I have now removed All In One and replaced it with Disk Space Equalizer, as that's all I need to get the aggressive balancing I want.

I Googled it and what I needed was the second result - a page from 2018: The Volume Equalization plugin doesn't do what I thought it does. None of the default plugins do - you actually need to install one! What I needed was the Disk Space Equalizer plugin, which actually shows up as "All In One" under the Balancers tab: This plugin immediately solved my problem by providing functionality that I previously assumed was the default right out of the box:

I have three identical-model 10 TB drives, so I think I can rule out different drive capacities as being the problem here. Interestingly, the third drive is 49.56% full. I wonder if DrivePool's trying to stop the third drive going past 50% for some reason? I tried disabling all balancers apart from Volume Equilization but nothing changed. I don't know what the logic is behind this behaviour but, as far as I can tell, it's not balancing the way it's supposed to.

They're all enabled and I've cranked them up to balance more aggressively than the defaults.

My drive pool was nearly full so I added a third 10 TB drive this week. It just finished balancing this morning but the dark blue line for Unduplicated data is much shorter than for the first two drives. For some reason, the data is not being distributed evenly across all three drives. Does anyone have any idea what's going on?

So just to answer my own question... As far as I can tell, it's fine to store a VHDX file itself in a pool (and, therefore, to duplicate it if required). It's only a mounted VHDX that isn't supported for inclusion as part of a drive pool, but think there's no reason why a VHDX file itself can't be simply stored in a pool. My VHDX file happens to be a BitLocker drive; if it turns out that a BitLocker VHDX file shouldn't be stored in a pool for data integrity reasons (just as databases shouldn't be stored in a pool), I would appreciate it if someone could let me know!

I've got a BitLocker-encrypted file (VHDX extension) and want it duplicated in case one of my disks fails. Am I okay to just enable duplication and have the entire VHDX file duplicated to both disks? Or is this not recommended/best practice?

Thanks Drashna. It's been working perfectly for me so far. It looks like WinSCP buffers downloads in RAM quite a lot (I'll ask the developer for clarification) and it only updates its part files a few times per minute. Definitely isn't constantly thrashing the file in the same way as a database file might be constantly accessed. I'll keep my WinSCP folder in my drive pool. Already downloaded over 1 TB straight into the pool so far and had zero problems!

Hi everyone, newbie here! I read that active databases shouldn't be stored on a pooled drive, which I can sort of understand the logic behind; they're particularly delicate things. Are there any similar concerns with SFTP-ing large files (i.e. ~30 GB) straight into the pooled storage area, as the growing part file is repeatedly being written to in a way that could maybe (but I suspect not) be considered similar to the way a database is repeatedly written to? I've already downloaded a bunch of ~30 GB movie files straight into my pool and it seems to be working perfectly but was just wondering what the best practice is with regards to large downloads that take a long time (sometimes over an hour per file). Is anyone here downloading large files directly to one drive (outside the pool) and then moving the file into the drive pool folder after that or would that be completely unnecessary? I suspect it's not an issue but just wanted to double check what the best practice is when downloading large files via FTP or SFTP!