HPLovecraft

Hi All,
 
I'm back again with another potentially stupid question... The 'Pool on my home server contains the usual household shared folders: Documents; Pictures; Music; Videos - accessed from various client PCs, Plex on the Roku, Squeezeplayers etc. There are four HDDs in the pool, all files have 2 x duplication.
 
Because I'm a bit anal (and because I've been burned in the past) I use placement rules to force my folders onto the exact disks where I want them. So Documents & Pictures are duplicated on disks 1 & 3; Music & Videos are duplicated on disks 2 & 4. This allows me to ensure my files are duplicated on two different brands of HDD (a year or two ago a pair of Seagates that I bought at the same time, failed at the same time, teaching me a valuable lesson...).
 
Anyhoo, my Videos folder is getting very fat, so I'm a bit low on space on disks 2 & 4. No problem, I'll just move all my Music onto the same drives as Documents & Pictures (1 & 3), where there's plenty of room. How best to do this?
 
My initial thought was to simply change the placement rules for the Music folder, and let DrivePool get on with it. But is there any benefit at all in shutting down the DrivePool service and moving the folder myself? Then restarting DrivePool and changing the placement rules to match what I just did? A bit like the manual way we pre-seed drives? Unlike my pre-seeding, I'd be moving the folder onto two entirely different physical drives...  
Told you it was a potentially stupid question!
cheers, Simon

Usually I just leave DrivePool to do its thing, but tonight I checked in with its control panel on my WHS2011 home server for the first time in ages, and was confused (and somewhat alarmed) to see 101GB of unduplicated files. I use file duplication, with a fairly anal set of rules to force certain folders onto certain pairs of disks (Docs & Pics are duplicated always on disks 1 & 2; Music & Videos always on disks 3 & 4). This is so I can mix HDD brands for added protection.
 
I was utterly baffled by what seemed like an 'undupe-able' 101GB of files, and tried rebalancing, remeasuring, checking the rules etc. I logged in here to ask a question & post some screen shots.
 
Fortunately before I had time to make a prat of myself I noticed something I'd missed in the 'file placement' tab: I'd been so busy checking & rechecking my folder rules, that I'd totally overlooked the 'Recycle Bin' line. My Recycle Bin isn't duplicated in the same way that my 'real' folders are (why bother?).
 
Checked the Bin's properties - it contained exactly 101GB of stuff I'd thrown away. Emptied the Bin, and all my DrivePool stats reverted to normal (equal amount of files on the appropriate disks, everything duped). The moral of this story: if you have inexplicable duping stats weirdness, check the Bin, and empty it. I'm posting this as confession is good for the soul; as potential help for others; but mainly so that when I've forgotten it in a year's time and I have the same problem again, I might find the answer on this forum from my past self...

Duplication is the priority. The code regarding it tries to respect the balancing setttings (including file placement rules), but will disregard them if it's not able to find a valid drive to place the files.
This is intential, as duplication is literally the most important feature here. As it should be.
 
 
 
As for the drives, Yes, StableBit DrivePool is "aware" of the physical disks.  It will ACTIVELY avoid placing duplicated data on the same physical disk, if you have two partitions on the same drive added to the pool.  This way, you don't lose data because we "did something stupid" basically (what's the point of duplicating the data if both copies are on the same disk!!). 
This is also why we don't support Dynamic Disks. It makes the detection significantly more complex, and would adversely affect performance.  That's coupled with the wierd and random issues that Dynamic disks have, especially when moving to other systems (the "import foreign disks" thing can fail, and I've had it happen to me .... it's not fun, as you've basically just lost your data because of this). 
 
 
 
And hopefully, everything stays stable and sane! And it definitely sounds like the failing drives were the issue.