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celegorm

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Posts posted by celegorm

  1. SO I think I just needed to talk bad about the plugin.  I kicked it off manually probably 5 times out of frustration after this post and on the 5th time it started actually moving more.  2 days later it's 30% done - but I have a lot of data across a lot of drives and it's 100% duplicated so the time is fine by me.

     

    Curious as to why it too so many re-tries to get it to do anything but I might never get that answer.

  2. I have added 2 new drives to my existing pool.  I wanted to balance my current load out so I didn't have 12 drives sitting at 75-90% with 2 new drives virtually empty.  I disabled all balancers except Disk Space Equalizer which I have set to balance by Percentage used (I have a mix of 4, 8 and 14 TB drives so free space won't get me quite what I want).

    When it did the initial balance it put about 150GB on both new drives - then nothing.  It finishes saying the distribution is not optimal but no matter how many times I re-kick off the balance nothing else ever changes.  Picture is a snip of my current pool.  You can see the markers where the balancer wants to take the drives but it doesn't move things from there.

     

    Has anyone else had luck balancing out the load after expanding their pool?

     

    image.png.55a16247794093901a88f0c5621b43a6.png

  3. I turned off the volume equalization and duplication stuff and Things seem... better but still functioning as expected.  For example, this morning, the drives had 15 and 16GB on it (yes, they were reported as being different, 1 reported 1GB of unduplicated data).  I changed my settings to force rebalance at 10GB and it fired off leaving 3GB behind.  With Balance Immediately checked, i wouldn't have expected this to stay.

     

    The problem is, I can't find that 3GB, the drives, when navigated into appear empty.  I'm sure I've missed a folder or two since the cache doesn't clear/delete the empty folders but there's no way 100 empty folders maps to 3GB of data on each drive.   Either there's 3GB of super-hidden files somewhere or something is reporting wrong.

     

    image.png.e65340d821d318c1f793b40da2305647.png

    Balancing Page.PNG

    Used.PNG

  4. I have 2  120GB SSD Cache drives That I want to use for nothing but cache.  I have them plugged in and the SSD Optimizer plugin to see them as Cache drives.  My goal is for these to be 100% flow-through with no data stored permanently.

    Right now, both drives have 23.1GB of data stored on them.  It looks like the balancer moved files to them there based on date/time stamps.  When copying over about 75GB of files just now and watching the disk performance, it was writing directly to the Archive drives skipping the cache.

    I've reset the plugin and it is the first on the list for priority.  Default is 75% fill for cache then 90% to archive.  There is still about 7.5 TB or room left in the pool not including cache drives.

    Do I need to un-check the cache drives from the file placement tab?

     

    Edit

     

    To also add, I have 3 other Balancers enabled.  Maybe I need to turn 2 of them off?  The three others enabled (in priority order) are

    1. StableBitScanner
    2. Volume Equalization
    3. Duplication Space Optimizer

    I'm thinking maybe these last 2 are the ones that might be conflicting here.

  5. Thanks for the info!

     

    Sadly the Stable Bit Scanner won't be much use on the SMART front.  Most of my drives are connected to a high-point RAID card which is notorious for not passing through SMART data.  That said, I'll at least turn it on for the 3 drives that are not on the controller.

  6. So far so good!  Things have been stable and working well.  I am very impressed.

     

    My only remaining question at this stage is how the drive balancing feature benefits me? I had turned it off to make sure it didn't clash with SnapRaid while it did the initial parity build.  I understand that if a drive fails  I lose less data (temporarily) as it's all balanced across my drives but now with SnapRaid managing a backup of sorts and no duplication is there really a point in me turning that back on? 

  7. So far so good!  I'm doing the parity calculation with SnapRAID now.    It's going slow but calculating that much parity data I wouldn't expect anything fast.  For the time being, I disabled the data balancing as I cared more about getting a parity created than balance.  but I might turn that back on later.  worst case a drive dies before the next snapshot and things are restored how they were before the balance.

     

    My initial thoughts so far are "wow".  super simple to set up and integrates very nicely.  My only complaint is that now "My Computer" is now littered with extra drives and drive letters that I don't need since I'll be doing everything in the pool.  That said, if that's my only complaint then I'm still in a much better position than I was before.

     

    At this point I'm fairly confident that I will be buying once my trial is up.  I was talking to one of my friends who went the "UnRAID" route and with some of the things i've told him, he's regretted not trying this first.

     

    Thanks again to all of you who answered my noobish questions and linked to the articles I couldn't find.  The prompt feedback was greatly appreciated and the activity within this community was a huge factory in me trying out the software.

  8. To clarify when I was asking about backup options I was referring to duplication vs parity vs RAID.  I knew RAID wasn't an option with this software but I was hoping for parity as it wouldn't require that I buy any new disks :)  I think half the reason I'm having so many issues with FlexRaid's parity is that Plex scans the media and does god-knows-what with the meta data fairly often.  From what little I've found so far, it sounds like this might be a similar issue if I do anything involving snapraid.  This leaves me with duplication or a real RAID system.

     

     

    One thing I have yet to find in an FAQ is let's say I want to replace an existing 4TB drive with an 8TB a few years down the road.  how would I go about expanding the pool with to include the new "4" extra terabytes?

  9. I'm currently using FlexRaid and I'm getting sick of constant false reports of corrupt files.  All my drives check out OK and files are all good but it's validation checks fail immediately after re-doing the parity.  Needles to say, I don't trust it any more if a drive dies to successfully restore my info.

     

    Before I switch over I have a few questions and things I'd like confirmed if anyone here can help me.

     

    First, and most importantly can I add or create drives to a pool that already have data on the drives?  I have 15TB of data to move so this is huge for me.  Assuming I can add to the pool without destroying my data, is there anything else I need to do?

     

    Second, after the pool is created, can I later add additional drives to expand my pool or am I stuck with the number of drives I start with in the pool?

     

     

    Next, if I need to pull a drive out of the pool for any reason, am I able to read the data off the drive?  If there's one thing FlexRaid has done well is I can pull a drive out of the pool, plug it into another PC and read all the data off of it.

     

    Last, how does the backup functionality work here?  My current setup has 7 4TB drives that are pooled with an 8TB drive used to store parity information.  After formatting, this gives me between 25 and 26 TB or usable space in the pool as the parity drive obviously isn't counted.  I'd like to not lose any of that space due to parity if I can help it but at least want to be properly informed on the expectations.

     

    Thanks in advance!  It takes a while for Flexraid to rebuild after pulling things out so I'm a bit hesitant to go for the free trial until I know what I'm getting into.

     

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