Newbie Here. Will Drivepool reduce the lifespan of my nvme ssds ?

[Bensmir]

Hello, I only have nvme M2 ssds on my system. I use them for music production librairies, therefore in "read" most of the time.

I am currently testing drivepool. Will it reduce the lifespan of my ssds by constantly writing, with the rebalance feature ? 

Or Am I over-thinking this ? 

 

Thanks 

[Christopher (Drashna)]

Definitely overthinking it.   Specifically, while StableBit DrivePool will rebalance data, most of the default enabled balancers handle edge cases, so there should be very little balancing that occurs, once the pool has "settled".   

There is a brief summary of these balancers here: 
https://stablebit.com/Support/DrivePool/2.X/Manual?Section=Balancing Plug-ins#Default Plug-ins

But for ease:

• StableBit Scanner
  • This plug-in is designed to work in conjunction with the StableBit Scanner version 2.2 and newer. It performs automatic file evacuation from damaged drives and temperature control.
• Volume Equalization
  • This balancer is responsible to equalizing the disk space used on multiple volumes that reside on the same physical disk. it has no user configurable settings.
• Disk Usage Limiter
  • This plug-in lets you designate which disks are allowed to store unduplicated vs. duplicated files. It doesn't do anything unless you change its settings to limit file placement on a disk.
• Prevent Drive Overfill
  • This plug-in tries to keep an empty buffer of free space on each drive part of the pool in order to facilitate existing file expansion.
• Duplication Space Optimizer
  • This plug-in examines the current data distribution on all of your pooled disks and decides if some data needs to be rebalanced in order to provide optimal disk space availability for duplicated files (see About Balancing for more information).

 

The StableBit Scanner balancer may move stuff around a lot, but only if it detects issues with a drive.  And the Duplication Space Optimizer will try to rebalance the data to minimize the amount of "Unusable for duplication" space on the pool.  Aside from that, none of these should move data around much, normally. 

[Bensmir]

Hello, thanks. I now understand better the mechanism behind it. 

I m running some tests. I am loading a music instrument inside a sampler named Kontakt (standalone app). The patch I am loading weight 18 Gb. I tried to put it outside the pool, then inside the pool. 

When it's inside the pool, it seems to take a bit more time to load.

Something like 0.5 sec when outside the pool, but 2 seconds when inside the pool. Is it because I am using different SSD models in my pool ? 

- Samsung 980 1 tb (gen 3, Dramless) 0.5s when the library is here

- Samsung 970 Evo plus 2tb (gen 3, dram) 0.5s when the library is here

- Netac nv7000 2 tb (gen 4, dram) 0.5s when the library is here

 

This famous sampler have a "batch re-save" function, which basically re-save that specific library in the exact path (a little bit like indexing which make loading times super fast, and you only perform a batch re-save once per library and forget it. So there's a workaround for this, but still out of curiosity, do you have any idea why loading speed seems slower when using the pool ? Give me best guidances

 

THANKS 

 

 

[Bensmir]

Nervermind. I crystaldiskmark all my drives. Found out that my brand new samsung 970 EVO plus 2 tb was the bottleneck. Everyone was peaking at 70-80 mo/s in regard to random read spead 4K Q1D1 but him. He was at 40-45

I'v taken it out of the pool, and now the pool peak at 71 mo/s 4k read spead as it should. And real-life loading speed are good !  

[Christopher (Drashna)]

Wow, that's ... unusual.  I'm glad that you were able to figure out the issue, though. 

[protator]

That 970 is certainly not performing as it should. The 970 Evo Plus is one of the best and fastest Gen. 3 SSDs on the market, a 2TB EVO Plus should outperform a 1TB non-Pro 980 or at the very least be just as fast.
I've had similar issues with Samsung SSDs in the past, though.

All problems with low disk IO were solved quickly by applying firmware updates via "Magician" and (after a reboot) resetting the drive using the "clean" command in Diskpart ('clean' removes all data and partitions from a drive, so don't forget to backup).
The latter will most likely cure your limping SSD even without an update since the cause appears to be a misaligned partition in most cases. Not sure how that is even a thing on nand storage, but apparently it is.

[protator]

I just realized ... three M.2 drives ... assuming your system is not based on a HEDT or server platform that would mean it's impossible to run three NVMe drives with four PCIe lanes each at Gen.3 speed. If it's a mainstream platform then it has 16 to 28 lanes tops. At least one of the M.2 connectors is either sharing lanes with the PCIe slots via a PLX chip or, which is more likely, drops down to Gen.2 speed if PCIe slot #1 is using all of its 16 lanes.
So check the manual, the Evo Plus might actually be totally fine.