Should my pool be balancing automatically?

[puulima]

Here's my scenario:

 

- I have 7 drives in my pool - all are 4TB except for one 2TB.  

- I have 5.8 TB free in total

- All drives were added last week and early this week (well I added several NEW and then swapped out old 2 TB drives).  

- The first 4 drives (one of which is the 2TB) each have 135 GB of free space - so obviously DrivePool balanced these out.

- Of the remaining 3 drives, one has 414 GB free and the last 2 added (I know this based on the drive volume naming scheme) each have 2.44 TB free.

 

So it seems DrivePool "balanced" the last 2 - 4TB drives out also - but does this "balancing" scheme make sense?  Obviously any new files added to folder with duplication turned on will likely get added to the last 2 drives - so that shouldn't be an issue.

 

I've never touched the settings in the "Balancers" tab in the "Balancing" settings.  ALL have the checkboxes checked off.  The settings are set to balance every day at 1am.  It's been several days since I added the last 2 drives.

 

Any concerns?

 

[Christopher (Drashna)]

It depends really.  

 

StableBit DrivePool mostly balances "new" files and it generally won't move around files unless the disks are VERY full (or if you have StableBit Scanner installed and there is an issue with a disk).

 

For the most part, that sounds about right for what it does by default (but if you can get a screen capture, I can be sure).

 

However, we do have an option "Disk Space Equalizer" balancer plugin that will equalize the usage between the disks, so that any one disk isn't more filled.

https://stablebit.com/DrivePool/Plugins

The Disk Space Equalizer balancer will specifically make each disk use the same percentage (or optionally, the same amount of free space, in MBs/GBs/etc)  This may be what you want.