Include drive C: in pool?

[Jeff]

Hi,

 

I was curious what people thought about adding the system drive to DrivePool.  My drive C: has 750 GB free; it seems a waste of empty space.

 

As long as whatever is put there is duplicated, are there any reasons not to add the system drive to the pool?  Maybe some performance issues?  Could it slow down the pool or slow down Windows?

 

Thanks!

[Christopher (Drashna)]

That's a spinning drive, right?

 

If so, I'd recommend shrinking the system (C:\) partition, and then creating a new partition just for data. 

 

Why? In case you have to reinstall the OS. in a lot of cases, you may end up having to wipe the drive, and that could mean data loss. 

 

 

And yes, this can affect performance, as you're splitting IO between the OS and the pool. 

 

However, if you do want to do this, then use the "Drive Usage Limiter" balancer to only allow Duplicated data on the system disk (by unchecking the "Unduplicated" option for this disk in the balancer's settings). 

 

The "Read Striping" feature (which is enabled by default) may end up avoiding reading from this disk if there is a lot of activity.