Balancing question from a migrating StoargeSpace user..

[mr_greedy]

Hi. I'm trialing this excellent looking piece of software at the moment..

 

I had a 4 drive storage pool running on MS storage spaces - with parity. I plan to move this to a 3 drive StableBit DrivePool and leave one of my disks out of the pool for SnapRAID. It's only a media server, so the data doesn't change enough to warrant parity-on-the-fly.

 

My question is about balancing. I'd like the "Volume Equalization" behaviour to occur when the data is first written to the pool, but I don't really want DrivePool to be rebalancing automatically. Rebalancing like this would kill my parity and it'd have to reconstruct it from scratch every time.

 

So my question is; can SBDP do this? Just apply the balance rule ONCE to keep things roughly equalized as data is written to the pool?

 

Thanks for this excellent piece of software - expect another paying customer very soon!

paul

[Christopher (Drashna)]

Well, to clarify, the "volume equalization" helps to equalize the usage between volumes on the same disk.

 

If you want to equalize the usage between the disks, then you don't really need to install a balancer. New files are added to the disk with the most free space by default. This will equalize the usage between the disks, over time. 

But there is an option balancer plugin that will forcibly do this (the Disk Space Equalizer balancer plugin).

 

 

 

However, for the most part, the balancing system doesn't actively move files around often.  Most of them balancers are very "edge case" usage, and shouldn't move files around often.  The only exceptions are the balancer plugins (as they are drastic changes to the normal behavior), the StableBit Scanner balancer (this will clear out a disk if StableBit Scanner detects unreadable sectors on a disk), and the Prevent Drive Overfill balancer (which is only triggered if the disk is more than 90% full by default, and empties the disk until it's 85% full by default). 

 

Aside from these cases, you should be able to leave the balancing enabled without any ill effects here. That said, there is an option to balance once per day, or to not balance automatically at all. 

 

 

 

 

Additionally, you may want to check out this thread:

http://community.covecube.com/index.php?/topic/52-faq-parity-and-duplication-and-drivepool/