pool free space and drive balancers

[thu]

I've had DrivePool up and running for about a week now and everything is working great. (FlexRaid pooling used to give my Mac permission errors all the time. Haven't had one yet with DrivePool.)

I used the "Prevent Drive Overfill" balancer to set aside 60GB of free space on each of the 21 drives in the pool for SnapRaid to use.

DrivePool is reporting all that space as "free". Just wondering if there is a way to make DrivePool ignore the space set aside by the balancers.
 

Like, I'll long onto my server from my Mac or Windows machines and they'll both say 1.8TB is free. But there is really just 750GB on the last drive that is free. The rest of it is the unuseable 60GB on each drive.

 

Is there anyway DrivePool could account for that? Not a deal breaker or anything like that. Just a bit of a hassle to have to keep logging into the server and watching the free space of the drive.

 

 

 

 

[Christopher (Drashna)]

Well, I'm glad to hear that the StableBit DrivePool pooling has been much better to you than FlexRAID's!

 

 

 Just wondering if there is a way to make DrivePool ignore the space set aside by the balancers.

 

Not really.  

 

There are a couple of balancer plugins that may help facilitate filling the drives all of the way up, though. 

 

The best way to do this may be to use the SSD Optimizer balancer.  While it says "SSD" , you don't have to use SSDs with it.  

 

Specifically, it places files on the drives marked as "SSDs" and then later moves the files onto the "Archive" drives. You can configure the balancer to fill the archive drives up to 100%, so they're completely full (or as full as possible). 

 

You'd want to disable the other balancers, such as t he prevent drive overfill balancer, but that should allow you to fill up drives. 

 

 

 

And to clarify something here ... there is no issue with filling up the drives all the way. The only time this matters is for the drive with the page file on it, or for drives that are used for temp folders. In most cases, this is just the C:\ drive. And yes, the C:\ drive should never be filled all of the way. But the rest of the drives shouldn't have a problem with this.