New user - Check my migration plan

[jasazick]

Currently I'm trying to consolidate my Plex library into one contiguous (virtual) pool. Right now I have TV and Movie content on two different RAID based NAS devices. DrivePool seems like a solid option. To that end I've ordered 2x 8tb archive drives and expect delivery today. 

 

Right now my plan is to install the 2x 8tb drives on my Windows based plex server and configure them in a pool with no duplication (initially). From there I will offload the NAS data onto the pool, and will keep those devices active in the near future to serve as a backup to the primary pool. Eventually I may add more drives to the pool itself and enable file duplication there, which would free up the NAS devices for other use. Suggestions on Windows software to perform the data copy? (Windows File Explorer seems less than idea for such a large dataset)? I currently have a license for SyncBack Pro. 

 

I'll be putting approx 13tb of data onto the pool once it is built. From what I've read the seagate archive drives don't write large sets of data very well, due to the way they buffer incoming data. Would I see any advantage to adding in a SSD via the Optimizer plugin? I assume it would help offset the slower write speeds of the archive drives. Any suggestions on drive size? 

 

 

[Christopher (Drashna)]

This depends on how much data you have.

 

I'm just goign to assume "a lot", based on the fact that you've said you're getting two 8TB Seagate Archive drives.

 

Unfortunately, in this case, the SSD Optimizer balancer wouldn't help that much. 

 

Specifically, in your case, it would essentially only create a buffer equal to the size of the disks.  Once you've exceeded that, new data will be added to the archive drives directly. And you'll run into the issue again. 

 

 

So basically, for the the initial migration, it may be best to "grin and bare it".

 

That said, the performance isn't *that bad*. You may see frequent dropouts, where it its 0 bytes/sec periodically, but over all, you'll probably see close to 80MB/s write speed for the average over t ime. 

 

 

 

However, if you're adding data frequently, then yes, the SSD Optimizer is a very good idea. This way, new data is written to the drive and then migrated off of the disks.  Since this can take a bit of time, depending on the balancing settings and the disks, 100GB or larger may be best. Also, the SSD drive size limits the file size of the data that you can add, since they hit the SSD drive first.

 

 

 

Additionally, if you have a larger drive to use (such as 1-2TB hard drive), you could use this for the SSD Optimizer balancer, as an "SSD" drive (as this doesn't have to be an SSD, as it's used as a "write cache" drive). 

This way, it would take much longer to fill up, and would definitely help out here. 

[jasazick]

Makes sense. Thanks

 

I do put data onto the existing NAS drives pretty frequently, and since they often hold very large files, the SSD optimizer does sound like a good idea overall for the new replacement pool (And I have a spare 240gb SSD). 

[Christopher (Drashna)]

You're very welcome. 

 

I actually have 8x of these drives, so I'm very familiar with their shortcomings.  

 

 

And the 240GB SSD isn't a bad choice at all.  Though, if you do enable duplication, you will want to grab a second one. THis is because any data written to a duplicated folder is written to both destination disks in parallel. If you don't have enough "SSD" drives, it will fall back to the Archive drives and can slow down the write speeds.