the placement of files is confusing

[Tay]

 

I don't understand what is happening, but the program is not organizing the disks in any way, these disks all started at zero and in the beginning only DATAEX8 was used and now after several attempts to get it to record on all the disks, now only is recording on DATAEX5.

note: I want all disks to have the same percentage of space used, and for new files to enter the unit with the lowest percentage of space used, but this does not happen regardless of how I configure the plugins tab.

[Shane]

Unless directed otherwise by a File Placement rule or a balancer that can set file placement limits, DrivePool will always try to place incoming files on the drive with the most free space.

To balance existing files across all the drives according to percentage used space, it looks like you need to do the following:

• Balancing -> Balancers: enable the "Disk Space Equalizer" balancer with its options set to "Equalize by the percent used". I'd also recommend making the "StableBit Scanner" balancer the highest priority if you're using that, and you can probably disable the "Volume Equalization" and "Drive Usage Limiter" balancers.
   
• Balancing -> Settings: turn on the Automatic balancing so that the (non-realtime, non-immediate) Balancers can do their thing. For now I'd suggest selecting "Balance immediately" with the "Not more often..." option unchecked.

[Tay]

On 5/20/2024 at 8:04 AM, Shane said:

Unless directed otherwise by a File Placement rule or a balancer that can set file placement limits, DrivePool will always try to place incoming files on the drive with the most free space.

To balance existing files across all the drives according to percentage used space, it looks like you need to do the following:

• Balancing -> Balancers: enable the "Disk Space Equalizer" balancer with its options set to "Equalize by the percent used". I'd also recommend making the "StableBit Scanner" balancer the highest priority if you're using that, and you can probably disable the "Volume Equalization" and "Drive Usage Limiter" balancers.
   
• Balancing -> Settings: turn on the Automatic balancing so that the (non-realtime, non-immediate) Balancers can do their thing. For now I'd suggest selecting "Balance immediately" with the "Not more often..." option unchecked.

but won't doing this procedure with an HDD shorten its life by half? Is it not possible to autodirect to the unit with the lowest percentage of use?
If there is no way, thank you very much for your answer, it helped me to better understand how the program works.

[Shane]

While SSDs have a strictly limited (albeit these days very large) number of read/write cycles, HDDs are all about the mechanical wear for which (as I understand it) environmental factors (temperature changes and extremes, vibration, shocks, etc) and usage/data patterns (platter spin on/off, motor head movement) contribute significantly.

The reason DrivePool prefers the drive with the greatest free space is because due to the way Windows writes files, it isn't possible for the file system to guarantee the size of an incoming new file in advance - so with no way of knowing whether a file being saved into a pool is going to be 1MB, 1GB, 1TB or whatever the drive in the pool with the most free space is always picked to minimise the risk of being unable to complete writing the file. There is currently no option in DrivePool to change this to "lowest percentage of use"; the alternatives as far as I know are the SSD Optimizer balancer, the Ordered File Placement balancer, and the File Placement rules.

For most of your drives, given they have same capacity, "save to drive with most free space" and "save to drive with least percentage used" would be the same anyway (which is why DATAEX8, being twice the size of all the others but one, was used first by DrivePool, and DATAEX7, being half the size of those others, presumably was used last). The equalizer should thus only be needing to move a small portion of your data between drives - except for DATAEX7 and DATAEX8 - and further you can adjust how aggressive the equalizer is via the "Automatic balancing" and "Automatic balancing - Triggers" sections.

All that said, based on what you've mentioned so far, I'd be inclined to leave the equalizer set to the default of "Equalize by free space remaining" and set the Automatic balancing schedule to "Balance every day at X" where X is a time you won't be using the drives for other things; scheduled file balancing is performed sequentially, one file at a time, so it won't be thrashing the drives. You can use a lower balance ratio and/or have a higher "this much data needs to be moved" if you wish, too, to find your preferred sweet spot.