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Drive Letters and Balancing


Simon

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New user here who is keen to move to DrivePool and SnapRAID from FlexRAID as it seems more transparent and better supported. On a trial for DrivePool and Scanner at the moment and have hit a couple of areas that I would like to get a bit of advice on before going any further:

 

1. The initial Drivepool setup has chosen a drive letter that I want to change. I have now filled the pool quite a bit, and added a couple of shared folders, is it still as simple as making the adjustment in Disk Management or do I need to follow a more complex procedure?

 

2. When changing drive letters (or any other disk tasks) do I need to exit DrivePool or Scanner? To close either down is there anything more to it than the top right X as Scanner still seems to show notifications after the window is closed, but there is no right click menu in the notification tray icon.

 

3. When cutting and pasting folders round inside a drive pool, am I right in thinking by default it keeps the files on the same drive and just moves them to a matching folder on that drive? Interested as the moving seemed instant at the time.

 

4. Given my intended setup of using with SnapRAID, I do not want the drives changing the location of existing data regularly. What I would ideally like to do is run a balancing process once when the majority of my data is moved across, then have Drivepool only balance new data it is adding. What would be the best method to achieve this? I can see the Disk Space Equalizer plugin which I am guessing installing, running then removing will get the balance sorted, what is the best settings for the balancing after that?

 

Thanks in advance for any advice  :)

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Hi

 

for 2) - both dp and scanner run as a service - so closing the UI does not stop them running - have changed drive names (my drives are mounted with no drive letter) while scanner and dp we running with no issues - dp and scanner use the unc path for the drive not the letter/mountpoint

 

for 3) if you cut and paste on the same drive all you are doing is changing the "path" to the file - no actual move takes place - this is no different than normal windows

 

for 1) not done this but i suspect it will not cause a problem - if you are worried then stop the two services for dp and scanner - change the drive letter and restart the services

 

4) depends :) - are you using a ssd cache?

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Hi

 

for 2) - both dp and scanner run as a service - so closing the UI does not stop them running - have changed drive names (my drives are mounted with no drive letter) while scanner and dp we running with no issues - dp and scanner use the unc path for the drive not the letter/mountpoint

 

for 3) if you cut and paste on the same drive all you are doing is changing the "path" to the file - no actual move takes place - this is no different than normal windows

 

for 1) not done this but i suspect it will not cause a problem - if you are worried then stop the two services for dp and scanner - change the drive letter and restart the services

 

4) depends :) - are you using a ssd cache?

 

Thanks for that Spider and sorry for the slow reply.

 

 I have successfully shifted round all my drive letters now and raised Drivepool up to E:\ . It was very OCD, but I wanted to have the array in the same order of letters as bay numbers. I have also manually juggled files whilst setting up to create a rough balance.

 

 With the continual balancing I am not looking to use an SSD cache at all, just want Drivepool to balance on adding data then leave drives dormant if that makes sense.

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  1. Yes, just change the drive letter in Disk Management. 
  2. Nope.  The software will pick up the change automatically, though it may take a minute or two for this to be reflected in the UI.
  3. Yes. This is referred by windows as "Smart Move".  Where instead of moving the data around, it just updates the files's location (eg, what folder it is under).   This is obviously much faster and much more efficient.  This doesn't always happen, but it should 99.9999% of the time (it depends on how full the disks are, really. 
  4. Basically, this should happen by default, for the most part. But I would recommend unchecking balancers rather than disabling balancing here. 

    But let me summarize each of the balancers (not in order), regarding their likelihood to move data: 

    • StableBit Scanner - This balancer will only move data around if there is a disk error.  If there isn't any issues with the disk, this shouldn't move data around at all.  If there are, it should immediately (triggered event) start moving all of the data off the drive. 
    • Volume Equalization -  This manages data on different volumes of the same disk (eg, partitions). If you're not partitioning data, this won't affect you at all.
    • Drive usage Limiter (aka File Placement Limiter) - Allows you to set a drive to allow duplicated data, unduplicated data, or both.  Unless you change this, it won't cause data to be moved. 
    • Dupllication Space Optimizer - This balancer reduces "Unusable for duplication" space, by rebalancing data to be in a more "optimal" configuration.  This can cause data to be rebalanaced if you have a lot of "unsuable for duplication" space on the pool. 
    • Prevent Drive Overfill - This is the balancer that is most likely to cause issues.  This will semi-aggressively move data off of a disk if it gets too full. Specifically, if a drive is 90% or more full, it will balance data so that it is only 85% full.  This is configurable, and can be done with size measurements (100GB free to 200GB free). 
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