1:1 Duplication and their "Free Space" in the Pool

[CharredChar]

I am currently using DrivePool on two sets of disks, one of which are two 1TB drives that I have set up to duplicate each other as well as show up as a single pool. This is mostly used for more important documents, photos as well as the most accessed disks on the system such as the downloads folder.

 

One "issue" I have been having with doing it this way is that the "Free Space" shown as available is the total of the two, which in most cases is what you'd want. The problem I have with that in my use case is it is really half as much. This is not so much of an issue if I Always (not the case) remember that it should be half when I go to allocate space for something but it also becomes a bother since I do have some automated tasks going to that disk and they will look at the total free space before executing. If there any way to work around this?

[Christopher (Drashna)]

There isn't really a work around for this. 

 

Specifically, even if you're using x2 for the "pool file duplication" to enable duplication on the entire disk, we can't be 100% certain of that. 

 

You could have different levels of duplication on the pool. 

 

We could "fix" this by running some calculations each time that the free space was queried.  But that would be essentially checking the duplication status of the ENTIRE pool every time.  Which would add significant overhead.  Or even cache it and look for changes. 
And then there is the said calculations, which would also add overhead.

 

The simplest method is to report the combined free space of all of the drives.   This is the simplest and most compatible method to calculate the free space. 

[CharredChar]

I was figuring as much, just based off when you re-measure or re-balance. I was just wondering if there would be a simple option I missed or some way to implement to just report half of current without needing to remeasure beyond what the drive is currently reporting. Thank you for the detailed information.

[Christopher (Drashna)]

Yeah, it would be nice if we could, but that's one of the disadvantages of a file based pooling solution.

 

And you're very welcome. We tend to be (like to be) verbose with our answers.  A short answer is rarely helpful enough. So we'd rather include a bunch of information and explanations why.  And that very least, it may help somebody to understand the explanation better.