Balancing won't balance.

[CityguyUSA]

This is the message at the bottom of the screen when I hover over the balancing arrow.  I just added a new drive and placed it in the order I want it filled using the Ordered File Placement balancer rules at the very bottom of this post.

When I hover over the blue arrow it tells me there are 763GB available but it won't move the 641GB that it says should be moved?

 

 

[Shane]

Does a Manage Pool -> Re-measure, followed by attempting a manual Re-balance, have any effect?

[CityguyUSA]

I didn't re-measure because it didn't seem like there was a measuring issue.  It was telling me what I was seeing that it wasn't optimized and when I tried to do a manual re-balance it just would comeback and give the same result stating that it wasn't optimized... and even though I could see that there was plenty of room to move files from the drive that I had protected for larger files it just wouldn't.  In the meantime a backup occured that has used up the remaining space on the "protected" drive that should have offloaded some files onto the smaller drives.  I guess technically those files could still be moved off the unbalanced target is still at the same place on the protected drive.

I just tried a re-measure but the result it still the same except now there's more that won't move.

I don't know the size of the individual files except that it was saying that it had 741gb to move prior which there was empty space on the other drives that would have accomdated that.  Now we're at an impass.

[Shane]

Do you have any rules set in Manage Pool -> Balancing -> File Placement -> Rules that could be conflicting with the Ordered File Placement balancer plug-in?

[CityguyUSA]

This rule which is the one I talk about potecting the largest drive for files written to folder DriveV.

[CityguyUSA]

I freed up about 2TB of space.  I thought that would cause a rebalance but nothing so far.

[Shane]

I suspect the warnings are because the Ordered File Placement balancer is conflicting with the File Placement rules.

If you want the rules for DriveV to have priority, try un-ticking "File placement rules respect real-time file placement limits set by the balancing plug-ins" in Settings.

[CityguyUSA]

I changed it.  Should that kickoff a rebalancing?

[CityguyUSA]

Nothing.  Still at the same place.  It still looks like the last image I uploaded.

I am curious about the unduplicated arrow on the bottom disk and why it's at a different place than the others?

[Shane]

Are you still getting the warning in the File Placement section?

[CityguyUSA]

Yes

[Shane]

Hmm. Should be working, so I'd guess something about the files needing to be moved is confusing DrivePool's process.

For DriveV try changing it to "Allow files to be placed on other disks" to see if that has any effect?

You could also try temporarily removing the DriveV rule so that the Ordered File Placement balancer can arrange the content to its liking then put the rule back to see if it stays un-confused.

Beyond that I think I'd be out of ideas other than manually moving some of files between the poolpart disks and then forcing a remeasure.

[CityguyUSA]

Before I change those settings...

Here is a copy of the message at the top of the File Placement dialog.

It almost sounds as if it wants to move the entire 2.19TB of data from wherever it is (I'm assuming multiple drives) to one drive rather than writing seperate files to different drives.