Move existing data from outside the pool inside the pool, on the same hard disk

[ZuperMario]

Hello, i'm a new user and i'm trying DrivePool.

What's the best/fastest way to move pre-existing data from a hard drive into a pool that also includes that same hard drive? I have a computer with a couple of multi-terabyte drives that are already occupied, and I want to "join" them using DrivePool. Once I've created the pool which includes the same hard drives that already contain data OUTSIDE of the pool, can I move the files from the original folder to the pool's folder while avoiding the very long operation of reading and writing the same terabytes from the same disk to the same disk? In other words, I would like to perform a "logical" move, since the disks are physically the same, and I would like to avoid the significant thermal and mechanical stress of reading and writing the same terabytes just to change the folder that contains them (I always use Total Commander for file operations, and a true "MOVE" of even a gigantic file from one folder to another on the same disk is immediate and does not require reading/writing the file itself).

Thanks.

[Shane]

Hi! Yes, you can perform an intra-drive "move to new location" operation instead of an inter-drive "copy to new location and delete from old location" operation.

This is called seeding and the official wiki article is here. However my advice is to create a temporary unique* folder in each drive's hidden poolpart folder and move your data into that folder rather than just into the poolpart folder itself, and THEN access those folders via the pool drive to move them from there to wherever you want their final position to be and then delete the temporary unique folders. This reduces the risk of accidentally overlapping any data. I also don't reset DrivePool's settings store afterwards; instead I use Manage Pool -> Re-measure and Cog (upper right) -> Recheck Duplication in the GUI.

* so different names on different drives, that didn't already exist on the pool, e.g. on drive D you might create d:\poolpart.1234\seedtemp.d\ while on drive E you might create e:\poolpart.5678\seedtemp.e\ and so forth.