I have been using Drive Pool for several years now, and it has been working just fine with a pool of similar-speed hard drives, set to keep the same amount of free space available across all of them, and certain directories set to be duplicated across some or all drives.
However I've moved everything to a new system which can hold more drives, and so I've added a pair of archive drives and a pair of SSDs to the pool, which is causing me grief.
The pool consists of:
120GB SSD
512GB SSD
4x 4TB HDDs
2x 9TB HDDs
2x 8TB Archive Drives
I can never get Drive Pool to keep files where I want them to be, and it seems like I'm fundamentally misunderstanding how the plug-in and file placement rules interact.
I've gone as far as disabling all other plug-ins, and it still doesn't work like I'd expect.
I have the two SSDs set up as "SSD" in the plug-in, and everything else set as an "Archive" drive. Ordered placement is as listed above, with the fastest drives at the top and the slower ones at the bottom of the list.
SSDs should be filled up to 95%, 'archive' drives up to 98% or 200GB free space (97% would be >200GB on the 9TB disks).
In the file placement rules, I have the "Apps" and "Documents" folders (which total ~15GB) explicitly set to be stored on the SSDs, though "Documents" is also set to be duplicated across all 10 drives.
I have "\Video\Current Projects\" set to be stored on the regular HDDs, and "\Video\Archived Projects\" set to be stored on the Archive HDDs.
The pool is constantly rebalancing, and I'll come back to it a day later to find that some of the drives are 30% or more fragmented. If I mount any of the drives, I can see that the files are scattered all over the place, not following the placement rules I have set at all.
The SSDs are nearly always empty, other than a small amount of duplicated data (which is different for each drive, somehow).
Currently, three of the HDDs have <100GB free space, despite the balancing rules being set to try and keep ~200GB free, and two of the other drives each having almost 1TB free.
Access to anything stored on the 8TB Archive drives is painfully slow now, with them often stalling for 10-20 seconds at a time, since they're SMR drives with bad fragmentation.
File Placement reports that it was unable to move 9TB of data because a suitable destination could not be found. There is currently 4TB of free space on the pool (I plan to add another drive shortly) and none of the balancing / duplication rules should be preventing them from being followed. The directories are smaller than the total space offered by the drives the rules point them at, even factoring in duplication. The largest files are ~100GB, though the vast majority are <40GB.
I spent some time over the weekend manually placing files as they should be, but three days later, it's back to how it was before.
I was also having problems with new files not being written to the SSDs at all, and prioritizing the slowest Archive drives for some reason (because they had the most free space?) but after disabling everything except the SSD Optimizer and StableBit Scanner plug-ins, that now seems to be working correctly.
I realize that this is a long and potentially confusing post, but any help would be appreciated.
Question
Andy2
I have been using Drive Pool for several years now, and it has been working just fine with a pool of similar-speed hard drives, set to keep the same amount of free space available across all of them, and certain directories set to be duplicated across some or all drives.
However I've moved everything to a new system which can hold more drives, and so I've added a pair of archive drives and a pair of SSDs to the pool, which is causing me grief.
The pool consists of:
I can never get Drive Pool to keep files where I want them to be, and it seems like I'm fundamentally misunderstanding how the plug-in and file placement rules interact.
I've gone as far as disabling all other plug-ins, and it still doesn't work like I'd expect.
I have the two SSDs set up as "SSD" in the plug-in, and everything else set as an "Archive" drive. Ordered placement is as listed above, with the fastest drives at the top and the slower ones at the bottom of the list.
SSDs should be filled up to 95%, 'archive' drives up to 98% or 200GB free space (97% would be >200GB on the 9TB disks).
In the file placement rules, I have the "Apps" and "Documents" folders (which total ~15GB) explicitly set to be stored on the SSDs, though "Documents" is also set to be duplicated across all 10 drives.
I have "\Video\Current Projects\" set to be stored on the regular HDDs, and "\Video\Archived Projects\" set to be stored on the Archive HDDs.
The pool is constantly rebalancing, and I'll come back to it a day later to find that some of the drives are 30% or more fragmented. If I mount any of the drives, I can see that the files are scattered all over the place, not following the placement rules I have set at all.
The SSDs are nearly always empty, other than a small amount of duplicated data (which is different for each drive, somehow).
Currently, three of the HDDs have <100GB free space, despite the balancing rules being set to try and keep ~200GB free, and two of the other drives each having almost 1TB free.
Access to anything stored on the 8TB Archive drives is painfully slow now, with them often stalling for 10-20 seconds at a time, since they're SMR drives with bad fragmentation.
File Placement reports that it was unable to move 9TB of data because a suitable destination could not be found. There is currently 4TB of free space on the pool (I plan to add another drive shortly) and none of the balancing / duplication rules should be preventing them from being followed. The directories are smaller than the total space offered by the drives the rules point them at, even factoring in duplication. The largest files are ~100GB, though the vast majority are <40GB.
I spent some time over the weekend manually placing files as they should be, but three days later, it's back to how it was before.
I was also having problems with new files not being written to the SSDs at all, and prioritizing the slowest Archive drives for some reason (because they had the most free space?) but after disabling everything except the SSD Optimizer and StableBit Scanner plug-ins, that now seems to be working correctly.
I realize that this is a long and potentially confusing post, but any help would be appreciated.
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