Direct Copying Files between HDD DrivePool Folders

[jmone]

I'm adding a bunch of re-purposed 8TB Archive Drives to my backup pool on WS2016 Essentials so I can reformat the existing ones to ReFS V3.1 - Using the File Balancer to do this will take about 15 Days as it reads / writes one file at a time.  I know it is not recomended but I could:

- Stop DrivePool

- Copy the contents from the Hidden DrivePool Folder at the same time "OldDisk1 --> NewDisk2" / "OldDisk2 --> NewDisk2" / etc etc

- Restart DrivePool

By doing this I could get 4 parallel streams and hence it would be much quicker..... but what am I going to break (if anything) with DrivePool (apart from the pool being offline)? ...or is there a way of making the Balancer do multi streams?

Thanks

Nathan

 

Edit - I've started the above process on 3 x 6tb --> 3 x 8tb hdds - will report back how it goes but is (as expected) much quicker (if I don't ruin my pool in the process)

[Jaga]

It won't break anything, but you'll want to force a re-measure on the pool afterwards, especially if you changed locations/added/deleted any files during the copy.

[Christopher (Drashna)]

That may cause issues.... Namely, with the PoolPart folders. 

But if you want, this should work better:
http://wiki.covecube.com/StableBit_DrivePool_F1655

[Jaga]

Correct me if I'm mistaken, but I thought the PoolPart folders were free to be read from / written too freely (like with the trick of installing games directly to them).  It would throw off pool measurements, but that's easily corrected.  If we're just moving contents of one PoolPart folder to another, wouldn't that be the same?

[jmone]

Thanks for the tips.  The manual copy of the old 3 x 6tb --> 3 x 8tb hdd has finished, just checking the pool (also with FreeFileSycn the contents against my production pool) and then I'll remove the 6tb hdd, reformat as ReFS 3.1, re-add, then repeat the process starting with the older 4tb hdd.  All of this takes ages of course.  I'd really rather do this all through the UI but as pools and discs get larger, the lack of parallelism starts making some of the operations very long.  To get some parallelism it would be good to allow multiple "Remove Drive 1 and copy to Drive A" + "Remove Drive 2 and copy to Drive B" etc.

[Christopher (Drashna)]

On 7/22/2018 at 2:30 PM, Jaga said:

Correct me if I'm mistaken, but I thought the PoolPart folders were free to be read from / written too freely (like with the trick of installing games directly to them).  It would throw off pool measurements, but that's easily corrected.  If we're just moving contents of one PoolPart folder to another, wouldn't that be the same?

The other problem is balancing and duplication.  Ideally, you want to stop the service before moving files around too. 

And ... generally discourage people from going so, as it may cause other complications long term. 

 

 

On 7/20/2018 at 5:46 PM, jmone said:

Using the File Balancer to do this will take about 15 Days as it reads / writes one file at a time

Is with boosting the priority? 

Either in the UI or by setting "FileBalance_BackgroundIO" to false? 

[jmone]

3 hours ago, Christopher (Drashna) said:

Is with boosting the priority? 

Either in the UI or by setting "FileBalance_BackgroundIO" to false? 

Yup - it is because it does one disc at a time instead of (in my case) 3 Old Discs --> 3 New Discs in parallel.  It all went fine BTW.  I'm now in the final process of using the balancer to do the final empty of 2 old 4TB disks to one new 8TB disk.

[jmone]

...and "Remove Disk" is even slower when you are using the "SSD Optimizer" as it first copies the data to the SSD then to the Archive Discs (eg it does not just copy the data to the new disk).

[Jaga]

1 hour ago, jmone said:

It all went fine BTW.

Good to hear it.