Jump to content
  • 0

Direct Copying Files between HDD DrivePool Folders


jmone

Question

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)

Link to comment
Share on other sites

8 answers to this question

Recommended Posts

  • 0

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?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 0

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.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 0
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? 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 0
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.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Join the conversation

You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.

Guest
Answer this question...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Paste as plain text instead

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.

Loading...
×
×
  • Create New...