Drivepool and defraggler

[Bjohnson]

Hi all - just installed drivepool and scanner and everything was going great until I started getting windows notifications that my drives were full. 

When I first installed drivepool I had four drives that I pooled.  Only one was really full.  It seems that drivepool has balanced everything and now two of the smaller drives are full showing 0 bytes left and the constant windows notifications.  The drive that was full (4tb) is now half empty.

Am I doing something wrong?  I also use defraggler and have move large files to end of drive enabled - could that have something to do with it?

All settings are set to default.  

Thanks for any advice!  I use this pool for Plex mainly along with photo archive - is the SSD plugin a good idea for this purpose?

[Jaga]

Using a defragmenter on the drives in the pool won't hurt anything - Drivepool doesn't care where on the disks the files reside.  But letting a drive get to 0 bytes available can be a real issue for Windows (it doesn't like it one bit).

Due to your space issues and different drive sizes, you should probably enable and use the "Prevent Drive Overfill" plugin in Drivepool.  You can get there by clicking the up arrow next to Manage Pool, then "Balancing...", then the Balancers Tab.  Find the plugin in the list and enable it, and try to set a reasonable "max full percentage" on the drives based on how much free space you have left (total).  Then move it up the order with the up arrow on the right so it's near the top.  You'll have to kick off a manual re-balance for it to take effect (usually turning on the balance immediately switch works).  If it doesn't kick off straight away, do a re-measure on the pool and it should.

The SSD plugin really only helps with speeding up pool write speeds, and it will migrate files that land on the SSD to the regular pool disks so they don't stay there.  It's not considered permanent pool storage, unless the rest of the pool is completely full, in which case it would (reluctantly) continue to hold the files it stored.

 

Edited August 28, 2018 by Jaga
Clarified SSD behavior when pool is full.

[Bjohnson]

18 minutes ago, Jaga said:

Using a defragmenter on the drives in the pool won't hurt anything - Drivepool doesn't care where on the disks the files reside.  But letting a drive get to 0 bytes available can be a real issue for Windows (it doesn't like it one bit).

Due to your space issues and different drive sizes, you should probably enable and use the "Prevent Drive Overfill" plugin in Drivepool.  You can get there by clicking the up arrow next to Manage Pool, then "Balancing...", then the Balancers Tab.  Find the plugin in the list and enable it, and try to set a reasonable "max full percentage" on the drives based on how much free space you have left (total).  Then move it up the order with the up arrow on the right so it's near the top.  You'll have to kick off a manual re-balance for it to take effect (usually turning on the balance immediately switch works).  If it doesn't kick off straight away, do a re-measure on the pool and it should.

The SSD plugin really only helps with speeding up pool write speeds, and it will migrate files that land on the SSD to the regular pool disks so they don't stay there.  It's not considered permanent pool storage, and wouldn't help expand the size of your effective pool (if that's what you were looking to do).

 

Thanks Jaga - appreciate the quick response.

 

Cheers!

[Jaga]

Most welcome, always happy to help.

[Umfriend]

Still, it is weird. With default settings, DP would write to HDDs that have most absolute space free. For example, if you have a Pool of 1x4TB and 2x2TB HDDs then the 4TB would be used solely for the first 2TB of data. So I don't understand how this could have happened.

[Bjohnson]

Hmm - enabled that plugin and forced a re-balance but still no joy.  Any other suggestions at all?

[Umfriend]

Reset everything to defautl settings, re-balance and then provide screenprints of DP showing the HDDs.

Hmm, can't attach as I reached the limit and cannot delete old attachments.. Anyway, we want to see how many HDDs, capacity, usage and where the small triangles are. It is located under Disks in the UI on the right side.

 

[Jaga]

What Umfriend said - screens would be helpful.     Sidenote:  if the Prevent Drive Overfill plugin isn't near (or at) the top of the plugin list, it might get trumped by a different balancing algorithm.

[Bjohnson]

Well looks like it figured it out after all.  I started receiving errors on one of my drives and it looks like it may have started evacuating that drive.  Is there any sort of notification when this occurs?

[Jaga]

If you have it configured in Scanner it'll email/text/push-alert you when a drive has issues.  Drivepool also has email notifications, but they're a little hidden.  Click the gear icon in the upper right, choose Notifications, then "Notify by email..".

Glad you were able to figure out what was going on!

[Bjohnson]

Thats what i thought - I've set that up and receive the test email ok but didn't receive any other notifications about sector errors...  Guess I will just see how it goes.  Thanks again.