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Did I do this correctly? Cut/Paste From/To Pool


SkOrPn

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Well I finished installing new drive and new DrivePool installation.

 

What I did was copied all the data from the server to a new hdd that was big enough (2TB) through the network. I then removed the two drives that were already in the server (1.5tb & 1tb) cleaning them up and wiping them. I put the new drive (2tb) with all my data back into the server along with one of my other drives (1tb) that was empty and freshly formatted. The other drive (1.5tb) will go in tomorrow once it is finished with its Surface Re-initialization Write operation.

 

So, I have this at the moment.

A: Pool (A:ServerFolders)

C: SSD for OS (NOT part of the Pool)

D: 2TB = 75% Full (Pooled Drive)

E: 1TB = 100% Empty (Pooled Drive)

 

I then installed DP, I selected both those drives as part of the Pool. Everything great so far. I then noticed that the Pool (A:) instantly showed 1.55 TB free space (should be almost 2.73tb and empty) but when I went inside nothing is there, no folders. So, I then used the Dashboard (WHS2011) to re-create missing ServerFolders into the A: Pool. After the new folders were re-created I then simply "CUT/PASTE" the data from the large 2TB into the newly created A:ServerFolder/xx. About 7 folders in all. All the folders that had small amounts of data say 20gb here and there went smoothly and quickly but the large folders 1.2TB says it will take 12 hours to move the data. Is this correct? It only took me an hour tops (if that) to transfer over the network this 1.3TB, but it now needs 12 hours? Isn't the data pretty much on the same drive anyway? Since auto balancing will not take place for another three hours (2AM) am I going to be safe or will DP think I am running out of space? I think it says I have 2.57 TB of total space but only 1.55 free.

 

I also accidentally hit the Balancing button (hey it said it was not optimized) before the cut/paste operation finished (just now as I type this). So not only is Explorer trying to cut/paste 1.2TB of data which it claims will take 12 hours, DrivePool is also trying to balance everything, lol. Will it take 12 hours to balance also? I assume as the data moves from D: to the Pool A: it will continuously balance? Normally when you cut and paste it is a fast operation.

 

I am going to leave it to work all night but I thought I would ask here before I slip into bed if I did everything alright. I'm sure I am OK but if I did something bad please let me know. Thanks

 

Rod

 

EDIT: Ok maybe its Ok. In the time it took to write this post it went down to 7 hours estimation. Stupid windows explorer lol

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Ideally you should move the data on the individual disks into the poolpart.xxxxxx folder.  This would take seconds not hours.

 

All data on D drive moved directly into the poolpart.xxxx and the same for the E drive, then balance.

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Ideally you should move the data on the individual disks into the poolpart.xxxxxx folder. This would take seconds not hours.

 

All data on D drive moved directly into the poolpart.xxxx and the same for the E drive, then balance.

Ok that is where I went wrong then. However upon checking the server this morning all is well.

 

Strange I thought DP balances the data evenly across drives? If one drive is 931gb and the other 1.8tb doesn't that mean the larger drive should have approximately twice the data? DP put only 130gb on the 1TB and 1.1tb on the larger drive. I'm kinda confused now.

 

Other than that all is well and seems very stable. Thanks

 

EDIT: Never mind me I guess It's balancing the free space not the used space which makes perfect sense to me. There is exactly 800 GB of free space on both drives. Lol

Rod

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Actually, unless you have installed the "Disk Space Equalizer" balancer, it won't equalize the space across the disks.

 

Well, that is unless you're adding new files. New files tend to be placed on the drives with the most space available, which will tend to equalize the disks eventually. But the "Disk Space Equalizer" balancer enforces this behavior.

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Actually, unless you have installed the "Disk Space Equalizer" balancer, it won't equalize the space across the disks.

 

Well, that is unless you're adding new files. New files tend to be placed on the drives with the most space available, which will tend to equalize the disks eventually. But the "Disk Space Equalizer" balancer enforces this behavior.

 

I just today became aware of having to use plug-ins and how the Balancers tab works. I added the third drive and after a few hours nothing was happening with it and that is when I dug deeper and found the plug-ins page.

 

Quick question and guidance needed please. 

 

1. Is there any known guides to using DP efficiently for Home Server users? Recommended settings for different types of users? 

2. How do I determine if % or Free space is best for a particular situation? I mean % seems better to me but free space is default. Why is free space set as default?

3. What if I have a drive that is not 100% healthy? I have a drive that is 79% Healthy with 100% performance. SMART reports that there is 21 bad sectors that were moved and the remaining surface is perfect and full performance. However, the others are all 100% Healthy. Should I continue using that drive in an equal way or should I set it up to use the other two equally and leave that not so healthy drive for just in case I run out of space on the other two? I currently have the Balancer keeping all three drives balanced by %.

 

I love this software I must say. Its making me want to search for another motherboard with more sata ports, lol... So I can throw more drives at this thing :-)

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  1. Efficently? Recommended?

    It really depends on what you mean, and what you want.

  2. Depends on preference. IF the disks are the same size, then it doesn't matter, you'll ge the same. But my recommendation is percentage.
  3. If the drive is marked as damaged by Scanner (if you have that installed as well), then it will attempt to migrate data off of it.

    You can configure it to do the same with SMART errors.

    And for either, you can set it to move unduplicated and/or duplicated files off the drive in either the damaged or SMART error state.

    Also, it can be set to avoid using drives that have exceeded the temperate threshold, as these drives are more likely to fail.

     

    However, adding a "health" rating, and using that to avoid using disks is a good idea, and I'll pass that onto Alex.

ANd I'm glad that you love our software! :)

 

As for more drives.... there are other options... pricy... but ..... I'd recommend any LSI chipset based card. They're expensive ($200 range), but 2x miniSAS SFF-8087 cables means 8 SATA HDDs without using expanders. ....

 

That, or I blame a friend for this link, as I can actually use it (Norco RPC 4220, with 20 hotswap bays):

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813157470

 

22 SATA Ports, and .... uses LSI chipset and an expander to accomplish this. And it's a haswell board. But I don't "need" it. Per se. 

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OMG, pardon the abbreviations but WTF? LMAO 22 ports on a single board. Where's the extreme drooling emoticon when you need it? And I thought my Asus Rampage looked good with 10 ports, lol, but wow 22.

 

Yeah, I was looking at cards yesterday, but my server is using an old BFG board (out of biz company) based on NVIDIA's 650i Ultra. I would prefer to spend the $ and get something with an ICH10R and an Intel chipset, which is probably the most stable option for this Intel Quad. An ICH10R would get me at least 6 ports, 1 used by the OS drive leaving me with 5 ports for 5 2TB drives. And I can continue to use the memory and Intel cpu I already have. This old BFG board does feel quite stable and its been keeping the Q6600 at 3ghz for several years now and not once complaining about it. However, to put it bluntly, the storage controller and PCIe slots suck so I'd rather do away with this board.

 

What Id really like to do is put 22 Samsung 840 Pros (1TB Models) on the ASROCK Board, haha. Everything on my main rig is raided with super fast Samsung 840 Pro SSD's, so having a bunch of SSD's in the Server would allow the transfer speeds to match what my Machine feeds it. But I will wake up now...  ;)  

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LOL. I though that you'd appreciate that.

If it makes you feel any better, I've been drooling over that since  friend pointed it out. And trying to see if I can justify it... and how hard it would be to migrate from my AMD FX cpu. And .... yeah. And that board uses an LSI chipset for all those ports. Which is awesome. :)

 

 

As for transfer speed... 125MB/s max theoretical for gigabit network. That's not accounting for overhead, and "regular" traffic. And assumes high quality cards, and cabling. And no interference. :)

So, I'm not sure how effecting RAIDing 22 SSDs would be. But it would be damn fast locally!

 

Aside from that, I'd recommend ASUS motherboads. They have been very hit or miss in the past, but when you get a good board.... they're awesome. And if you're upgrading and willing to spend a bit of money (maybe not $500 for a mobo), I'd recommend trying to find something that uses ECC RAM. It may make the system that much more stable.  As for onboard, yeah, the ICH chipsets are pretty good. But if you really do want to RAID SSDs, make sure you get a chipset that actually supports TRIM in that raid. :)

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I'm a huge Asus fan, probably on my 30th Asus mobo. Back between the mid 1990's to about 2010 I was rebuilding the PC two to three times a year and sometimes more. About the time AMD 64 came around I was building a new system every other month practically and very few times did I venture away from Asus. Yeah I had a few Gigabytes, DFI LanParty's, and several others (I even had TWO ABIT BP6's overclocked at one time), but for the most part I am an Asus guy. This mobo I'm on now is my second Rampage III Extreme and its been super rock stable for me. I write my own BIOS's for it just so I can keep it up to date. I only have a i7-930 but it runs happily at 4ghz so even today still see no reason to upgrade. Not until Haswell-E anyway. OH, I just had an idea, I will probably not do anything to my server for now and just use this Asus mobo I have now. It has 9 SATA ports directly on the PCB and a 10th on the rear I/O panel. I cant imagine 8 ports not being enough for this family. Sure speeds will be limited but one day there will be SSD's that are affordable and still work on SATA II. And if not at least I have four PCIe 2.0 x16 slots I can utilize with a LSI card ;) 

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Well, that's cool to hear that you write your own BIOS's. :)

 

And yeah, I'm an ASUS fan too. Though, that ASRock board.... :drool: Yeah.

 

But I've had ASUS boards that just do stupid weird things. Like never sleep right, no matter what you do, bios update or not. Or other weirder stuff. Hence the hit or miss. But when you hit... the board is GOLD. :)

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Oh, and just an idea for the "efficently" bit....

 

There is a "fsutil" command that allows you to increase the memory size used for file system cache. This may speed up performance on ... well all the disks, and reduce disk activity (like when DrivePool queries for the file/directory list).  I'll have to dig it up, but if you have a lot of unused RAM, it wouldn't be a bad idea at all.

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Oh, and just an idea for the "efficently" bit....

 

There is a "fsutil" command that allows you to increase the memory size used for file system cache. This may speed up performance on ... well all the disks, and reduce disk activity (like when DrivePool queries for the file/directory list).  I'll have to dig it up, but if you have a lot of unused RAM, it wouldn't be a bad idea at all.

 

 

I'm not sure what the RAM limit is on this old board but I only have 4gb. I was going to get more but damn RAM has increased in $ so much that I can't get myself to buy more old school DDR2. I have used fsutil in the past I believe but not sure.

 

What about throwing in a LSI HBA? Isn't the new HBA's from them have something like 1 million iops rating and something like 500 MB/s speeds on each port?

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That depends on the PCIe generation that a) the card is and B) the slot is. 

 

v1.x: 250 MB/s (2.5 GT/s)
v2.x: 500 MB/s (5 GT/s)
v3.0: 985 MB/s (8 GT/s)
v4.0: 1969 MB/s (16 GT/s)

 

Also, this is "per lane". As in per "times" it is. so a PCIe 2.0 x4, is a 4 lane card, so it can get 2GB/s or 20GT/s assuming that the motherboard is also a) running that same generation, and B) capable of that many lanes.

 

 

Wikipedia has a lot more information about that.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PCI_Express

 

And to be honest, I'm using a IBM m1115 card, that has been cross flashed to an LSI 2008 "IT" card. Meaning no RAID on it, just HBA. Works really great for my server.

And I don't really keep up with the higher end storage stuff. It gets crazy expensive fast. 

 

 

As for the RAM... 4GBs isn't enough to really do that, I think. Too much RAM in use to be useful.

But if you're interested:

fsutil behavior set memoryusage 2
Unfortunately there isn't any specific amount that you can set. It's "default" at 1, or "more" at 2.
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