Create two pools on same physical disk

[slongmire]

Here's what I have - two identical HGST 8tb sata drives - each partitioned (gpt) identically as - Partition 1 2.4tb; Partition 2 5tb.

What I want is to create two independent drive pools as - DP M (Movies) = Disk1 partition1 + Disk 2 Partition 1 and DP Q (datafiles) = Disk1 partition1 + Disk 2 Partition 2

The reason is to improve routine operations such as defrag and backups since the movies parition will change very rarely (only when a new movie is ripped) but the datafiles change constantly. THus the movies partition rarely needs to be backup up (certainly not daily) but the datafiles does need daily backups.

I want to have duplication of each of the pools across the two physical drives.

1> CAN I do this?

2> How? Is it as simple as just creating the two pools as though the partitions are "real disks"?

 

Once I can get the two pools created I need to move the movies from an existing drivepool which currently contains everything and takes nearly 15 hours to backup across the lan (1Gps ehternet).

 

Many thanks for your help now as well as in the past! 

[Umfriend]

Yes, that's the way two do it: 2 partitions, assign one to one Pool and the other to another Pool.

I would not recommend it though. If it is about backup then you could specify a backup excluding the movies folder. If it is about defrag, the movies won;t get fregmented so there is no issue there. It's not about the size of the disk/partition but abou thow much must be replaced.

The last time I heard about defragging being a concern is, I don't know, 15 years ago?

[slongmire]

Thanks -

I understand your comment about the backup - unfortunately I have been caught in a continuing issue with Macrium Reflect over excluding directories (as I use the Image Backup method rather than the file-by-file method) - when excluded directories are specified I get failed backups with errors about network resource not available and/or file not found-aborting. I have worked with Macrium several times over this and the simplest method is to just separate out the Movies from everything else.

I would love to have enough space/resources to just put the movies on their 2 disks and the data on its 2 disks, but my pc has 3 slots for drives - all full - and the esata port is occupied by the Bluray Disk. So - this was my idea for a solution.

 

Why would you not recommend the 2-disk 2-partition plan (if I can call it that for simplicity's sake)? 

[Umfriend]

I was a bit to quick as I don't know your use-case. But if you run a server that is used by more people who could cause I/O on both partitions, then the HDD performance will suffer as the head actually needs to run from one partition to the other. But such a scenario might not at all be relevant for you. And heck, backups over performance, I say.

In any case, your 2-disk 2-partition plan will work (I had a similar setup for a while). If you have the budget and the machine is somewhat up-time critical, you might consider having a third 8TB HDD handy in case of a failure.

[slongmire]

Sort of a final follow-up here - I did create the two drivepools  - the first comprising partition 1 of HDD 1 and HDD2; the second comprising Partition 2 HDD1 and HDD2. Both are working perfectly and the tiered Macrium backups are now blazingly fast! The initial backups took a while, of course, because they had to be full backups, but the subsequent differential and interval backups are done so fast I first thought they weren't running. 

 

Many thanks to Umfriend for help and insight into potential issues - and many thanks to the whole CoveCube team as well!