Jump to content
  • 0

Uneven Balancing


Greg

Question

DrivePool is placing more files on one drive in my pool than the others. I have tried removing it, cleaning it with diskpart, formatting, and adding it back to the pool. Has anyone experienced this? Anyone know how to fix it? 

It's my "J" drive in the screen shot below. DrivePool balances between them all, but "J" gets more than the rest. It's annoying since it is an older slower drive and I get buffering issues when streaming because it stacks newer files more on that drive.

I used to use the rebalancer plugin. I have added an SSD scratch drive ("B" drive) a few months back. So I installed SSD optimizer and uninstalled the rebalancer. I have installed newer betas attempting to resolve the issue also.

Thanks in advance.

image.thumb.png.7345f8e6f2980ca0cbdb0723c21e4aac.png

Link to comment
Share on other sites

2 answers to this question

Recommended Posts

  • 0

It appears to me that all your archive drives are at ~2TB from full. So it seems that there is some balancing going on in the background.

If you want only older files on your J: drive, I might be able to suggest a work around. You could move a bunch of old files (~7 TB) to a TEMP directory, then "remove" the J: drive from DrivePool to force all data off that drive, then add that J: drive back into DrivePool and manually copy all those old files from the TEMP directory to fill up the J: drive hidden PoolPart folder. You might have to shut off Automatic Balancing under the Settings in the Balancing menu so DrivePool does not attempt to write files to the newly added empty J: drive.

When done copying the old files into the J: drive hidden PoolPart, you could turn on automatic balancing again. DrivePool will remeasure the drives and see that your J: drive is almost full, and will not send new files to it anymore.

I think that would work. I did something like that when I moved 5TB of movies directly on to a drive in my pool in the PoolPart folder. DrivePool remeasured the drives, found all the new manually added files, and everything worked just fine for me.

6 hours ago, Greg said:

It's annoying since it is an older slower drive and I get buffering issues when streaming because it stacks newer files more on that drive.

You could try turning on the "Network I/O boost" under Manage Pool>Performance>Network I/O boost. That might help with buffering issues when streaming over a home network.

I just streamed content from my DrivePool. I open the DrivePool GUI and a 17 GB 1080p movie averages ~3 MB/s transfer rate, which is fast enough for no buffering on my home TV. I cannot imagine your HDD not being able to transfer data at a much faster speed. If I have a larger file than 20 GB, I start to see buffering, not because of DrivePool or my drive, but because of the limits of my Amazon Fire TV stick. I also see a difference between Plex and Kodi in performance. Some files just play better in one program than the other. If you have an older WiFi router, that could also cause buffering problems. I had to upgrade to a 1 gigabit router to maintain a strong 54 MB/s download speed on my system. My older router was not up to the task and I had constant buffering problems.

So I understand wanting to get the newest files on your fastest drives, but in the end your slower drive might have little or nothing to do with your buffering issues.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 0
On 12/3/2020 at 7:33 PM, Greg said:

it is an older slower drive and I get buffering issues when streaming because it stacks newer files more on that drive.

Just came across a YouTube video about streaming media files where the YouTuber stated that .mp4 files are more streaming friendly than .mkv files - something to do with the file types themselves. Almost of my media files are .mkv, and I do notice streaming buffering on ~15GB+ files, but have not tried converting a file of that size to .mp4. YouTuber also mentioned that in his case, the problem is with the device that connects to the computer. He was using Roku, but I see the same buffering problem(s) with my Amazon Fire TV Stick with large (~15GB+) files. Again, this leads me to believe that buffering issues may have not so much to do with slow drives or DrivePool, but perhaps other factors such as the devices we use on the TV end and the size/type of files we are trying to stream. It might be worth looking into. Good luck.

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...