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Folder placement balancing question/suggestion


SantiagoDraco

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First off... great start!   Been waiting for this for some time since posting a while back and so happy to see it.  Now to get more drives to make room for this to work ;)

 

So to my questions and suggestions.

 

In the Balancing > File Placement > Folders section I see the list of folders and then the list of available drives on the right for creation of that relationship...

1.  Would it be possible to add the actual drive model/size to the list of drives?  

2.  If I remember correctly you said you do some level of performance measuring in DP (not sure to what extent).   Does this info lend itself to applying a "good/better/best" color flagging to the drives in this list to gauge relative actual performance?

3.  If not (or maybe as an enhancement to 2 above) have you thought of adding the ability to, on a schedule or manually, "test" all drives for performance indexing that can be applied to my suggestion 2 or some other way?

4.  If you are selecting folders/drives in the folders tab and you hit "save" the entire dialog closes.   Please add an "apply" button to create the actual rule rather than having every click create a rule.   The problem here is you can easily end up with rules that don't automatically remove themselves if you "uncheck" what you changed.  

5.  When navigating down folders in the tree child folders should always display the drive selection of it's parent folder unless explicitly changed. 

6.  Along the lines of the apply/save comment maybe it could be "apply to rules" in the folders tab for the current selection(s) and then a ".   Of course I know buttons should usually have single word but just stating as for examples sake.

 

 

 

Have you thought of creating more traditional rules that can be grown/expanded as needed? For example I might have a rule called "HD movies" and within that rule are all the folders and drives that apply to that rule.   So I can have one rule for a given set of folders and assigned drives.  If I delete that rule I remove all those custom relationships.  If I ever want to assign a new folder to the rule I can just add the folder to the rule without having to create an entire new set of folder/drive assignments per folder.   Assuming this makes sense.    So in your Rules pane you'd have:

 

RuleName1

+Folders:

-- Folder 1

-- Folder 2

-- Folder 3

+Drives

-- Drive 1

-- Drive 2

-- Drive 3

 

RuleName2

+Folders

-- Folder 5

-- Folder 6

+Drives

-- Drive 2

-- Drive 4

-- Drive 5

 

 

Questions/comments aside thanks for such a great product.  I don't know what I'd do without it... maybe use raid again /shudder.

 

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First off... great start!   Been waiting for this for some time since posting a while back and so happy to see it.  Now to get more drives to make room for this to work ;)

 

So to my questions and suggestions.

 

In the Balancing > File Placement > Folders section I see the list of folders and then the list of available drives on the right for creation of that relationship...

1.  Would it be possible to add the actual drive model/size to the list of drives?

This could be useful information. I've changed the the labels of my drives in Windows Explorer to show the size/primary contents of each just for my own reference (e.g. (Hitachi 2TB - Videos) E:)

 

2. If I remember correctly you said you do some level of performance measuring in DP (not sure to what extent). Does this info lend itself to applying a "good/better/best" color flagging to the drives in this list to gauge relative actual performance?

 

This would be helpful, especially for someone who doesn't have a firm idea of their drive's real world speed. Also lends itself to adding some sort of one click auto configure to setup a feeder/archive disk setup when you setup a pool. "We detected that one of your drives is significantly faster than the rest of your pool. Would you like it to be used as a high speed landing zone for your pool? Yes/No"

 

3. If not (or maybe as an enhancement to 2 above) have you thought of adding the ability to, on a schedule or manually, "test" all drives for performance indexing that can be applied to my suggestion 2 or some other way?

 

I'm not sure how useful it would be to have it automatically retesting performance of a drive. As a rule the drive speed shouldn't change much. Maybe in the instance of an older SSD without TRIM you could use that information to zero out empty space on some sort of schedule? Not sure, just throwing out ideas.

 

4. If you are selecting folders/drives in the folders tab and you hit "save" the entire dialog closes. Please add an "apply" button to create the actual rule rather than having every click create a rule. The problem here is you can easily end up with rules that don't automatically remove themselves if you "uncheck" what you changed.

Yes, an Apply button would be nice. It's not clear at first that you can create a bunch of Folder rules at once. Normal instinct says if I click away from something and it disappears than it's gone forever unless I clicked Save or Apply.

 

5. When navigating down folders in the tree child folders should always display the drive selection of it's parent folder unless explicitly changed.

 

Yes, or at least some indication that file placement is being controlled by a parent rule unless you specifically override it.

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First off... great start!   Been waiting for this for some time since posting a while back and so happy to see it.  Now to get more drives to make room for this to work ;)

 

So to my questions and suggestions.

 

In the Balancing > File Placement > Folders section I see the list of folders and then the list of available drives on the right for creation of that relationship...

1.  Would it be possible to add the actual drive model/size to the list of drives?  

2.  If I remember correctly you said you do some level of performance measuring in DP (not sure to what extent).   Does this info lend itself to applying a "good/better/best" color flagging to the drives in this list to gauge relative actual performance?

3.  If not (or maybe as an enhancement to 2 above) have you thought of adding the ability to, on a schedule or manually, "test" all drives for performance indexing that can be applied to my suggestion 2 or some other way?

4.  If you are selecting folders/drives in the folders tab and you hit "save" the entire dialog closes.   Please add an "apply" button to create the actual rule rather than having every click create a rule.   The problem here is you can easily end up with rules that don't automatically remove themselves if you "uncheck" what you changed.  

5.  When navigating down folders in the tree child folders should always display the drive selection of it's parent folder unless explicitly changed. 

6.  Along the lines of the apply/save comment maybe it could be "apply to rules" in the folders tab for the current selection(s) and then a ".   Of course I know buttons should usually have single word but just stating as for examples sake.

 

 

 

Have you thought of creating more traditional rules that can be grown/expanded as needed? For example I might have a rule called "HD movies" and within that rule are all the folders and drives that apply to that rule.   So I can have one rule for a given set of folders and assigned drives.  If I delete that rule I remove all those custom relationships.  If I ever want to assign a new folder to the rule I can just add the folder to the rule without having to create an entire new set of folder/drive assignments per folder.   Assuming this makes sense.    So in your Rules pane you'd have:

 

RuleName1

+Folders:

-- Folder 1

-- Folder 2

-- Folder 3

+Drives

-- Drive 1

-- Drive 2

-- Drive 3

 

RuleName2

+Folders

-- Folder 5

-- Folder 6

+Drives

-- Drive 2

-- Drive 4

-- Drive 5

 

 

Questions/comments aside thanks for such a great product.  I don't know what I'd do without it... maybe use raid again /shudder.

 

  1. Yep, we can add that.
  2. We don't measure actual physical disk performance as of right now in a way that we can use like that.
  3. I would hate to make the user run through a manual test, it really should be automatic.
  4. Ah, if I understand you correctly, they actually do remove themselves. For folder based rules, "meaningless" rules are not saved. So a rule with all drives checked will never be saved, even though it is temporarily created while you are in the Folders interface.
  5. I'll think about changing the code to respect this.
  6. IMO, apply causes confusion I try to avoid that paradigm.

     

     

 

Have you thought of creating more traditional rules that can be grown/expanded as needed? For example I might have a rule called "HD movies" and within that rule are all the folders and drives that apply to that rule.   So I can have one rule for a given set of folders and assigned drives.  If I delete that rule I remove all those custom relationships.  If I ever want to assign a new folder to the rule I can just add the folder to the rule without having to create an entire new set of folder/drive assignments per folder.   Assuming this makes sense.    So in your Rules pane you'd have:

 

RuleName1

+Folders:

-- Folder 1

-- Folder 2

-- Folder 3

+Drives

-- Drive 1

-- Drive 2

-- Drive 3

 

RuleName2

+Folders

-- Folder 5

-- Folder 6

+Drives

-- Drive 2

-- Drive 4

-- Drive 5

 

 

Questions/comments aside thanks for such a great product.  I don't know what I'd do without it... maybe use raid again /shudder.

 

If I understand you correctly, you mean setting up "rule groups", so a set of rules that place file on the same pool parts. Yes, I have though about it. I've even imagined a UI for it, we can have color coded rectangles around sets of rules representing the fact that they are in the same group. I think that this is too complex for where we are today. We need to take this one step at a time, first make sure that the new system works reliably and then we can add on to it.

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