Balancing could use some massive improvements

[Sirkassad]

More of a comment than a question.

So I've been dealing with the ultra slow re-balancing performance and I've given up.  I have a USB DAS populated with fairly large drives and when attempting to re-balance the throughput is so slow that it is worse than watching paint dry.  I'm not sure if this is because it is a DAS, but it is unaccapetably slow, we're talking read/write speeds of a couple MB/s.  I followed the instructions of editing the setting.jron file, and have tried increasing the priority.  No improvment.

The workaround is to do this manually.  I identify the file(s) that I want to move from one drive to the other, and use swap space (storage that is not part of the drivepool).  I cut/paste the file from the pool to the swap space.  I then modify/create file placement rules so that when the file is placed back in the pool it goes to the correct drive.  File placement rules are quite easy and straight forward and my workaround works much faster that letting drivepool re-balance.

[Christopher (Drashna)]

To be blunt, the balancing isn't designed to be super fast.  In fact, it's designed to rarely happen, to minimize any impact to the system.

That said, USB storage has never been great.  And problems with USB storage is something we do see a good amount of.  

[plutonian]

On 2/23/2022 at 6:17 PM, Christopher (Drashna) said:

To be blunt, the balancing isn't designed to be super fast.  In fact, it's designed to rarely happen, to minimize any impact to the system.

That said, USB storage has never been great.  And problems with USB storage is something we do see a good amount of.  

I'm running into the same issue. I understand that balancing might not be designed to be super fast, but there's a difference between being "not fast" and having a read/write speed of maybe half the nominal speed of the drive, and being so painfully slow that it's literally ~75x slower than the nominal read/write speed of the drives.

In my case, I have one full 12 TB HDD in my pool and added another 12 TB HDD recently. When I test transfers from one to the other without DrivePool (just plain old Windows Explorer copy), I get speeds of 100-200 MB/s. However when DrivePool tries to do the balancing, the Windows Task Manager shows me write speeds of 2 MB/s on the new drive... It seems to me that this is probably a bug that should be looked into.

Because of this I am forced to disable the balancing otherwise it's going to take 4 months...

Please consider looking into this.