Organising Files Before Installing Drivepool

[mf3106]

I'm currently looking to install Drivepool on my Windows 8.1 headless server. This is mainly used for media (TV, movies, music), photos (which are also replicated to Google Drive), user files (direct to server), as well as backups from one other windows machine.

 

I currently have my media spread across two disks 1 x 2tb and 1 x 1.5tb. These are pretty much full. I've purchased 2 x 3tb drives to provide for some redundancy as well as future headroom.

 

I have a few questions before I jump in and start.

 

1 - Is there any need to re-organise the data on the disks before pooling them. For example currently on one disk there are movies and the other TV shows. Is there any benefit to bringing these onto as single 3tb disk or should I just leave them as they are?

 

2 - One the drive are pooled and new files are added are they just scattered anywhere on the disks in the pool - so for example if you pulled out the disks (say because of a machine failure) and you put them into another machine would you then see (say movies) across any of the  4 drives under Windows Explorer.

 

3 - I use SabNzb, Sickbeard & Plex for all of my video downloads and management - when configuring when using Drivepool do I just use the Drive and Folder structure in Drivepool?

 

 

Sorry if some of these questions are a bit basic - I'm just trying to get my head around the concept of pooling from a simple practical perspective.

[amanteka]

there is a file placement option in drivepool where you can set the types of files that you like to sort to each disk based on rules. you can create an *.mkv rule to store files with the extension .mkv to be stored on a single or more disks as an example. when you create a pool it will appear as a normal drive on windows, there, you can create folders to organize your data inside, or, you can create pools for specific content and add more drives later to an specific pool when there is no space available. an example is a pool with 2 drives, a folder named MOVIES and other folder named TV SERIES. or two pools; pool 1 with 2 drives named MOVIES, pool 2 with one drive named TV SERIES, each pool with their respective letter on windows.

[Christopher (Drashna)]

1. Well, if you "seed" the disks, they'll end up on that disk to start off with.

   http://wiki.covecube.com/StableBit_DrivePool_Q4142489

   Additionally, once the data is there, unless the files violate one of the balancer settings, they should stay there. And the only balancer that may take exception to start off with is the "Prevent Drive Overfill" option. If the drive is more than 90% full, it will try to move out some of the data to other disks. 

    

   I'm not sure what you mean by the "any benefit to bringing these onto a single disk" bit.

   But I suspect that you are wondering if there is an advantage to storing the entirety of the movies or tv on a single disk, as opposed to spreading them out between the disks. 

   And the answer is yes and no.  From a data standpoint, not really. But if you don't have duplication enabled, then well, you wouldn't have to worry about what you have lost if a disk fails.

    

2. I kind of already answered this, but let me expand. 

   If you're seeding the pool, the data will likely stay on those drives. Unless a balancer decides otherwise. 

   For new files added to the pool, the files can end up scattered. By default, we add data to the drive(s) with the most available free space (absolute, not percentage). This can end up scattering the files all over the place. 

    

   However, we do have the "Ordered File Placement" balancer that you can install. It fills up one disk at a time.

    

   Also, if you install StableBit DrivePool on that other machine, it will see the pooled disks and recreate the pool for you.

    

3. You absolutely can. None of these programs have any issue accessing the pool. 

    

   However, I've found that using SabNZBd and Sickbeard has a weird NTFS permission issue. Namely, if the source and destination are on the same disk (in this example, the pool is a different disk from the disks in the pool), it will keep the NTFS permissions from the source directory, and not take up the destination's permissions. This can cause issues for Plex, if the permissions are not properly configured for plex to work. 

   Because of this, I use a temp disk for downloading.

 

Also, as Amanteka has mentioned, there is the file placement rules. You can use this to lock file types, or even whole folders to specific disks in the system.