WHS, Drive Pool, and 64k cluster size

[gplasky]

Actual backups end up in the pool. There is also a backup database that resides on the D drive.

You may want to look at this add-in: Windows Home Server Backup Database-Backup (BDBB) 1.0.1.6 released

WHS Backup Database-Backup (BDBB) is an Add-In for the Microsoft Windows Home Server Operating System that was developed by Alex Kuretz of MediaSmartServer.net.

WHS BDBB is designed to allow the user to easily create and restore a backup of the Backup Database created by Windows Home Server, which contains the backups of all Client PC's in the home. This is an automation of the steps defined in the WHS Backup documentation, which can be found on the Microsoft site here

Gerry

[WellThen]

Originally Posted by gplasky

I don't do folder duplication so it doesn't spend a lot of time balancing the drives. And I have all the PCs in the house being backed up now.
Gerry

Hi Gerry,

I'm about to move to a single WHS/Sage server instead of 2 separate PCs. I currently have WHS running with folder duplication turned on. I've never needed the folder duplication (never had a corrupted file on my WHS folders) but I like the idea of being able to recover a file if there was ever a problem. Based on your comment above, do you think that if I want to turn on folder duplication, then I should leave the Sage drives out of the pool, to avoid balancing causing performance issues in Sage?

Thanks.

[gplasky]

Leaving the drives out of the pool also means you lose out on some features of WHS. (Ease of adding drive space, replacing a failing drive.)If you had WHS running a while with duplication turned on my otehr question would be are the drives in the pool formateed to 64k clusters? If you plan on using them as the recoding drive then you will need to reformat the drives in the pool. So keeping the drecoding drives out of the pool would probably be a better choice. Most of your recordings are large files and WHS will record the file to the drive that will end up hosting the drive. It's the smaller files that WHS end up moving around to best balance out the drives. You may not notice any issues with drive balancing. I just know I had seen some issues when some intense balancing was going on and I was trying to watch Sage and do some recordings. For me it made sense to turn it off. The files I put on WHS are also kept on other PCs (music, photos, etc.) Recordings I don't care if I lose necause I can probably get them elsewhere and ripped DVDs just need to be reripped.

Gerry

[Brewer]

I have 1 physical drive in my MediaSmart server (1.5TB) where both c: (20G) and d: (~1.4TB) partitions are formatted with the default 4k cluster size. So my Sage recordings are in the default 'Recorded TV' folder which is part of the DATA pool in the d: partition. Now I add another 1.5TB drive to the DATA pool and format it to 64k clusters. So the DATA pool now contains physical disk 0, partition d: using 4k clusters and physical disk 1 using 64k clusters. So how does my current 'Recorded TV' folder (with many recordings) get migrated over to the physical drive using 64k clusters. The DATA pool contains a mix of both 4k and 64k partitions. It seems to me that I need to format the original d: partition to 64k clusters before the Sage recordings can take advantage of the 64k clusters?

Brewer

[gplasky]

Here's what you can do. Copy those recordings from your physical D drive to an external USB drive. Now copy them from the USB drive to the new share for the TV recordings you created. If you don't have a external USB drive create a network share on another PC and copy them there and then back to your Mediasmart server.

Gerry

[Brewer]

Originally Posted by gplasky

Here's what you can do. Copy those recordings from your physical D drive to an external USB drive. Now copy them from the USB drive to the new share for the TV recordings you created. If you don't have a external USB drive create a network share on another PC and copy them there and then back to your Mediasmart server.

Gerry

Hmmm...I didn't create a new share for 'Recorded TV', just left it as is. I do see that a new recording appears to be writing to the new drive in the DATA pool, even though the share hasn't changed. So I think I understand your suggestion.

If I was to actually copy all of the old recordings to a different share on another PC, stop the SageTV service, delete the recordings on the server, copy them back to the same shared folder on the server, start the SageTV service, then the files would actually end up in the DATA pool on the new drive formatted to 64k clusters. So it seems like WHS won't re-balance the 'Recorded TV' folder from one drive to another on its own, or if it does, it may just take longer than one would expect.

Does my reasoning make sense?

Thanks

[gplasky]

What is hsppening now because you have added the drive WHS should move the files off of physical D drive to the new drive so you are probably OK to just leave it as is. When WHS only has a single physical drive (c & d partition) WHS has to store the files on the d partition. Now that you have added a drive to the pool WHS will migrate them to that new drive. The D partition should stop being used for any new data and everything should go to the new drive. When you add another drive to the pool it will balance between the two new drives but not back to the d partition.

Gerry

[Brewer]

Originally Posted by gplasky

What is hsppening now because you have added the drive WHS should move the files off of physical D drive to the new drive so you are probably OK to just leave it as is. When WHS only has a single physical drive (c & d partition) WHS has to store the files on the d partition. Now that you have added a drive to the pool WHS will migrate them to that new drive. The D partition should stop being used for any new data and everything should go to the new drive. When you add another drive to the pool it will balance between the two new drives but not back to the d partition.

Gerry

Ok, now I understand what's happening...

Thanks for your help!