Drive Balancing tool for WHS

[jaminben]

Originally Posted by Beefcake550

thanks chuck, since that flow worked for you, it means I foudn the real problem and will fix it shortly. Sorry about that. That fix plus the improvement to the DE restart function during the Landing Zone Clear should help you out. I may have time for that tonight, but I'm on Daddy-Duty and we'll see how good the kids (3 & 5) are.

Hi Brian,

Does Drive_Balancer_v1.04 contain that particular fix? I'm going to give this tool awhirl tonight but I'm abit nervous about it so thought I'd ask now so I know what to expect.

Cheers

Ben

[Beefcake550]

I'm not sure, but I would like you to go to the first post and grab v1.05. I just put it there and has all known bug fixes and I don't know of any other issues at the moment.

-Brian

[jaminben]

Originally Posted by Beefcake550

I'm not sure, but I would like you to go to the first post and grab v1.05. I just put it there and has all known bug fixes and I don't know of any other issues at the moment.

-Brian

Oki, thats cool. I'll set it off in a few hours once I can turn Sage off. Looking forward to seeing what will happen. I'll let you know how it goes

Cheers

Ben

[jaminben]

Hi Brian,

Well I ran your tool last night while I slept, woke up this morning and looked at the drives only to see nothing had changed....... I then realised I needed to press the refresh buttton and BAM, there it was...... all balanced out.

One very small, and I mean very small observation, there was no message to say the tool had finished.

Very Cool Tool, thankyou

Cheers

Ben

P.s Why couldn't M$ do something like this?

[Beefcake550]

about the finishing....it's not a GUI and i could just make it say "DONE" and make you press enter for the window to disappear. For now, just take it as the cmd window disappearing to mean it's done.

MS...where to begin. Their heart is in the right place. Their "balancing" scheme is about 180 degrees from what I think is "balanced". There is a white paper about it out there and I read it many times so that I cdould manipulate it they way I wanted and this tool is the result of the manipulation. That's why it is safe. It doesn't actually do anything but create fake files in such a way that the built mechanisms move reall data around the way we want.

[voorhees]

Brian,

Just wanted to let you know I just ran v1.05 for the first time. I had the exact same results as I did with v1.03 back in March. It ran great and balanced my 3 drives, but it did not delete the fake files from D. No big deal, but i just wanted to let you know. Maybe it is just me.

Again, thanks for the great app. Now the load on my drives will be much more shared. Thanks again.

[toricred]

I haven't read the entire thread, but I'm starting now. I understand that once you run this app the drives will be balanced, but does it keep the drives balanced on a regular basis or does it need to be run every so often?

[voorhees]

Originally Posted by toricred

I haven't read the entire thread, but I'm starting now. I understand that once you run this app the drives will be balanced, but does it keep the drives balanced on a regular basis or does it need to be run every so often?

It has to be manually run. I do not believe it has an automatic option.

Side note: I am not sure how WHS handles drive usage, but once balanced, WHS keeps my 2 1.5TB drives evenly utilized. However, SageTV does not seem to use my 1.0TB drive. Even after running the balancer, SageTV seems to only record to my 1.5TB drives and WHS only uses the 1.0TB drive to store other files. SageTV did record to my 1.0TB drive when it was empty, but after balancing I do not think it has touched it. Strange...any thoughts anyone?

[toricred]

That's interesting how it is working for you. I thought that WHS would write to one disk until it was nearly full and only then move on to the next disk. If is based on available space then I should be pretty good after balancing the first time. In my case the Drive Pool is only used for Sage.

Up until now I've been using the disks completely outside the pool, but I want to use the pool as long as I can keep the recordings spreading out over all the physical drives.

[Beefcake550]

@toricred - This tool does do a good job of spreading out the recordings over multiple drives. That was actually my main concern when creating the tool....even distribution of new media that I write to the pool.

Works like a champ for me....

Oh, and it has to be run every so often. I tend to run it about once every couple of weeks (depending on how much recording happens).


~

[voorhees]

Originally Posted by toricred

That's interesting how it is working for you. I thought that WHS would write to one disk until it was nearly full and only then move on to the next disk.

Originally Posted by Beefcake550

I tend to run it about once every couple of weeks (depending on how much recording happens).

Hmmmm...based on both of your comments it sounds like my 2 1.5TB issue is the anomaly and not the other way around. When I built my WHS server 10 months ago I put in the 2 1.5TB drives and once I ran drive balancer to get everything nicely spread between the drives (which it does a great job of) WHS has kept the two drives balanced within 1% of each other. It writes to which ever drive is lower at the time. When I added a 1.0TB drive a couple of months ago and ran drive balancer to bring it in line and balance it with the rest, WHS keeps my 2 1.5TB drives still within 1% of each other no matter how much data I through at them, but the other drive has stayed nearly at the level when balanced. It seems to be acting like you mentioned toricred. I guess I got spoiled with WHS somehow keeping my other two drives balanced automatically.

[Beefcake550]

@vorhees - I definitelysee a similar thing. I think WHS also looks at drive speed as well. I really can't explain it, but I have 3 1TB drives and 2 1.5TB drives and I see similar things with my 1.5TB drives. Who knows, I like it

[mickdaly]

Does it work on the WHS 3.0 upgrade?

I tried it and it refused every option, and filled up my D: drive (with no fake files visible!)

[Beefcake550]

Drive Balancer only works on WHS v1. Since there is no Drive extender in WHS v2 (vail), I'm not sure what you would even expect the tool to do there. There are 3rd party apps out there and I have not looked at how any of the work.

You may need to go to control panel->folder options and not hide files from being seen in explorer. Check out the readmes for fake file locations to delete them.