Balancing storage in WHS

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ljames44

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#30860 24-Feb-2009 04:59

Hello; My WHS system has six internal drives, 4 X 500Gb WD & 2 X 1Tb WD, & 1 external WD MyBook 500Gb. I have the Disk Manager add-in installed. The WHS console storage screen shows all drives as healthy; Disk Manager shows one of the 500Gb internal drives (not the system drive) as 96% filled (red color) and the external drive as 88% filled (orange color). Two of the 500Gb drives are at 47%; the two 1Tb drives are at about 4%; all green color. This is balanced storage??!! I assume the orange & red colors mean the drives are nearing an unhealthy condition; Disk Mgr says they are healthy. Is there any way I can move some of the data files to the bigger drives and get a more balanced distribution?

Nety

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#197634 24-Feb-2009 06:27

Does not mean they are unheathy just that they are almost full. There is no way that I have heard of for getting home server to spread the data accross all drives it just looks after itself. You will find that if you put more data onto the server it will fill up the drives that still have space before it starts filling the empty drives. Of course if you have duplication turned on then it will fill up two two of the drives.

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freitasm

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#197636 24-Feb-2009 06:52

As Nety says, this is not a sign of unhealthy drives at all. Balancing will depend on file size, duplication for each folder and other variables. If you have all the drives of the same size, and in pairs, and all folders with duplication turned on then you might have a chance that drives will fill up to the same level, but this is not guaranteed - and not a target either.

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timbosan

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#197638 24-Feb-2009 06:58

Actually there is a product that does exactly this; balance the storage across all your drives evenly. It was recently reviewed at wegotserved.co.uk, a great site for WHS products.

http://www.wegotserved.co.uk/2009/02/16/whs-utility-drive-balancer/

Seems to work quite well but I have not personally tried it.

freitasm

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#197639 24-Feb-2009 07:04

Yes, but the question is "why bother?"... It works just as the same by not interfering with the OS.

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timbosan

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#197644 24-Feb-2009 07:25

That's very true, and in the end it's not going to change the way the product works for the better, the data is stll on a drive accessable to the operating system which doesn't care is 90% of a drive is full when there are others available with more free space.

But some people just like to fiddle!

ljames44

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#197735 24-Feb-2009 13:17

Thanks, guys; Your answers shed some light on the way WHS operates. Guess this isn't as much of a problem as I thought.