Balancing Drives in WHS

J

jfkriege

Weaksauce
Joined
Jun 28, 2006
Messages
91
I just got another WHS installation up and running, and have bumped into a problem. I have 3 1TB drives installed. I started transferring data across and ran into a hurdle. It has filled up two of the drives and the primary drive (where the OS resides) has nothing on it. It will not let me transfer any more.

Should I try using Drive Balancer? Is there a setting I have missed? Will it automatically spread the data out across the drives?

Any help is much appreciated.
 
give it a bit of time, it should balance out to the main drive, the balancer tool is to remove files from the main drive. If you dont have power pack 2 installed make sure windows update gets that, should allow you to put more files then.
 
I think that everything is up to date. I just updated everything last night, unless power pack two is downloaded outside of Windows Update.

How long will it take to make it all balance on its own?
 
It has filled up two of the drives and the primary drive (where the OS resides) has nothing on it. It will not let me transfer any more.
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That doesn't sound right.

It will fill the drives as it wants but to not let you transfer anymore doesn't sound correct.

Are you getting some kinda storage alarm?

Are all the drives are in the "Storage Pool"?
 
jfkriege said:
I think that everything is up to date. I just updated everything last night, unless power pack two is downloaded outside of Windows Update.

How long will it take to make it all balance on its own?
Click to expand...

A balance check is usually like every 10 minutes. Whether or not it does anything is dependent upon if a balance is needed. What I want to know is how how you moved the data and how fast. Did you move it all, then turn on duplication?

There is still a limitation in WHS though, that you can't set your two balance trigger points. They are fixed at 10GB and 20GB, you used to be able to manually set them. This makes large block transfers on full drives a PITA. I think the current issue people building a WHS server and then dumping tons of data (100+GB at a clip) on it was probably not one of the "expected conditions". It is an interesting problem but not without workaround.

My recommendation would be to use the balance tool provided at wegotserved since you are operating on a odd (1,3,5,7) amount of drives and also a small amount of drives (< 5). Hopefully in the next version of WHS this will be handled a bit better.

Remember, this issue might be annoying but it isn't a deal breaker by any stretch of the imagination.
 
I transferred about 1TB of data last night in 6 batches. Duplication was on for everything until I can get the backup server up and running as well and then duplication will come off for most of it. It finished copying about 4 hours before I checked it, and it was completely on two drives.

It certainly is not a deal breaker, just a minor pause in getting everything up and running.

What do you mean by setting your two balance trigger points?
 
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