Question on Balancing

[gsd2012]

I have look around to find an answer for this so I am turning to the experts since I can't seem to find a straight answer. I have 8 4Tbs drives in my system. I want to spread the media over them evenly across all drive equally. I know movers will do this on a nightly bases but if you have to replace a drive that is failing after moving everything off it to re-balance again? Maybe a better way to say is I put a new 4Tbs drive and I want to even out all the drives, is there simple way to do this?  I have been running my UnRAID for many years now but want optimize it better so I also wanted to know if it is best to set on the shares to split up the files across all drives? or is there a better way? After almost 6 years one of my drives have finally started to degrade and warn me of a future failure. I move everything off of it with UnBalance and now got a new replacement drive in place but the data is all uneven now. I was trying to find the best solution to correct it. Thanks ahead.

[John_M]

There isn't an automatic way to move files between disks in the array because there isn't really much need to do it. There are one or two genuine reasons, such as replacing several small disks with fewer large disks, which is why the UnBalance plugin was created. In general, though, there isn't much to be gained by moving files from one disk to another and it isn't really an issue if one disk is significantly more or less full than the others. I'm not sure why you moved files off of your failing disk before replacing it. You could have just replaced it and the files would still be in the same place but on the new disk. If you really want to even things up again, the UnBalance plugin might help you do it - I don't use it myself. But there is really no need and if you're using the high-water allocation method the disk usage will tend to balance out over time anyway as you add more files. FWIW I use the fill-up allocation method and treat my disks more or less as write once, read many devices. Once a disk is full its contents seldom change. But everyone's use case is slightly different so you need to choose what suits your requirements best.