I just upgraded my license and added three additional disks to my server.  My original disks are Very full of data, what is the easiest way to spread the data out onto the new disks so as to get some breathing room back to the original disks?  Some of my existing disks have only about 3% free space!

 

Thanks!

The easiest way is to enable disk shares and then drag and drop. The fastest way is telnet to the server and use mc. Enter "mc".

When I needed to this, I just opened the 2 disks directly - \\tower\disk1 and \\tower\disk3 - and then just used Windows move to move the files (they were 5Gb ISOs). It is almost instantaneous.

 

I was on my Windows 7 64-bit machine when doing this. I also have a cache drive. When I did this, I checked the cache drive to see if the files were copied there but I did not see them. Either way, it worked for me. Lot easier to use Windows than mc, especially if you have never used mc before.

Honestly.. I just left my data alone when i added new disks.. i gained nothing by moving everything around.

 

the only thing you might consider moving is TV series that you want to add more episodes to.

 

I think in one case, i did move all my Music to a single drive.. that was just to stop gaps in between tunes when a playlist was across several drives that might be a sleep.

 

in one other case i did move the entire contents of a drive to another drive  as a sort of ghetto defrag. it was a drive that i used for scratch work and sorting and had deleted 60% of its contents.

 

for those, i just used windows... copy then delete once it was done.

I have moved my files around to sit in specific disks to make the spin-down as maximum as possible.. Example:

 

I have transmission running for torrents, I also have subsonic running 24/7 and am regularly using itunes from the pc. Ofcourse I also have my documents folders that I use regularly.

 

I have placed all of the above on -one- specific disk, room enough on a 2TB and this means that going thru the day one data drive is constantly spinned up, I have even removed cache drive use for this disk.

 

Ofcourse the shares that span multiple disks are another story and I also would like a possibility to more evenly distribute my data, I am now doing this by hand thru MC, not to much of a bother bit I would like a plugin to do some balancing for me.. For some reason it gives a good feeling to have a balance and it also is not total nonsense with respect to data loss. I have 48% of my available storage used at the moment (14TB in total), it is just a higher risk having all of that data on half of the drives... Double drive loss will then be a bigger loss while evenly distributing would loose less data in a catastrophic event..

 

In case anyone is wondering why I have so much spare space ?  I moved from a WHS (with all data mirrored) to unraid. Should have done this SO much earlier..