Best Practice to Fill Up Drives

[boianski]

Hey all,

I just added two new 12 tb drives to the array and wanted to ask how the community deals with new drives and how they fill up, best practice? 
Should I utilize UnBalance or something similar (if it exists) to shift some data around or leave as is and fill up as I go along? 

 

ty
 

[Veah]

Majority of my data being media, I just assign the disks to the shares I am feeling at the moment, set to high water, and let it ride.  If something about it bothers me later on, then I use Unbalance to move things around.

[Frank1940]

I would never move data around on an array just to make a graph look 'pretty'!  Any read-write type of operation always has a small potential for a data loss event.  Why take a chance.  (In the same vein of thought, I would have added only one 12TB drive and used the other 12TB as a cold spare until needed.)   But now that you have added it, I would not remove it for the same reason.  My philosophy is to always minimize the number of write operations to any drive.  One could take a similiar approach to read operations but most times read operations are not avoidable with the possible exception of periodic parity checks.  I view those as a necessity rather than optional as they provide for a check as to the current health of the drives themselves and the data stored on them.