Hey there,

 

I have a question regarding the split level of the files on my disks.

I have the Allocation Method Highwater selected.

So in my unterstanding Disk 2 should start being used when Disk 1 has only 1 TB free.

Then till Disk 2 will be filled till only 1 TB free and so on..

 

But if you take a look at the writes, disk 1 is used aaaaloot more especially because i dont get a ton of new files so all the reads / writes when just accessing the existing files fall back on Disk 1. Is there any better method for splitting the files? I have heard from Unbalanced to move files around but at the same time i have seen a lot of people not recommending using it.

Should I consider moving my most used files onto Disk2 for a while?

 

Is there any other allocation Method which would work better with my config ( 4TB + 2 TB drive ) ?

 

thanks,

Paigner

 

 

33 minutes ago, Paigner said:

So in my unterstanding Disk 2 should start being used when Disk 1 has only 1 TB free.

Correct, but disk1 still has over 1TB free, only only it has less than 1TB.

yeah, but is there any better way to balance out the read/writes other than unbalanced?
Maybe an allocation Method which takes the "utilisation percentage" of each disk and not absolute numbers?

Just now, Paigner said:

yeah, but is there any better way to balance out the read/writes other than unbalanced?
Maybe an allocation Method which takes the "utilisation percentage" of each disk and not absolute numbers?

Not really.    Why do you want to do this?

to balance the read/write usage of the discs

There's simply no reason to do this. But if you really want then most-free is your best choice.

Edited October 15, 20241 yr by Kilrah

14 minutes ago, Kilrah said:

There's simply no reason to do this. But if you really want then most-free is your best choice.

That will not work as even with this setting disk2 would not start being used until there is less free space on disk1 that disk2.

Sure not straight away, but once free space is balanced either by loading more stuff or manually it will maximize usage of both drives like OP wants.

Be a bit careful in looking at the number of read/write operations.  This is just a count of the read/write requests sent to each disk.  And you are looking at a very short period of time.  (I just pulled a disk from one of my servers with 81,000 power-on hours.  That is over 9.25 years and the disk was still functioning without any issues!!!  It was replaced with a larger disk because I need more storage space.)  I have three more disks with over six years on them.  I anticipate that they will eventually be replaced because of the need for additional storage space rather than because they failed.

 

My observation is that Unraid is relatively easy on disks if you spin them down when not reading or writing to them.  It only takes about 2.5-4.5 hours to write a TB data--- depending on file size.  So a 20TB disk could be completely filled with data in less than five days.  Actually, you beat up the parity disk(s) more as they are involved in every write operation for every data disk.  Those folks who use unbalance to 'balance things up', subject those HD's to many more unnecessary read/write operations in their desire to 'even things up'.   Granted, the read-write speed is greater at the start of the disk than at the end of the disk.  The High Water choice attempts to "write as much data as possible to each disk (in order to minimize how often disks need to be spun up), while at the same time, try to keep the same amount of free space on each disk".  One problem is that HD capacity has grown so large that the 'High Water' value is now so large that it often takes months to switch to a new disk for writes.   When you have all of the data disks full in your array, you will have performed about the same number of writes to each data disk.  So your looking at what is happening in a very small slice of that interval may distort your view if you don't consider the larger picture.

 

One solution is to toggle the Reads/Writes display to show speed rather the number of read/write operations.  🤣

Edited October 15, 20241 yr by Frank1940