For some reason, all my data is going to one disk (edit, well, one and a half disks)? What is going on? I would expect it to distribute it and not let one drive get maxed out. I wonder if there is some process that is the problem. I am running UrBackup to backup another computer on the network but it is in the /mmt/user directory, so that should also be distributed I would think. Any insight how to rebalance my disks?

Edited January 12, 20251 yr by SteveScott

Check your share settings.  Specifically look at included and excluded disks.

 

Attached img of one of my shares for comparison.

 

 

Edited January 12, 20251 yr by Veah

Also look at the split-level setting for that share, it overrides allocation method.

Seems like all my shares are at the default?

What is the High Water method of filling disks? Is this the best method?

50 minutes ago, SteveScott said:

What is the High Water method

This setting determines how Unraid OS will choose which disk to use when creating a new file or directory:

High-water Choose the lowest numbered disk with free space still above the current high water mark. The high water mark is initialized with the size of the largest Data disk divided by 2. If no disk has free space above the current high water mark, divide the high water mark by 2 and choose again.

The goal of High-water is 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 (in order to distribute data evenly across the array).

Fill-up Choose the lowest numbered disk that still has free space above the current Minimum free space setting.

Most-free Choose the disk that currently has the most free space.

If you click on the 'Allocation method:' text, a box describing the options will pop up that explains pretty well.

Edited January 13, 20251 yr by Veah

This is how I would expect high water to fill up my disks (20 TB). If my largest disk is 14 TB, half of that is 7 TB, so I would expect all disks larger than 7 TB to have at least 7 TB of data. But that is not what I have.

Edited January 13, 20251 yr by SteveScott

That looks about right.  Try and manually move some of that data to disk 3 and see if your next iso gets downloaded right to disk 1 again.  It's basically full at this point and even if you got all the settings perfect, it will not clear off D1 without some intervention.

Please post the diagnostics.
 

See attached. One thing that may be useful is I get daily warnings about overheating disks. Would that change the allocation?

daikoku-diagnostics-20250113-0931.zip

Not a seeing a reason to be writing to disk 1, how are you writing to the share?

 

Type this and check where the file was created:

 

touch /mnt/user/Daikoku/a

 

I got nothing else.  Hoping to learn something now.

It ended up on Disk 3. That is a good place to be and what I would expect from the high-water algorithm. And 10 TBDisk 2 is at 6.5 TB, and overflowing onto disk 3, as expected.. And my large Downloads file is distributed across three disks, as expected. I just wonder how I can force a rebalance to reduce storage on disk 1. That is the main issue I would expect disk 1 to not be maxed out. Maxing out a disk is not what I expected.

5 minutes ago, SteveScott said:

I just wonder how I can force a rebalance to reduce storage on disk 1.

Have a look into the Unbalanced plugin.  

Edit: the Scatter function.

Edited January 13, 20251 yr by Veah

Well I was organzing and deleting files, and what do you know, it looks like it balanced itself. I am also running a parity check. Would a parity check result in rebalancing?

Edited January 13, 20251 yr by SteveScott

1 minute ago, SteveScott said:

Would a parity check result in rebalancing?

Nope.