Easiest way to spread data across new disks?

[tucansam]

I am using highwater on my shares.  My disks have gotten really, really full, 100GB free on 4TB disks.  I just added two more disks, and now I'd like to spread the files around a little to make some space on the original 4TB disks.

 

What is the easiest way to accomplish this?

 

Thanks.

 

[switchman]

http://lime-technology.com/wiki/index.php/Transferring_Files_Within_the_unRAID_Server

[tucansam]

Thanks.  I have been using cp/mv, but wasn't sure if those methods kept the highwater system in place.  Wasn't sure if I needed to copy to my local PC, and then back to unraid, for the share rules to be in effect.

[garycase]

... I'd like to spread the files around a little to make some space on the original 4TB disks ...

 

Why?    There's really no benefit to this.    The newer disks will automatically fill up as you add new files, and there's no notable read performance benefit by "equalizing" the distribution of data.

 

[sureguy]

... I'd like to spread the files around a little to make some space on the original 4TB disks ...

 

Why?    There's really no benefit to this.    The newer disks will automatically fill up as you add new files, and there's no notable read performance benefit by "equalizing" the distribution of data.

 

I can think of one case.  You want to keep all the files in a specific share or subfolder on one disk, and it's going to continue to grow beyond the remaining capacity left on the drive. 

 

 

[tucansam]

... I'd like to spread the files around a little to make some space on the original 4TB disks ...

 

Why?    There's really no benefit to this.    The newer disks will automatically fill up as you add new files, and there's no notable read performance benefit by "equalizing" the distribution of data.

 

 

 

I thought I had read somewhere that a disk above 85% capacity took a performance hit.  That's why I was trying to redistribute the data.

[sureguy]

It all depends on what's going on with that data.  If it's not being modified, you're fine.  The performance hit occurs when writing to the disk.  If you have an ongoing season of a TV show you're recording, and your split levels force the episodes in the same season into the same folder, then you might see a performance hit.

[garycase]

There are two factors that come into play when a disk gets very full:

 

(1)  For writes, it takes longer for ReiserFS to decide where to allocate the data, so writes on very full disks (typically above 95%) can be significantly slower than on relatively empty drives.

 

and

 

(2)  For all disks, as you move very close to the innermost cylinders, the transfer rate is the slowest on the disk.  However, this is still faster than your network, so the effective impact is zero for reads.  For writes, the slightly slower write speeds are irrelevant, as this is much less of a slowdown than the Reiser impact noted in #1

 

If you're frequently modifying the data on a drive, I agree it's worth trying to keep it under about 90% full.    But if your system is effectively a media server (as many UnRAID systems are), then there's no reason to not fill up the disks.    Most of my drives are 99+% full, and the system works just fine -- I often stream 2-3 media files at once to various TVs in the house, and it makes no difference which drives the movies are stored on.

 

[sureguy]

It should be noted that most users achieve the level of fullness Gary has achieved by manually moving nonchanging data for the last 5% or so.

 

Sent from a mobile device, sorry for any typos.