Evening out shares

[teedge77]

Could someone point in the right direction (a link, search term, etc.) for info on the following:

 

Is there any sort of plugin or command that can "even out" shares?

I was running out of space and upgraded one of the 2TB drives to a 4TB. However, quite a few drives are still nearly full, which still affects performance, correct? I know there used to be issues with drives that had <10% free. Is there anything that will try to move files from other drive to the new drive to reduce usage on some drives and increase use of drives with large amounts of storage?

[skyfox77]

I was about to ask the same question, I would really love to have a script/plugin to automatically even out space on the disks if you accidentally overfilled them. Right now I manually have to move files from one disk to another.

[itimpi]

It looks as if the script mentioned here might be of use?  Not tried it myself as I just do manual moves as required but seems it could be useful.

[teedge77]

It looks as if the script mentioned here might be of use?  Not tried it myself as I just do manual moves as required but seems it could be useful.

 

That's interesting. I had also seen the "unbalanced" docker today as well. It mostly seems to just reduce usage on a single disk though. I will check out those other scripts as well.

 

Thank you.

[garycase]

Could someone point in the right direction (a link, search term, etc.) for info on the following:

 

Is there any sort of plugin or command that can "even out" shares?

I was running out of space and upgraded one of the 2TB drives to a 4TB. However, quite a few drives are still nearly full, which still affects performance, correct? I know there used to be issues with drives that had <10% free. Is there anything that will try to move files from other drive to the new drive to reduce usage on some drives and increase use of drives with large amounts of storage?

 

Note that if drives are nearly full it can effect WRITE performance (notably with Reiser formatted drives); but does NOT impact the read speeds.

 

There's really no reason to "balance" your drives if the content is essentially static -- full drives simply won't get any more writes anyway.    With a new 4TB drive that has 2TB of free space, virtually all of your writes are going to be to that drive ... and in fact, they'll be in the middle cylinders, where performance is much better than on the innermost cylinders.    If you "balanced" your drives, then virtually all of your writes would be to the slower inner cylinders on your drives.

 

As long as your allocation method is either "high water" or "most free" you're not going to have any issue with your nearly full drives.

[ysss]

Aye, if you don't need to put your files in specific order on the disks, just let unraid do its thing. All your new writes will happen on the new empty disk anyway, so its gonna be fast.

 

Unlesss if you happen to use split level to auto-manage your content in some ways.

[garycase]

Yes, you do need to be cautious about split levels => If you write a file to an existing folder and the split level doesn't allow that folder to be split, then it will force it onto the disk the folder is already on -- regardless of whether the disk actually has room for it or not.  But as long as you give careful thought to split levels (or just don't use them), then this isn't likely to be an issue.

 

[SSD]

Yes, you do need to be cautious about split levels => If you write a file to an existing folder and the split level doesn't allow that folder to be split, then it will force it onto the disk the folder is already on -- regardless of whether the disk actually has room for it or not.  But as long as you give careful thought to split levels (or just don't use them), then this isn't likely to be an issue.

 

Split levels are used to keep related files on the same physical disk. Being "cautious about them" is pretty vague. If you are, say, using a user share for TV shows, and you have configured your user shares so that each show is on the same physical disk,  you may start to run into trouble as the TV shows are renewed season after season. Eventually that disk that had plenty of space when you started, gets fuller and fuller and, because of the split level, files keep getting copied to it. Eventually new episodes would start failing with insufficient space issues.

 

Setting your split levels to keep each "Season" together, rather than the whole show, would be a better strategy to avoid this problem.

 

Alternatively you could move whole TV shows from physical disk to physical disk to ensure that each disk in the share has room enough to grow for a reasonably large period of time, and continue to monitor periodically. With a little planning and care, this could also work.

[ysss]

Yup. Gotta be realistic with your planning.

 

If you want near-zero planning, then just let unraid handle everything and add\enlarge disk whenever space is required... but if you use split-level to try maintain tv seasons together, then you have to be realistic with your planning and calculation of required space.