When I first set up my unRAID I was converting NTFS formatted drives and copying the data from each Windows drives to a single unRAID drive. As a result the data is not distributed evenly among my drives. Is there a utility that can work to automatically do this for me or must I manually move data around between drives to accomplish this task?

unBalance plugin. Not really any good reason to do this though.

Yeah, going forward unRAID isn't going to evenly balance your data.  That was a mental hurdle I had to get over when I adopted unRAID.  You're better off spending some time understanding how unRAID balances data on its own than trying to fight with it.  You might still want to make some changes via unBalance, but better to understand what it's doing before you start.

I've looked at unBALANCE before and I'm not sure how it would help me. To me it looks like that utility is made to move data from a single existing drive so that it can be removed from the array. I don't want to move all the data from a drive. Just move data around so that in the end I get approximately the same amount of free space on each drive.

 

In hindsight it would have been better to have copied the data to the array rather than an individual drive in the array. However, I don't know that would have made a huge difference since I was progressively copying data then adding the next drive one by one. So it would have filled up that newly added empty drive before copying data to any of the other drives. I do understand how it balances the data out. It's just that the drives my data came from were not balanced and I really didn't have the money to buy all new drives. I had to progressively copy data from the Windows drives. In the end I would have ended up with a single empty drive that would need to be filled before the data on the entire array would be balanced.

The question that you should be asking is,  "Why should I want to balance the data?"

 

The 'High Water' allocation will spread any new data across the  disks to bring the array into the state that you want by filling up the disks with the most space free first. If you attempt to spread each file in every save to the array across the all the disks, you may find that you end up spinning up every data disk in the array when you want to access a set of related files.  (In fact, this was an issue in the past with the VIDEO_TS folders of DVD rips got split across two folders.)  The only disadvantage to using the normal unRAID method is that it will take time (and data) to reach this state.

 

There is no real advantage in the operation of unRAID to having a balance data setup.  Granted the inner tracks are a bit slower on reads but that is virtually unnoticeable in typical operations. 

Personally I like to keep like minded data on the same drive so I don't have multiple drives spinning up when all I need is one drive spinning up.

 

Personally I like to keep like minded data on the same drive so I don't have multiple drives spinning up when all I need is one drive spinning up.

Me too, but this can be accomplished by managing your user shares. For the OP perhaps it is too late and some user shares will need to be moved to other drives.