Hi once again!

Another question I forgot to post is about swapping out hard drives...I initially purchased the Drobo because of the ease of swapping hard-drives when more space was needed. I was pleasently pleased to find that the EX490 had the folder duplication process. Now my question is if my 500gig drive which is the smallest out of the 4 becomes full is all I have to do is replace it with a new one since the data is spread out using the duplication process? Thanks again in advance!

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Win Home Server 2011 8Tb
QNAP TS-559 Pro II 16TB

Not quite. You need to do a removal of the drive in the WHS console first. Once the drive is marked safe for removal. In some rare instances you might have to temporarily disable folder duplication and turn off certain media sharing services to be able to get a drive safe to remove.

There are a couple of steps to removing a drive from the storage pool. Within the Console, you'll see a tab for Server Storage. Highlight the drive you want to remove from the pool then click on Remove. This ensures that the MSS takes all the files form that drive and loads them onto other drives across the pool. I'd recommend that you NOT wait to do this when everything is full. Instead, do it before the remaining server space falls below the size of the drive you are removing. For instance... If you have a 500 GB drive, try and remove it as your total free space nears 600-700 GB. The MSS will try to move the 500 GB drive's contents to the remaining free space - in essence cleaning it off. Once the MSS reports back that the files have been successfully moved, you remove the drive and swap it out with a larger one.

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X510 w/7 TB (100% WD Green EARS)
Stock Processor, 4 GB Memory Upgrade

Got ya- I have 1x1tb, 2x1.5tb and the one 500. I was worried since that 500 is at 60% free within a week of use, knowing that info do you suggest I do the first method as things get lower from there?

Thanks-

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Win Home Server 2011 8Tb
QNAP TS-559 Pro II 16TB

How much total free space do you have across all of your drives? It is in the nature of WHS to want to fill up discs and leave other discs largely empty.

There is an add-on out there that will actually try to allocate all of the space on all of the discs so that you have even distribution. You might want to give that a go before you replace a single disc for being utilized.

If you replace the 500GB with a 1.5TB it very well might be that WHS just starts filling that one or one of the other discs.

Also, make sure you have folder duplication on as that will force the WHS to store copies of the files in at least two places, which also protects you from losing your data due to a drive failure.

Actually, since PP2, drive extender behavior changed to place all new files on the drive with the most amount of free space, which will keep the data balanced between all of the drives in the system. However, unless the data is moved with a program like Drive Balancer, the data that was on drives pre PP2 will stay allocated among the drives it was on pre PP2.

Thank you, I was not aware of this behavior change.

I just confirmed this by turning on folder duplication for a 500GB folder after putting a new 1TB drive in the machine, sure enough it was the fresh drive which took the duplicated folder.

Actually this last part in not quite true. What I found out is that DE will pick out the drive based on the directory. What it is attempting to do is to keep all like items together, in case of a failure. So, what I have done is to cut subdirectories from my server and pasted to a drive off of the server, then copied them back. This process allocates the old data to the new drives. I try to pick directories of about 50 gig or so. What happens is that DE reallocates this data to the new drives and it has worked well for me.
My biggest problem was my video directory, which has grown to over 500 gig. What would also work well would be to use the backup and restore feature of the server itself, where you would back everything up, delete it and then restore it, however, I just don't have a spare drive that is that big.
Maybe it is just me, but I don't know that I would not want to run the utility that rebalances data between your drives, it jsut seems a bit risky to me, of course, that is just me.