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 Post subject: Re: Andromeda
PostPosted: Wed Mar 31, 2010 6:41 pm 
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stelvio wrote:
cavediver wrote:
Andromeda is complete as originally intended (40 TB media storage server) with all data duplicated. I now have all 20 drive bays populated with 2TB LP, Geen and Ecogreen drives, and all 1.5 TB drives removed. Server storage indicates 36.5TB with 9.46 TB free and Disk Management indicates 37379 GB with 9690 GB free. I had a problem with one of the Samsung drives. It kept dropping out of the storage pool as missing, but running chkdsk /r on it didn't show any problems. So I RMA'd it and will keep the replacement as a backup. In order to remove the 1.5 TB drives and keep the storage balanced, I added a Sans Digital TR4M and installed the little card with two (2) esata ports. So now, I also have a 4 bay Sans Digital TR4M attached which will allow me to add another 8 TB of storage space if I need it. The transfer speeds between the TR4M and the internal drives was very fast. PP3 did a good job of balancing the storage between all of the drives. Below are a few shots of Disk Management and an internal shot showing the new card and the 120mm fans.



cavediver-

How did you get PP3 to balance your data pool as shown?

I read in your 120mm fan thread you did not use the drive balancer app.

Is there a command or hack to get WHS to balance so nicely?

Thanks, this thread has been a great resource for many DIYers. :cheers:



+1 How do you get all your drives so nicely balanced.

Dave


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 Post subject: Re: Andromeda
PostPosted: Thu Apr 01, 2010 7:21 am 
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A couple of you have asked me how I got my drive pool balanced. The term "balanced" refers to the percentage of free or used space on all drives in the storage pool staying basically equal. PP3's drive extender is designed to keep the drives in the storage pool balanced. It is supposed to place each new file on the drive pool drive with the MOST amount of free space. It will not automatically balance your storage pool if the data on the drives is not already balanced. Keep in mind that Andromeda was started from scratch with all new drives being added. All initial data was copied over from my HP MSS. Initially, I was putting drives from the MSS in Andromeda and copying the data rather than copying over the network. This caused an anomaly with PP3 as the data was all being placed on one drive filling it up before starting to place the data on another drive (PP1 drive extender behavior). I didn't want this so I resorted to copying the data over the network which made PP3 work as intended. I don't know why there was a difference, but there was.

To balance the data off the drives that had filled up, I just put in 2 new drives for each full drive and removed the full drives via the server storage tab. PP3's drive extender balanced the data between the new drives during the removal process.

I recently built a new Windows 7 X64 based PC and when I copy (copy and paste), files from the new PC to Andromeda, drive extender is again behaving like PP1 and filling up one single drive pool drive. I don't know why this is happening. Note drive 15 which is 89% full while all of the other drives are 83 - 84% full. It actually reached 95% full before I started the removal process.
Attachment:
andromeda disk management 20100328.jpg
andromeda disk management 20100328.jpg [ 271.6 KiB | Viewed 10321 times ]


When I copy files to Andromeda from the Win7 machine via another program like TsMuxer or ToNMT, drive extender behaves correctly. Also when copying files from my XP machines, drive extender behaves correctly. Not liking what was happening, I added two more drives to the storage pool and removed the drive that was filling up. When it was removed, I re-added it back to the storage pool along with another 3rd new drive. Once again my storage pool drives are balanced. And, Andromeda now has 24-2TB drives in the storage pool plus the system drive. Total storage pool is capacity is 41.96 TB. I also have one 1.5TB drive as a backup drive for BDBB backups.
Attachment:
andromeda disk management 20100331 1817.jpg
andromeda disk management 20100331 1817.jpg [ 283.43 KiB | Viewed 10321 times ]


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 Post subject: Re: Andromeda
PostPosted: Thu Apr 01, 2010 10:39 pm 
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cavediver wrote:

To balance the data off the drives that had filled up, I just put in 2 new drives for each full drive and removed the full drives via the server storage tab. PP3's drive extender balanced the data between the new drives during the removal process.

I recently built a new Windows 7 X64 based PC and when I copy (copy and paste), files from the new PC to Andromeda, drive extender is again behaving like PP1 and filling up one single drive pool drive. I don't know why this is happening. Note drive 15 which is 89% full while all of the other drives are 83 - 84% full. It actually reached 95% full before I started the removal process.


Thanks for the detailed explaination cavediver,

My workstation is also a Win7 x64 machine.

I'll do my video editting on my workstation and copy/paste to my server. I let WHS PP3 do it's thing, but it certainly doesn't balance the drives. Maybe using the <edit/move to folder> command will work better.
I'm wondering if this copy/paste/balance issue from a Win7 x64 PC is a bug, or do other Win7 x86 users not have this balance issue?

At least the remove and replacement of drives seems to work. I'll try it. Having one of my 2TB drives completely full (10GB free space) and another new one installed a week ago still with only 1% full clearly shows PP3 DE is not working for me.

Thanks again.


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 Post subject: Re: Andromeda
PostPosted: Fri Apr 02, 2010 6:04 am 
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stelvio wrote:
My workstation is also a Win7 x64 machine.

I'll do my video editting on my workstation and copy/paste to my server. I let WHS PP3 do it's thing, but it certainly doesn't balance the drives. Maybe using the <edit/move to folder> command will work better.
I'm wondering if this copy/paste/balance issue from a Win7 x64 PC is a bug, or do other Win7 x86 users not have this balance issue?

At least the remove and replacement of drives seems to work. I'll try it. Having one of my 2TB drives completely full (10GB free space) and another new one installed a week ago still with only 1% full clearly shows PP3 DE is not working for me.

Thanks again.


Are you saying that copy > paste file copies from your win7 x64 machine are landing on the drive with the LEAST amount of free space? If so, I'd like to know, as I'm about to log a Connect bug about the issue with MS.


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 Post subject: Re: Andromeda
PostPosted: Mon Apr 05, 2010 8:40 am 
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cavediver wrote:
stelvio wrote:
My workstation is also a Win7 x64 machine.

I'll do my video editting on my workstation and copy/paste to my server. I let WHS PP3 do it's thing, but it certainly doesn't balance the drives. Maybe using the <edit/move to folder> command will work better.
I'm wondering if this copy/paste/balance issue from a Win7 x64 PC is a bug, or do other Win7 x86 users not have this balance issue?

At least the remove and replacement of drives seems to work. I'll try it. Having one of my 2TB drives completely full (10GB free space) and another new one installed a week ago still with only 1% full clearly shows PP3 DE is not working for me.

Thanks again.


Are you saying that copy > paste file copies from your win7 x64 machine are landing on the drive with the LEAST amount of free space? If so, I'd like to know, as I'm about to log a Connect bug about the issue with MS.


Yes,

That seems to be the case.
Both my workstation and HTPC are 64 bit. So, I've never seen the behavior of file cut/paste from a x86.
I'm guessing it balances as it should since I haven't seen people complaining about it not working.
I only know my full drives do not balance when I install a new one. It's ugly.


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 Post subject: Re: Andromeda
PostPosted: Mon Apr 05, 2010 9:12 am 
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I am having the same issue. When I use synchtoy to add new files to my WHS it puts the data on the drive that has the least free space not the one with the most.

Dave


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 Post subject: Re: Andromeda
PostPosted: Mon Apr 05, 2010 9:32 am 
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stelvio wrote:
I only know my full drives do not balance when I install a new one. It's ugly.


WHS does not "balance" the drives when you add a new empty drive to the storage pool, instead new files copied to the server will be placed on the empty drive. Cavediver has seen behavior where new files are created on full disks rather than empty, which is a different behavior that to my knowledge is not expected to occur.

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 Post subject: Re: Andromeda
PostPosted: Mon Apr 05, 2010 12:16 pm 
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I see new writes going to full drives as well.
See below a screen shot of a rip I did for this post.
Attachment:
Disk activity.jpg
Disk activity.jpg [ 116.8 KiB | Viewed 10229 times ]


As you can see the majority of the writes are to a nearly full drive.

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 Post subject: Re: Andromeda
PostPosted: Mon Apr 05, 2010 12:52 pm 
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From everything I've been able to figure out, Drive Extender doesn't exhibit proper PP3 behavior when receiving file copies from Windows 7 x64 machines.


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 Post subject: Re: Andromeda
PostPosted: Tue Apr 20, 2010 9:52 am 
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When I installed WHS on the SSD it created 2 partitions, one 20gig(C drive) & another 99gig(D drive). I would like the D drive on the SSD to remain blank & my array to be the D drive where data willl be stored. Did you just change the drive letter for your remain drive space on the SSD to something other than D so data is not stored on the SSD? I messed my up by create a new shared folder on the array, & deleting the SSD D drive & assigning the array to D.

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 Post subject: Re: Andromeda
PostPosted: Tue Apr 20, 2010 4:24 pm 
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ladino wrote:
When I installed WHS on the SSD it created 2 partitions, one 20gig(C drive) & another 99gig(D drive). I would like the D drive on the SSD to remain blank & my array to be the D drive where data willl be stored. Did you just change the drive letter for your remain drive space on the SSD to something other than D so data is not stored on the SSD? I messed my up by create a new shared folder on the array, & deleting the SSD D drive & assigning the array to D.


What in the world ever possessed you to do that? You need to re-install WHS to the SSD and leave it alone. There will be two partitions: C: and D:. C: is the system partition and D: is the storage pool partition. No data except for tombstones will be written to the D: partition unless all of the other drives in the storage pool are full.


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 Post subject: Re: Andromeda
PostPosted: Thu May 20, 2010 8:43 am 
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Did you ever find a way to pull the drive temps from the MOBO? Mine don't show up either.


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 Post subject: Re: Andromeda
PostPosted: Thu May 20, 2010 9:45 am 
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Nefarious wrote:
Did you ever find a way to pull the drive temps from the MOBO? Mine don't show up either.


No I didn't and won't be able to because of AMD's Raid/AHCI drivers actually being Raid drivers which won't allow SMART data to pass.

This brings up a good point for the Disk Management addin and being able to monitor HDD temps. I'm able to see HDD temps on all of the drives attched to the SASLP cards and the drives in the TR4U. A few weeks ago, I noticed that my drive temps were climbing. At first I dismissed it as ambient temps rising due to approching summer time in Houston. But the temps were steadily rising and got to a point I wasn't comfortable with. I opened up Andromeda and discovered that two of the 120mm fans had completely frozen up and the third didn't appear to be spinning at full speed. I replaced all three fans and the temps immediately went back down to normal. If I had not been able to monitor the HDD temps at all, I might have started having drive problems due to excessive heat.


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 Post subject: Re: Andromeda
PostPosted: Thu May 20, 2010 10:16 am 
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That's really interesting to hear about the fans dying and being able to detect it with Disk Management!

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 Post subject: Re: Andromeda
PostPosted: Thu May 20, 2010 11:13 am 
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Reading your post I checked my fans. Wow, I had two fans die too on my Norco 4220 too, Scythe slipstream 120mms. They locked up like no tomorrow, can't physically turn them. I live in Phoenix, also pretty hot - 100 today. Since WHS Disk Management doesn't work for temps on my system I use SpeedFan. SpeedFan will send an email to me if my drives get too hot, just like Remote Notification. You can program a temperature to cause a notification.

I put some redundancy into my system because I had a fan go out early on last year - first week. I have 6 120MMs in my Norco, two stacked on each opening. Doesn't add much noise and helped out tremendously last August and September when I first built the system since we prefer our house a little hotter - 86-88F - inside. I think the redundancy kept my temps reasonable. I have a vent fan in the closet where I have the equipment rack that keeps it cooler as well.


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