By default, StableBit DrivePool will redistribute files across all of the disks which comprise a pool.
This default behaviour sounds beneficial but I’m weighing up the pros and cons for my situation (i.e. a Plex library and nothing which I need duplicated, either now or in the future) and I can only see a potential drawback!
Specifically, I’m wondering if it’s possible for DrivePool’s balancing to cause a delay during playback between two parts of a multi-part movie, as the files could end up on different drives. I’m concerned that the drive containing the second half of a move/show could have potentially spun down and may need to spin up again before playback can continue. By default, DrivePool won’t understand that “… - part1” and “… - part2” are best stored on the same drive, so it’s very likely that related files will end up separated and stored on different disks during balancing.
Does anyone know if DrivePool prevents disks in a pool from spinning down or is there a chance that I could potentially have part1 and part2 of files moved to different disks and potentially experience delays while disks spin back up, during what is supposed to be seamless playback?
Or is this a moot point because Plex buffers far enough ahead that it would buffer part2 well in advance, giving disks plenty of time to spin up if necessary?
I know it’s a fairly obscure question but hopefully it makes sense!
If you are having a problem of delay between parts of movies or pretty much anything else involving access to your media in a pool made by DrivePool I can pretty much assure you that it is not DrivePool’s balancing or just about any reasonable setting causing it.
One thing is that a drive may be sleeping and taking a bit to awaken.
I suggest in Windows disc manager and/or the drive’s configuration settings that you turn off all sleep or spindown or any other thing of that sort. That would need to be done for each physical drive outside of the pool. DrivePool can be active and running as you do it but it is not, as far as I know, a function that DrivePool embraces.
The first thing I do when I get a new drive to add to the pool is use the drives software to turn off all sleep functions and assure that Windows does not allow any sleeping either. Once or twice over the last few years a Windows update turned some part of the sleep disfunctionality back on. Windows is a little obsessed about trying to control how we use our computers and updates are a chance for Windows to regain a measure of control.
Fortunately, it’s not so much a problem I’m experiencing now as one I want to proactively avoid!
I was wondering if DrivePool’s balancing could indirectly lead to an issue if it pushed two parts of the same episode onto two different disks (which is completely normal behavior for DrivePool).
I think you’re right about the sleep settings as a good place to start. As a precaution, I’ve changed my HDD sleep timeout from 20 minutes up to 60, which I think should eliminate any possibility of this happening, while still allowing my drives to sleep eventually.
Drives in a pool should NOT sleep. To add to that the spin up/spin down cycles are believed by many to be more damaging than continuous spinning. Some drives handle spinning up from sleep better than others but I believe that there is nothing to be gained from allowing drives to sleep, even power savings are very minimal, and the potential problems are increased.
But you will have to make your own choice but nothing on my server is ever allowed to sleep and I have had no problems. The only negative is that heat may build up and I prevent that by having a box fan blowing across my entire server all the time.
I have 14 drives in my pool and have had many of them for over 5 years. The others have been added over time. I have had only one failure and that was due to me being clumsy and knocking it off the shelf while it was running. That will kill most any drive but I actually knocked 2 off and one survived.
Yeah, you’re right. I should just disable sleep for all drives completely.
For one thing, it feels like an eternity in Plex waiting for the damn things to spin up!
Besides having more space available for file duplication, is there any real benefit to balancing the drive usage?
I’m just wondering because it looks like it’s going to take a few days for my full 10 TB drive to balance with my brand new second 10 TB drive. Can’t really see how this will benefit me if I don’t plan on using duplication.
What do you think? Are there any benefits besides duplication space optimization?
I would not really know about other benefits as I use duplication for redundancy so that should a drive fail I do not lose any data and everything keeps running without problems. I suppose one benefit of DrivePool balancing files is that it also implements load balancing to some extent. While the drives should not be allowed to sleep therefore they spin all the time seeking is also a small load but an application causing seeking is probably a very small part of the total seeking that drives in a pool do.
I just believe it is best to let DrivePool do its thing and not worry much about how it works.
Unless you have good real time backups running in some way I do recommend having enough storage and using duplication. When I dropped that drive I mentioned earlier I lost nothing and I just replaced it with a new one a few days later and DrivePool just chugged right along. I did have to turn off part of the duplication for a few days or my drives would have overfilled but after the new drive arrived I simply added it (and another as well to increase the pool size) and turned on the part of the duplication I had turned off and after a few days everything was back to normal. I never encountered even one glitch in file access from losing that drive.
I’ve actually started using duplication now, although instead of selecting “Pool file duplication”, I choose “Folder duplication” and only enable duplication for a single folder that I want to duplicate (leaving my Plex media unduplicated for now - I don’t have enough free space to be able to duplicate all my non-critical data).
Yep, I use folder duplication as well. I have never found a need for file duplication. I duplicate my media folders but little else in the pool. I could get away with no duplication as I have everything on either DVD or VHS or other backup media so I could recreate my entire media library if needed but it would be “tedious” and I do not wish to do that even for a few files just because I had a drive fail.
Hardware (drives) are quite cheap and the time to recreate one drive’s worth of my library is fairly large so I use duplication so I do not have to recreate any part of my library for just one drive’s failure.
