Hiya

I have 6x 1TB drives in my home server (all identical internal drives), and it's putting everything on disk 4 (23%). The other non system disks are all at 1%.

The Documents, Pictures, Music and Videos shares all have duplication enabled. I have created a Movies share for my DVD/BD rips with duplication disabled and these are taking about 160GB so far with the other folders about 60GB. The 160GB worth of rips were copied up this morning.

Is this normal?

Thanks

From what I have seen (9TB spread over 11 drives), WHS doesn't worry about getting data evenly balanced across hard drives too much.

I find that if I add a new drive, it will often go unused if there is space on other drives that can be put to use.

There is a small utility over at wegotserved if you want to balance the storage across all volumes (it will also clear the "landing zone" on D: if you want).

I really wouldn't worry about it though - as long as you have duplication turned on where desired then WHS will look after the rest.

The way that WHS uses drive pooling and folder duplication is definitely one of Microsoft's greatest product ideas in my opinion (I have had 2 hard drives fail since I bodged together a WHS system out of old components, and I haven't lost a single byte of data)!

My only issue with this system is that if it puts all data on one disk until that disk is full, say 150 DVD rips, if that disk fails I have lost ALL of them meaning i'd have to re-rip them all.

Storage, although cheap, is still not cheap enough to have duplication for DVD rips.

That is normal behavior. Like the other poster said, it fills up one drive, and then goes to the next. It's kind of annoying, and I wish they'd balance it, but it's not a huge deal.

ldoodle

My only issue with this system is that if it puts all data on one disk until that disk is full, say 150 DVD rips, if that disk fails I have lost ALL of them meaning i'd have to re-rip them all.

Storage, although cheap, is still not cheap enough to have duplication for DVD rips.

Then you should turn on duplication for your DVD rips if you are worried about loosing them. Sure, if it balanced the data across multiple discs you would only loose the files that were on that disc, but you'd have to figure out which ones you lost, which could be equally time consuming. With WHS, the tombstones will still be there and you'd only know if the actual file is missing if you try to open it. That would require you do go through all your DVD rips, file by file and figure out which ones are missing.

I'm in the same boat as you, I have over 1.5TB of DVD and Bluray movies and there is no way I can use duplication.

This is a link to the drive balancing program - I have used it without any problems:

http://www.wegotserved.com/2009/02/16/whs-utility-drive-balancer/

I second drive balancing as duplicating my DVDs is not an option due to the large amount of lost space, that would just fill it right up.

What does the console refer to when it says Storage Balanced on xx/xx/xx.

The term balanced is used in the wrong context the way I see it?

WHS counts moving data off D: on the system hard drive as balancing storage. (D: = the "landing zone" where files copied to WHS are first stored) 

The "demigrator" service scans regularly to see if any files need to be copied/moved.

http://forum.wegotserved.com/index.php?/topic/512-balancing-storge/page__hl__balanced__fromsearch__1

http://forum.wegotserved.com/index.php?/topic/664-how-does-whs-really-balance/page__hl__balanced__fromsearch__1