[Beefcake]

Latest version - 1.05

I've finally gotten enough time to finish this app I've been working on for about a week now. If you'd like to balance the data distribution on your pooled drives, this tool is for you. Here's a cut/paste of the readme.txt:

========================================================================
UPDATED NOTE:
Some people have been having trouble not getting any data to move when their D:\ has lots of data on it. Before doing
anything else, please run Drive Balancer to clear the landing zone only. To do this, choose "n" to include d:, then
choose "y" to clear landing zone, and the "5" to exit. After this initial run (which can take hours), rerun Drive
Balancer the with the options you want. I believe this will help the problem of no data being moved on some people's
systems.

Usage Notes:
This program was designed to "even out" the data on a drive pool for WHS. The main purpose was when a person adds a drive to the pool, it doesn't necessarily start getting used for a while. While Microsoft has made changes to the usage of the Landing Zone (as in it doesn't exist anymore), some people's systems might still be in a non "evened out" state as wish to correct this. On my own system, I routinely get within 2% of perfect balancing on all pooled drives.

Usage Notes:
This program was designed to "even out" the data on a drive pool for WHS. The main purpose was when a person adds a drive to the pool, it doesn't necessarily start getting used for a while. While Microsoft has made changes to the usage of the Landing Zone (as in it doesn't exist anymore), some people's systems might still be in a non "evened out" state as wish to correct this. On my own system, I routinely get within 2% of perfect balancing on all pooled drives.

For a walk through of the tool running, checkout the walk_through.txt file.
Testing:
I have tested this program on my own system which consists of:

System Disk:
Areca 1210 RAID5 set consisting of (4) 250GB Seagate Drives = 20GB C: and 698GB D:

Pooled Disks:
(3) WD 1TB Green HDs
(2) Seagate 1.5TB HDs


IMPORTANT NOTE:
With some help from user "S_M_E" on SageTV forums, I am able to "restart" the Drive Extender service
which is responsible for doing the actual balancing. The program detects a restart is needed if <5MB/s of
total disk throughput is monitored on all pooled drives. Monitoring disk activity would not have been
possible within Sam Wood's help. At this point, it restarts the service and marches along. Feel free to
restart the service on your own if you are watching the process and see no disk activity (using Disk
Management plug-in).

You WILL see some critical WHS warnings reported all related to storage space. Do not worry, this is expected behavior while the tool is running and will be cleared up at the end of the run.

If you need to hit Ctrl-C out of the program even though it is automatic and will end on it own. If you feel the program is behaving badly, and you Ctrl-C out of it, You will have to manually delete the following DIRs:

C:\fs\*\fake\
D:\fake\

I have extensively tested this program on my own system with my own data. I have lost nothing and you should realize that this program does not delete any data (It only creates fake files). As such, I can't guarantee that any data on your own system. Don't be afraid, either do a backup first, or jsut trust me and run the tool anyway! :)

Acknowledgements:
Theo van Elsberg - author of LZReallocator
Brent from wegotserved WHS forums
S_M_E from SageTV forums
Sam Wood - author of Disk Management Add-In

================================================================================

Revision History:
v1.05
- Attempting to solve problem where no files are moved on the system when D:\is filled
prior to running Drive Balancer. Please read UPDATE NOTE for potential solution
- Fixed bug where calculation of free space on D: was not "worked around". Refer to v1.03
history notes below. This fix will help systems that either
a) don't include D:\ in balancing
B) tried to clear the landing zone
- Added programmable time interval for checking disk activity
- Added programmable disk activity threshold for restarting Drive Extender service

v1.04
- Fixed bug where D: was not always cleaned up
- Modified restarting of DE service to monitor disk activity. This will restart DE within
seconds instead of 15 minutes. Should improve run time on systems with large files.

v1.03
- Handled bug where WHS returns free space of D: as (C: + D:)
- Fine tuned "crunching" algorithm so balancing should be better on different sized HDDs
- Added exception handling around creation of fake directories and fake files

v1.02
- Added option to allow D: to be part of balancing.
- Fixed bug where restarting DE would not occur and forward progress would likely not occur.

v1.01
- Fixed bug with option #2 and a drive was large enough to contain an equal amount of data.
- Added option for entering in your own data
- Added "quit" option in case all you wanted to do was clear the landing zone

Attached File(s)

•  Drive_Balancer.zip (8.14K)
  Number of downloads: 673
•  Drive_Balancer_v1.01.zip (8.64K)
  Number of downloads: 326
•  Drive_Balancer_v1.02.zip (10.74K)
  Number of downloads: 187
•  Drive_Balancer_v1.03.zip (11.71K)
  Number of downloads: 343
•  Drive_Balancer_v1.04.zip (12.62K)
  Number of downloads: 534
•  Drive_Balancer_v1.05.zip (13.19K)
  Number of downloads: 6430

[JC634 (WGS)]

Hi Beefcake,

Just downloaded it and I will try it out shortly.

[Davers]

Downloaded and running even as we speak.. :P

Dave

[Beefcake]

Davers, on Feb 15 2009, 02:44 PM, said:

Downloaded and running even as we speak.. :P

Dave

Glad to hear.....keep in mind it will take multiple hours to balance some systems. :)

If you have any problems, questions, or suggestions, please let me know. If there is enough interest in this tool, I will probably take up learning how to make it a WHS console add-in and have some fancy graphics. :)

-Brian

[Davers]

 disks2.JPG (74.27K)
Number of downloads: 866  disks.JPG (77.09K)
Number of downloads: 913Ok...it finally finished...it did take a few hours...but I didn't watch it like a hawk..I just let it do it's thing, so I'm sure it would have gone faster if I'd been there as soon as things were finishing up. I have 3 drives. Disk 0 is my 500 Gb Hitachi then I have 2 WD @ 500 Gb each for a total of 1.5 TB...or if you go by what WHS says, each drive is 465 Gb. I've attached snapshots of what my storage looks like now. I forgot to take a "pre" shot...but disk 1, which I just put in a week or so ago, had nothing on it. Now, the 2 disks are about even..and the "system" disk has 4%....Pretty cool!

I give it a thumbs up! Good job Beefcake! :-)

Dave

[JC634 (WGS)]

Beefcake, on Feb 15 2009, 03:16 PM, said:

Glad to hear.....keep in mind it will take multiple hours to balance some systems. :)

If you have any problems, questions, or suggestions, please let me know. If there is enough interest in this tool, I will probably take up learning how to make it a WHS console add-in and have some fancy graphics. :)

-Brian

FWIW, you will probably be immortalized on the WGS blog in the morning. :) I just submitted an article to Terry about your ap. I did find one bug, but I will let you read the article to find out what it is. ;)

The article is kind of a "thanks for the utility" and a mini-review all in one!

[Beefcake]

JC634 (WGS), on Feb 15 2009, 08:50 PM, said:

FWIW, you will probably be immortalized on the WGS blog in the morning. :) I just submitted an article to Terry about your ap. I did find one bug, but I will let you read the article to find out what it is. ;)

The article is kind of a "thanks for the utility" and a mini-review all in one!

No prob....I should've mentioned it was of "beta" quality... :)

Being that I am a CPU hardware verification engineer, I'm sure there are bugs that I need to address. I am always eager to see what I missed the first time around.

Oh, and if I had to guess about the bug, it has something to do with "range checking" the newFreeSpace calculations. I just know I missed checking anything on the "equalize free space" update.

[Terry (WGS)]

The post is up :)

[Bodog (WGS)]

Beefcake, on Feb 16 2009, 05:33 AM, said:

Beefcake - great utility - a lot of people like to "balance" the load across their HDD's and will find this very useful

and congratulations on earning the Add-in Developer tag on your WGS profile

People can read Jim's review here

[Omertron]

Hi, This looks like an excellent application, and something that I was trying to do manually, so I want to give it a go.

However, I have a question about "landing zone" and whether I should clear it out or not.
My system disk is a 200Gb drive split into 20Gb C: and 166Gb D:. I store local files on D: for things like media servers, uTorrent downloads, etc. I assume that I don't want to clear this drive with the "Clear Landing Zone" option? or does this refer to another D:?

Stuart

[pkubhv]

Beefcake,

Not sure I understand what the benefit of this app is. What happens if I add an empty drive and don't use this app?
I was under the impression that WHS will balance the data by itself, isn't that the case?

[GaMeR (WGS)]

I've added this tool also in the WHS X:\Files v1.3 (A last minute update fix, wich is going to be done by Drashna when the complete iso is uploaded to his system later today - I'm at 60% now).

[Beefcake]

pkubhv, on Feb 16 2009, 05:43 AM, said:

Beefcake,

Not sure I understand what the benefit of this app is. What happens if I add an empty drive and don't use this app?
I was under the impression that WHS will balance the data by itself, isn't that the case?

I can't speak for all cases, but in my situation, I had added 2 new drives to my pool (about a week or so in between) and WHS kept putting data on the two drives already in the system. My issue with this was mainly driven around performance since my new drives were much faster than the older ones. Also, I run SageTV on 3 extenders and I have a popcorn hour A110 device. I wanted to try and spread the data across all the drives so at any random moment, I have the highest probability to use all drives when doing that many streams.

You can certainly wait it out and see if WHS balances data out for you, but I would not anticipate this happening.

[Dave Marchant (WGS)]

WHS is designed to fill up storage one disk at a time - please read the Tech Paper on Drive Extender to understand what is happening and why. Beefcake had specific reasons for doing something that works counter to this and has come up with an app which spreads data more across all the disks.

[Beefcake]

Dave Marchant (WGS), on Feb 16 2009, 08:02 AM, said:

WHS is designed to fill up storage one disk at a time - please read the Tech Paper on Drive Extender to understand what is happening and why. Beefcake had specific reasons for doing something that works counter to this and has come up with an app which spreads data more across all the disks.

Thanks, I wasn't sure if this was still the case. I though it was and now I know for sure.

[web ferret]

This is awesome! Thanks mate!

/edit: I created a new subfolder in Software on my WHS, uploaded the .exe and clicked it to start. After opening a DOS screen I'm getting an error (the famous 'Windows has detected an error, do you wabt to sent an error report')

Am I'm doing something wrong?

[Emerlin]

I would like to know the answer to this as well..... Does this mean it will move the data off the system drive to the pool drives? I think that is a good thing should your system drive fail.

Omertron, on Feb 16 2009, 10:06 AM, said:

Hi, This looks like an excellent application, and something that I was trying to do manually, so I want to give it a go.

However, I have a question about "landing zone" and whether I should clear it out or not.
My system disk is a 200Gb drive split into 20Gb C: and 166Gb D:. I store local files on D: for things like media servers, uTorrent downloads, etc. I assume that I don't want to clear this drive with the "Clear Landing Zone" option? or does this refer to another D:?

Stuart

[Beefcake]

Emerlin, on Feb 16 2009, 11:21 AM, said:

I would like to know the answer to this as well..... Does this mean it will move the data off the system drive to the pool drives? I think that is a good thing should your system drive fail.

This "clear landing zone" feature will move data from d: onto the other drives in the pool. As far as if you should do it, I'm not sure why you have things on there in the first place, but if you want them on D: for whatever reason, then do not run the clear landing zone part.

-B

[Beefcake]

web ferret, on Feb 16 2009, 10:44 AM, said:

This is awesome! Thanks mate!

/edit: I created a new subfolder in Software on my WHS, uploaded the .exe and clicked it to start. After opening a DOS screen I'm getting an error (the famous 'Windows has detected an error, do you wabt to sent an error report')

Am I'm doing something wrong?

I haven't seen this yet. I would venture putting the program in the pool may not be a good idea and it wouldn't be able to move itself while it's running.

I always put the exe on the C:\ and open up a command winow, followed by executing it from the command line. Let me know if that works out for you.

[web ferret]

Beefcake, on Feb 16 2009, 07:17 PM, said:

I haven't seen this yet. I would venture putting the program in the pool may not be a good idea and it wouldn't be able to move itself while it's running.

I always put the exe on the C:\ and open up a command winow, followed by executing it from the command line. Let me know if that works out for you.

Thanks for your reply Beefcake! But perhaps it is a good idea to describe the way of installing your tool. In my case, I followed the steps on the frontpage of WGS stating 'There is no installation required. Simply unzip the files into a directory of your choice and start the executable'. So I did but it results to an error.

I really want to use your tool but as of now, I'm stuck...