Before, I had 4 HDDs and the data were equally balanced between the HHDs except the system disk. I have heard that WHS tries to keep data of the system disk till it is absolutely necessary.
Some weeks ago I replaced the smallest HDD with a bigger one. All data were copied to the system disk as my other disk were full. No problems there. I put the new disk in and added the disk to the pool.
Now, the data is not balanced equally anymore as it did before.
My disks are as follow:
Disk0 61% Disk1 89% Disk2 93% Disk3 7% (the on that was replaced)
Before the replacement it looked like this:
Disk0 7% Disk1 97% Disk2 97% Disk3 97%
I thought the data on the system disk should be balanced back to non system disks. How does this storage balancing work?
There's nothing wrong. The term "balancing" is a misnomer; Windows Home Server doesn't balance files equally across disks; it's internal storage management algorithms prefer to put new files on the same disk(s) as other files in the same folder or share. So the files in your shares are equally protected no matter what disk(s) they reside on (i.e. if you have duplication on for all shares, all shares are protected against the loss of a drive). Also, Windows Home Server doesn't move files from disk to disk if there's no need (i.e. a drive isn't completely full) for performance reasons.I'm not on the WHS team, I just post a lot. :)
There's nothing wrong. The term "balancing" is a misnomer; Windows Home Server doesn't balance files equally across disks; it's internal storage management algorithms prefer to put new files on the same disk(s) as other files in the same folder or share. So the files in your shares are equally protected no matter what disk(s) they reside on (i.e. if you have duplication on for all shares, all shares are protected against the loss of a drive). Also, Windows Home Server doesn't move files from disk to disk if there's no need (i.e. a drive isn't completely full) for performance reasons.I'm not on the WHS team, I just post a lot. :)
