According to the Drive Extender Technical Brief, since PP1, it should be trying to fill up a drive (until there's only 20GB left) before moving on to the next one (with the exception of shadow copies, which go on drives with the most space). I ran the evaluation copy for about a month, and have recently installed the full (licensed) copy. In both cases the install source had PP1 included, and they were upgraded to PP2 after install, and in both cases, this is NOT how it behaved. It seems to be spreading data evenly between the drives in the pool, even putting some on the primary data partition, when there is PLENTY of space on the secondary drives (like 75% free, or more). For example, I have \\shares\videos\movies\movietitle1, and if you look at the actual data, that path will be duplicated on two drives, with one drive containing the video_ts files, and another drive containing the cover art, etc, that goes along with that movie. This means that to pull up that one movie, two drives have to be spun up and accessed. Duplication is NOT turned on for this folder (and the files aren't duplicated, it's just that the files for one movie are spread between two drives). Microsoft even seems to understand the reasons I'd like for it to keep it all together (from the whitepaper):
"One goal of the algorithm the Filter uses is to keep related files together on the same hard drive. Copying music from a CD to a hard drive illustrates why this is important. If a single secondary hard drive failed, it is more convenient to lose all the music from a few CDs and then re-copy those CDs than to insert hundreds of CDs to re-create one track from each. One way to achieve this is to ensure that a set of files created around the same time are stored on the same secondary hard drive."
Yet this isn't how it's behaving for me, in either install. Is everyone else experiencing this? Does anyone know why?
Thanks!
