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Drive usage split and replacing drives RRS feed

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    I have an HP WHS EX470, running for 1.5 years - it has grown to have a primary drive 500gig second drive of 500 and third drive of 1 terrabyte

    An hour ago it was
    Drive 0 500 90% used
    Drive 1 500 41% used
    Drive 2 1000 96% used

    It worries me that I am approaching 100% on 2 drives, it makes no sense for drive 2 to be at  96%  when it  could use drive1

    Right now I'm deleting a lot of superflous shares  to make some room - but its just a stopgap but it made more space
    Drive 0 500 76% used
    Drive 1 500 41% used
    Drive 2 1000 89% used

    This shows that drive 0 is holding one cop of shares which is stupid, shares should be going onto drive 1 & 2, and that would only leave tombstones on drive 0

     I will have to do something  to make expansion. I know I can replace drive 1 and 2 easily by putting a new drive  into slot #4  and un-mounting them- but I have no idea how to replace drive#0 - most posts I have seen are horror stories about lost data and from my own experience a year ago, I lost all my backups and had to start from scratch when I tried to clone drive #0 to make an offsite backup

    I was thinking of pulling drive 0,  cloning it with Acronix onto a  new 1 terrabyte drive, but I've seen reports that this does not work, that the drive serial # is differernt and that confuses WHS

    Is there a safe way that really works and why is this so hard to do?

    Wednesday, July 22, 2009 4:04 AM
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    What worries you about the data distribution? Balancing in WHS doesn't mean equal distribution of data. WHS typically tries to fill one drive first. So when you manage to make room you will soon end up in the same situtation.

    The best you can do: Add another big (1.5 or 2TB) drive as drive 3. Then remove drive 1 with the WHS console and replace this with another big drive. So you will end up with:
    Drive 0 500G
    Drive 1 2T (new)
    Drive 2 1T
    Drive 3 2T (new)

    Without a really good reason i wouldn't try to replace the system drive.
    LightsOut - Power Management for Windows Home Server http://www.home-server-blog.de/add-ins/lightsout/#en
    Wednesday, July 22, 2009 8:35 AM
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    What worries you about the data distribution? Balancing in WHS doesn't mean equal distribution of data. WHS typically tries to fill one drive first. So when you manage to make room you will soon end up in the same situtation.

    The best you can do: Add another big (1.5 or 2TB) drive as drive 3. Then remove drive 1 with the WHS console and replace this with another big drive. So you will end up with:
    Drive 0 500G
    Drive 1 2T (new)
    Drive 2 1T
    Drive 3 2T (new)

    Without a really good reason i wouldn't try to replace the system drive.
    LightsOut - Power Management for Windows Home Server http://www.home-server-blog.de/add-ins/lightsout/#en
    Wednesday, July 22, 2009 8:35 AM
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    Well that would very easy to do.

    I worry because WHS was flagging those  90%+  drives in red and when I removed files and they changed color to yellow (and the drive with space is green), it seemed  like it was trying to warn me

    Also, from a desktop computer viewpoint, its not good to have low disk space, it makes for more thrashing and fragmentations,  but since WHS does not defrag maybe that's not an issue.
    Wednesday, July 22, 2009 1:29 PM
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    I worry because WHS was flagging those  90%+  drives in red and when I removed files and they changed color to yellow (and the drive with space is green), it seemed  like it was trying to warn me
    That's not WHS itself, probably Sam Woods Disk Management?
    Drive Extender ensures that there's always some (small) free space on your drive.
    LightsOut - Power Management for Windows Home Server http://www.home-server-blog.de/add-ins/lightsout/#en
    Wednesday, July 22, 2009 1:45 PM
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    Yes,  you are correct,  it's his addin, and I was blaming WHS, I've just updated to the latest version, so I'm not sure if that would still flag high usage in red.
    Wednesday, July 22, 2009 4:21 PM
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    Yes,  you are correct,  it's his addin, and I was blaming WHS, I've just updated to the latest version, so I'm not sure if that would still flag high usage in red.

    I think this is possibly the issue I'm running into.  I just installed a new Hitachi 2TB drive as the system drive.  Did a new installation of WHS to this drive.  Installed all the latest windows updates which includes PP3 and then started to copy my data from my old hd's then include into the storage pool one at a time.  The 2TB is currently at 60% full while a second 500GB is 99% full.  Problem is, the 60% full 2TB is thrashing!!  It just will not stop.  I restart WHS, get to the windows logon screen and disk activity seems normal for a minute or two then bam!  Disk activity goes through the roof!!!  I think a service must have started which is causing this and wonder if it might be the disk management tool.  I downloaded the latest copy available as of two or three days ago so if this tool is the problem, the latest version might be as well even now.

    I've just remoted into my WHS from work and uninstalled the plugin.  Hopefully this will have fixed the issue but I wont know until I get home.

    I do wonder though whether my new 2TB drive is duff.  I was happily running a xcopy batch command to copy my data from my old disk to the shares on whs but I noticed that xcopy reported that the disk was out of storage space for some of the files.  This can't be true because even now the storage pool has 830GB free!?

    Does anybody have any other ideas as to why my 2TB is thrashing and certain files didn't copy over due to lack of storage space?

    Many thanks in advance from a rather stressed user!!
    Friday, November 27, 2009 11:26 AM
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    Yes,  you are correct,  it's his addin, and I was blaming WHS, I've just updated to the latest version, so I'm not sure if that would still flag high usage in red.

    I think this is possibly the issue I'm running into.  I just installed a new Hitachi 2TB drive as the system drive.  Did a new installation of WHS to this drive.  Installed all the latest windows updates which includes PP3 and then started to copy my data from my old hd's then include into the storage pool one at a time.  The 2TB is currently at 60% full while a second 500GB is 99% full.  Problem is, the 60% full 2TB is thrashing!!  It just will not stop.  I restart WHS, get to the windows logon screen and disk activity seems normal for a minute or two then bam!  Disk activity goes through the roof!!!  I think a service must have started which is causing this and wonder if it might be the disk management tool.  I downloaded the latest copy available as of two or three days ago so if this tool is the problem, the latest version might be as well even now.

    I've just remoted into my WHS from work and uninstalled the plugin.  Hopefully this will have fixed the issue but I wont know until I get home.

    I do wonder though whether my new 2TB drive is duff.  I was happily running a xcopy batch command to copy my data from my old disk to the shares on whs but I noticed that xcopy reported that the disk was out of storage space for some of the files.  This can't be true because even now the storage pool has 830GB free!?

    Does anybody have any other ideas as to why my 2TB is thrashing

    Probably because it's indexing files.

    and certain files didn't copy over due to lack of storage space?

    That is most likely because xcopy doesn't know how WHS handles files in the background.  It's probably only seeing the free space on the primary drive, not the entire storage pool.

    Many thanks in advance from a rather stressed user!!

    Friday, November 27, 2009 2:57 PM
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