Drive Balancing Tool
The AV Science Forums have a post for Windows Home Server users about a new tool that helps with drive balancing.
The utility balances all the data on your drive pool equally, the main purpose being that 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 and wish to correct this. On the authors own system, he routinely gets within 2% of perfect balancing on all pooled drives.
NOTE: Usage instructions are available in the following forum post. Make sure you download the latest version, which at the time of publishing is version 1.01 and remember it can take a few hours to balance some systems.
Share this WHS Article with Others:
I don’t see why this is needed. Windows Home Server does do some balancing. So what that some drives have more data than others.
For a server, I would want to keep the amount of installed third party software to a minimum.
Dont know about you but i would rather have the data spread evenly so if a drive fails i lose a smaller amount than one drive filled to the brim with data. Its all a probablity game but i would rather min the prob of data loss.
But with Drive Extender you shouldn’t be losing any data anyway. The only thing that this buys you is to minimize the amount of duplicated data that you you lose.
I still don’t see the benefit of having adding another third party piece of software on the WHS. Each additional piece of software will use more RAM, which may cause the server to page memory to it virtual memory swap file, which can cause higher disk usage.
Also with more software, there is a greater chance of conflicts or bugs.
That makes the assumption that someone is using duplication on all of their data doesn’t it?
For some people that may not be an option in the near future.