drivebalancer
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Drive Balancer

Experience Level: Expert

Drive Balancer is an application which runs on Window Home Server to spread files evenly across the various drives on your home server.

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.

For a walk through of the tool running, checkout the walk_through.txt file in the download.

Developer: Beefcake

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More Info: Download | Support Forum | Review

Release History

v1.06

  • Now supports 100 Drives (Arbitrary number) instead of 26
  • Changed “Landing Zone” verbage to “D:”
  • Fixed Cleanup procedures so hopefully always cleans up afer itself
  • Added minor support for “X-Files” version of WHS – did range checking on C/D sizes
  • Completely rewrote D: clearing algorithm to be based on disk throughput (better results)
  • Got rid of extra verbage no longer needed when it’s “Crunch Time”

v1.05 (15.04.09)

  • 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

 


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About Terry Walsh

Terry Walsh is the founding editor and owner of We Got Served. Since February 2007, the site has provided detailed coverage and analysis of the emerging home server category, and has subsequently grown into a trusted outlet for digital home news and reviews.

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  • ChucklesG

    HELP…
    I used this program and now my 5 1.5Tb drives are nicely balanced BUT my 1Tb System drive is 98%full…

    How the heck do I ‘Balance’ the system drive?

    I have images of my BluRay movies on my data drives, is it because the files are greater thaqn 20GB the system drive is screwed up?

    I’ve reinstalled the server, repaired the database (which finally allowed me to access my backup which were inaccessible after I used the Drive Balancer. Now I have to fix my system drive because it slows down my backup when the System drive is 98% full…

    Chuck G.

    • Warren

      System Drive is the windows install location, it can't be moved or messed with in any way

  • mathmathou

    51 weeks after the last activity on tjis post, I have a question :-)

    What you describe as the purpose of this pluggin… I thought that was the job of the "demigrator" process ?