Home Server Plus

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

More Info: Download | Support Forum | Review

Release History

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

drive balancer, drive extender