StableBit DrivePool Balancing Plug-in - Ordered File Placement
==============================================================

Author: Covecube Inc.

This plug-in changes StableBit DrivePool's default file placement strategy.

By default, StableBit DrivePool always places new files onto the disk with the most free space. This tends to 
equalize the amount of free space across all the disks in the pool.

With this plug-in, StableBit DrivePool will place new files in a way that will fill one disk at a time. Once a 
disk is filled to a pre-set threshold, StableBit DrivePool will then move onto filling the next disk.

This has a number of benefits:

* Files copied at the same time will tend to be on the same disk. Because those files were copied at the same time, 
  it stands to reason that they might be related. It can be beneficial, in terms of file recovery, to have related 
  files be placed on the same disk.
* You may want StableBit DrivePool to write to one disk at a time in order to implement an efficient power savings 
  policy.

Implementation Notes
====================

* This plug-in comes pre-configured with reasonable defaults. All you have to do is install it, and it will start working 
  instantly.
* The list of disk priorities is generated for you automatically based on how full the disks are at installation time, 
  but you can tweak that list from balancing settings.
* By default, the plug-in is configured to only control new file placement, but you can configure it to move your existing 
  files as well.
* If the plug-in is moving existing duplicated files, it can take more than one balancing pass to get to an optimal file 
  layout.
* Any balancing plug-in that is running above this plug-in (in terms of priority) will be able to override the file 
  placement strategy. For example, if the StableBit Scanner plug-in wants to evacuate files from a damaged disk, 
  it will do so, even though that might violate the file placement strategy that you've set up. By default, this plug-in 
  runs at the lowest priority, but you can change that in balancing settings.
* By default, this plug-in will override any folder based or pattern based file placement rules. In order for folder based 
  or pattern based rules to take priority over this plug-in you can change the balancing settings on the "Settings" tab 
  as follows:
    * UNCHECK "File placement rules respect real-time file placement limits set by the balancing plug-ins."
    * CHECK "Balancing plug-ins respect file placement rules."
    * UNCHECK "Unless the drive is being emptied."

Change Log
==========

1.0.6.9
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* [Issue #27665] Added drag and drop support to the disk lists.

1.0.5.6
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* Rebuilt using the latest template.
* This Balancer should not be enabled by default.

1.0.4.5
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* [Issue #2163] Fixed disk size rounding error in the UI.

1.0.3.4
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* [Issue #76] Fixed a bug where existing files were not being moved out of the lower priority drives. This was also causing perpetual 
  balance ratio calculations.
* [Issue #76] Updated the duplicated file skewing code to work better with files that have > 2 duplicated copies, ensuring that those 
  duplicated files will get moved into the correct order eventually.

1.0.2.3
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* New disks that are not explicitly reordered are added to the bottom of the ordered list. However, if there is more than 
  one new disk, then those new disks were being added to the bottom of the existing list, ordered by the percentage of used 
  disk space. You could have of course reordered the new disks in the balancer's settings, but we now always add all new 
  disks in the order that they were first seen on the pool. This required a change in the integration DLL and will only work 
  on newer versions of DrivePool. The plug-in will fall back to the old behavior if the integration DLL doesn't provide the 
  "first seen" information for each pool part.

1.0.1.2
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* Corrected how file placement limits are used.
  Previous to this, the limit would always be set to 90%, regardless of what limit you specified. When your specified limit 
  was reached then the 90% limit would flip over to the next drive in the order. This is counterintuitive and did not work 
  correctly with limits > 90%. We now compute the actual limit as specified by the user and use that.

1.0.0.1
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* Initial release.