My home server currently has a mix of 1TB, 2TB, 3TB, and 4TB drives, plus a 64 GB boot drive that is nearly full with Windows 7 crap, so I am about to swap it out for a 120 GB SSD, so there will be about 60 GB free on the boot drive.   I've also ordered a Seagate 8TB Archive HDD, and plan to order one or two more, once I know they will work with my server.   Of course, the issue with those drives is their goofy write behavior, and I have read that people recommend using the SSD plug-in to prioritize writing new files to the other drives, and then later the plug-in will move the files to the archive drive.

What I'm wondering is, whether I should use the 60 GB free on the SSD as the landing-zone for new files, or should I just use all the other non-archive HDD's?   I think this depends on details I don't understand regarding how the SSD plug-in actually works.

If I use the SSD, I would want that 60 GB free to be kept empty and only used for temporary storage until the files can be moved.   If I were to use the non-archive HDD's, I would want them to be about the same % full as the archive HDD's, write only to the non-archive HDD's and rebalance later.   Can the SSD plugin be used either way, or just one?

My PC, Windows 10 with a drivepool of 18TB has been getting progessively slower over the past few weeks.  Stablebit scanner shows all drives as Healthy.  I have run virus checks and all is OK.  The updates are all current.  I basically use the computer to store my collection of movies, rip new additions to the drive, modify them thru handbrake, then store them in the pool for access using Plex.  I noticed folders started taking longer and longer to open.  Ripping movies also became slower.  I ran the rebalancing which seemed to help some.  Two days ago I accessed Stablebit to check on the pool and noticed at the bottom of the screen where a green line usually was present it was now yellow and showed activity; measuring.  I got out of the program and restarted the program.  I decided to run the remeasure from the pool choices.  It has been doing this now for two days.  My question is this normal on a pool of this size?  There are 8 drives in the pool with only one showing  the line as dark; the remaining are showing a lighter color.  As you can probably tell, I'm by no means a guru on Drivepool.  I have owned it for several years without problem, just installed, added the drives and enjoy.  Can this remeasuring be stopped without screwing up the content or do I just let it go and see what happens?

Thanks

Hello, hoping someone can give me a tip here.

I've set up my Plex library on a DrivePool drive that is set to save everything in triplicate - once on a local drive and then two more copies on two attached CloudDrive drives. This seemed like a great idea to me - until I started trying to actually use Plex.

I noticed things seemed slow to load - even just the info screen. Suspecting it might be because of the cloud drives, I tested having a Plex library folder that's entirely local, and clicking on those titles opened their info page nearly instantly as it's supposed to work.

Now, I don't have a gigabit connection or anything, but I'd think my 150mbit connection should be enough to keep up with things. (I haven't tested library files accessed directly from the cloud drive - that might be interesting to see if that performs better.) In any case...

TL;DR: If I turn off drive read striping, is there a way to tell DrivePool to always prioritize reading from the local drive?

I'll be getting my first real server which I want to do multiple things on. I use Windows on all my pc's, but I was thinking of using a hypervisor so i could take advantage of containers/docker etc.

• Is there any advantage of running a type 1 hypervisor (like Proxmox or Hyper-V core) and then WSE 2012 R2 as a guest OS. DrivePool will run under WSE 2012 and manage all storage. I read a number of other threads on this and it seems drives can be passed thru with no performance hit and even Scanner can work, correct?
• I was thinking of running the various services I'd need (like media server, download, web server) as Docker containers under Linux. They'd be stored on separate disk of course, and then access the media via \\shares from DrivePool. 
• Is there any advantage to doing this vs - installing WSE 3012 as main OS then using its Hyper-V to host Linux VMs - is the performance same in both cases? 

I've got folder level duplication enabled, but when it gets done balancing/duplicating there are always duplication warnings.  See the attached screenshot.  I've tried "Duplicate Now" multiple times and this still happens every time.  Anyone else run into this issue, or any ideas to figure out what's going on?

Hi, 

I have a folder with duplicated data on my system.

Can i just copy parts of the duplicated data from one disk in the pool to another disk in the same pool ?

(So from e: \poolpart....\duplicated\folderx  to f:\poolpart....\duplicated\folderx  )

Do i have to deaktivate the service before or do a re-measure of the pool afterwards ?

(I have automatic balancing deaktivated)

Thanks

Hello,

I regularly browse my Drivepool from another computer in the network.  I've noticed that if I accidentally delete a file it will not go to the recycle bin, it gets permanently deleted. I've tried setting the files in the pool to read-only, but it doesn't seem to take.  They get marked as read only, but if I click delete they are deleted. Is there is there any way to get around this problem?

Is there a way to view the network drive as read only? What would happen if I went into the pool folder in the host drive and changed the file attributes there, would this corrupt the file in some way? - and would it protect from accidental deletion? Any workarounds at all for this?

thx, E

I have 30 disks - approx 100TB.  

I'm slowly converting each of them to 64K formatted disks (most of the files are very large 40gb media files).  

But is there an advantage of dynamic vs basic?  If so, what?  And what are the disadvantages?

Perhaps you guys can help me, I have 30 disks (100TB) in a pool.

One of them is an 8TB Seagate archive disk.  About 2 months ago it started dropping routinely - which as you know - locks the pool into read only mode.  I could get it to readd after a reboot but inevitably it would drop again upon high use.

I removed all files from the disk, reformatted it, then readded it.  Still same behavior.

So I RMA'd the disk.  The company sent me another 8TB archive disk and now I'm experiencing the same issue.

Am I missing something?  I can't imagine that I got yet another faulty 8TB disk.  And...it's the only one out of 29 other disks that does this.  And it's not my only Seagate disk. 

Any ideas would be appreciated.

Running DrivePool 2.1.558 on Windows Server 2012 R2.

Don't own Scanner.

20TB DrivePool, 6 Drives, 6 SATA ports (all full)

One (1) of these six drives, a 3TB Toshiba, is in the process of failing BADLY.

Symptoms… whenever I attempt to copy data from the Pool, ONLY files being read off the failing disk slows to a craw of around 50-80Kb… then stops and chugs… then reads another 40-80kb… stops forever while the HDD churns.  I'm assuming the drive's built-in ECC algorithms are working overtime to recover the bits and the SMART system is reallocating sectors (but the drive is nearly 100% full… maybe 60-70GB free out of 3TB.  The files I'm copying off DO eventually get read though.  And so far, the files I've copied off the Pool and spot checked seem to be error free, but it can take up to 1-2hrs to read back a single 1GB file from the damaged sectors!

Anyways, it's OBVIOUS this 3TB Toshiba will die any SECOND now.

So my options:

Option #1

Buy a PCI-e SATA III controller card.  Buy a new 3TB+ disk.  Add new controller & disk to server then use the built-in "remove drive from Pool" function to empty all data off the failing Toshiba hdd.

• Q: Will the "remove drive from Pool" function timeout/error out?  As noted above, I HAVE been able to successfully copy files off this damaged HDD using plain old File Explorer… it just takes a LONG TIME.  How patient is the DrivePool evacuation function? Just as patient as File Explorer?  I know there's a "force removal of damaged disk" checkbox, but frankly I'm wary  of that option.  Nearly all this data is multi-part .RAR files without parity (music, movies, audiobooks).  If a single file from a multi-part .RaR-ed folder gets skipped b/c DrivePool decides it's taking too long to read, then I effectively lose 100% of the data in that folder even if 99% of those .Rar's are safely residing on the other 5 functioning HDD's in the Pool.
• Q2:  Does the "remove drive from Pool" function actually DELETE all the contents off the removed HDD after the removal process completes successfully or even errors out???  What if the process finishes but with errors??  Does DrivePool delete all files off the removed drive?  If so, that's bad… gives me no opportunities to use a data recovery tool like SpinRite after the fact  to recover those files.

Option #2

Physically remove the failing Toshiba 3TB drive from the server.  Place the failing drive into a 2nd PC running Windows 10 x64.  Place a new 3TB+ replacement drive the 2nd PC and then manually copy contents to the new hdd using File Explorer.  Finally, move new disk back to server and run some command to reintroduce the "new" HDD containing the old/existing files to DrivePool???

• Q1. There is a total filename/file path length limit in Windows  I don't know the exact number, 127 chars?, but somehow you guys seem to get around this issue inside DrivePool.  But I've encountered this problem when coping highly nested file trees using File Explorer (which my DrivePool contains (ie.. Media\Video\HighDef\TV\ShowName\Season\xxxxx.xxxxxx.xxxxxx.xxxxxx.xxxxx\yyyyy.yyyyyy.yyyyyy.yyyyyyy.yyyyyy.part99.rar).  Am I going to get thousands of "filename/file path too long, please rename file or shorten file path" errors when I attempt this manual file copy using Win10 x64?  Should I try using a disk cloning tool like Macrium Reflect Free Edition to clone the disk instead of using a manual file copy with File Explorer to get around such issues?
• Q2.  If I'm successful copying my disk over, I know there's a manual command to force DrivePool to notice the replacement disk and make it reindex/remeasure/re-integrated the data back into the DrivePool.  Is there a URL to this FAQ?

Sorry for the really long post.  

Hi all, seeking a little advice here : 

with the release of amazon cloud drive i'm now testing it with clouddrive, added it to the pool and setup the disk as the target of pool-duplication. Drivepool is still uploading stuff now,i will have with a 1:1 copy in a few days.

I have some questions regarding disasters (i'm coming to a snapraid-parity configuration that i wanna leave to regain my big 8tb disk) :

1 - If a disk is missing, drivepool will set everything as read-only until i remove and then add a new drive to the pool. Drivepool will then copy the missing stuff from the amazon cloud drive. No data lost. Is this right ?

2 - What happens if i accidentally delete a folder or file from the pool ? Can i restore it from the duplication ?

3 -  What is the easiest way to save file history of a part of my pool (duplicated to the cloud too) ? I'm scared of ransomware and do not wanna use other users or set everything as read-only (yes i'm a lazy ass eheh)

OT : i'm planning to re-install my windows 10 pro after all is setup to have a clean pc...can i just install all stablebit software with my keys ? I use all 3 products

Thanks a lot

A.

Hello All,

I have actually posted on another site and Drashna said it was fine that I posted here since there are many that have done this. I want to continue to use Flexraid-F for parity and use Drivepool to manage my pool.

I need your help, here is my current setup;

1 - Norco 4220 20TBs UNRaid Server running latest version all disks xfs, and running NFS as the protocol. This is my backup to my Windows 2012 Essentials Server, and I have to say that running the NFS protocol to my Windows 10 Kodi HTPC, ran flawlessly, no buffering whatsoever.

2- Windows 12 Essentials running FlexRaid-F, it has all my Movies, TV-Shows, and some other files I run FreeFileSync to Compare and copy any files to my UnRaid Server, but this is the server where I do all my work. Sadly, I figured out that FlexRaid-F does not support NFS, and FlexRaid-T Raid does. Apparently, I must be out of the time frame that they were offering a discounted price to current members, which I have been one since 2013, so I'd have to shell out the 100 dollars to get T-Raid. I refuse to do that.

This is where DrivePool comes in. back in 2013 I looked at DrivePool, DriveBender, sad to hear about them by the way, and FlexRaid. I already had UnRaid running. I chose FlexRaid because I liked the idea of parity, similar to what UnRaid was giving me, and I know it worked because I had rebuilt a few disks before, on UnRaid that is. I'd hope if there was a failure, Heaven forbid on my Windows Server that FlexRaid would work the same.

FlexRaid-F has worked well for me I can't complain, never could get an answer why my Verify would always fail though, but that's another story. I'm disappointed that after being a loyal member for so long that I have to shell out all that money for T-Raid. Also, if you make major changes to your server you have to buy another license. This is where DrivePool seems more appealing to me.

It is my understanding that DrivePool can use the built in NFS Server role in Windows Server, as well as other software such as HaneWin NFS Server, Drashna schooled me on that earlier, which will be great for streaming to my HTPC.

So now that I've given you some background, here is my question, and yes I have looked this up on the DrivePool forum and even tried to google it not sure if I used the right search phrases because I come up with nothing. So, this is where you guys come in. There is no formal guide that I have found, if there is one please point me to it, that points out how to use FlexRaid-F as parity, and DrivePool.

I have read the links from here: http://community.covecube.com/index.php?/topic/52-faq-parity-and-duplication-and-drivepool/#entry3542

I believe I did it, however, I read this link after the fact, http://forum.covecube.com/discussion/720/dp-with-flexraid-raidf-comments#Item_30 towards the middle Saitoh183 wrote:

 

saitoh183 October 2012

Resident Guru

no you dont need a new partition, you go on your C drive, Create a folder and in disk management you remove the drive letter and choose NTFS folder(right-click on disk and choose "Change Drive Letter and Paths..". As for naming convention i use the disk location like Disk0, Disk1, etc. that corresponds to what i see in my disk management

Unfortunately, I didn't read that part and was curious, if I could remove the drive letters now, or do I have to go through the entire process all over again?

I would appreciate all and any advice. Thanks for helping this 'Ole Grumpy Marine..

-Semper Fi

gyrene2083

I've attached a screenshot to show what I mean. For some reason even after weeks I can't get drivepool to use this drive. I have Volume Equalizer after StablebitScanner so I think it should be trying to put stuff on there.

I've read that with files being as large as they are these days and with HDD's having NCQ, that defragmentation offers little to no benefit, and just puts more wear on the HDD.   Is this true?   If not, what are the best defragmentation programs these days?

I forget if it was the old Norton or Central Point, but back in DOS times, there was one that actually had a "prioritize programs and folders with full file reorder" option -- it would stick all your directory info and .exe's at the front of the drive, and literally reorder every file and every cluster on the drive from end to end, in one long session.   Probably overkill, but it was cool to watch.

With the impending release of Server 2016 Essentials what is the way ahead for DrivePool? I am currently (happily) running drivepool on server essentials 2012 R2 and am looking to upgrade to 2016 when it releases.

Any idea on compatibility issues?

Hello All,

I have actually posted on another site and Drashna said it was fine that I posted here since there are many that have done this. I want to continue to use Flexraid-F for parity and use Drivepool to manage my pool.

I need your help, here is my current setup;

1 - Norco 4220 20TBs UNRaid Server running latest version all disks xfs, and running NFS as the protocol. This is my backup to my Windows 2012 Essentials Server, and I have to say that running the NFS protocol to my Windows 10 Kodi HTPC, ran flawlessly, no buffering whatsoever.

2- Windows 12 Essentials running FlexRaid-F, it has all my Movies, TV-Shows, and some other files I run FreeFileSync to Compare and copy any files to my UnRaid Server, but this is the server where I do all my work. Sadly, I figured out that FlexRaid-F does not support NFS, and FlexRaid-T Raid does. Apparently, I must be out of the time frame that they were offering a discounted price to current members, which I have been one since 2013, so I'd have to shell out the 100 dollars to get T-Raid. I refuse to do that.

This is where DrivePool comes in. back in 2013 I looked at DrivePool, DriveBender, sad to hear about them by the way, and FlexRaid. I already had UnRaid running. I chose FlexRaid because I liked the idea of parity, similar to what UnRaid was giving me, and I know it worked because I had rebuilt a few disks before, on UnRaid that is. I'd hope if there was a failure, Heaven forbid on my Windows Server that FlexRaid would work the same.

FlexRaid-F has worked well for me I can't complain, never could get an answer why my Verify would always fail though, but that's another story. I'm disappointed that after being a loyal member for so long that I have to shell out all that money for T-Raid. Also, if you make major changes to your server you have to buy another license. This is where DrivePool seems more appealing to me.

It is my understanding that DrivePool can use the built in NFS Server role in Windows Server, as well as other software such as HaneWin NFS Server, Drashna schooled me on that earlier, which will be great for streaming to my HTPC.

So now that I've given you some background, here is my question, and yes I have looked this up on the DrivePool forum and even tried to google it not sure if I used the right search phrases because I come up with nothing. So, this is where you guys come in. There is no formal guide that I have found, if there is one please point me to it, that points out how to use FlexRaid-F as parity, and DrivePool.

I have read the links from here: http://community.covecube.com/index.php?/topic/52-faq-parity-and-duplication-and-drivepool/#entry3542

I believe I did it, however, I read this link after the fact, http://forum.covecube.com/discussion/720/dp-with-flexraid-raidf-comments#Item_30 towards the middle Saitoh183 wrote:

 

saitoh183 October 2012

Resident Guru

no you dont need a new partition, you go on your C drive, Create a folder and in disk management you remove the drive letter and choose NTFS folder(right-click on disk and choose "Change Drive Letter and Paths..". As for naming convention i use the disk location like Disk0, Disk1, etc. that corresponds to what i see in my disk management

Unfortunately, I didn't read that part and was curious, if I could remove the drive letters now, or do I have to go through the entire process all over again?

I would appreciate all and any advice. Thanks for helping this 'Ole Grumpy Marine..

-Semper Fi

gyrene2083

***Update***

I actually made the move after I tested and everything just went smoothly. I also was a twitter giveaway winner for a Drivepool License so how could I not do it! I don't regret it not one bit. Thanks to the Stablebit Team, Drashna for his patience, and time to walk me through things as you will read, and many others whose threads I've read to get me to this point......

Hi,

I posted this question about 10 days back on hss forum but was told I may get a response here. I have edited it a little. Thank you for reading my message.

I am currently running an evaluation version of server 2012 r2 essentials on a dell T20 and have three drives for data (1 , 2 and 4 TB) and an SSD with the OS on it. Total storage is about 0.84TB (mirrored 2 way) but unevenly spread between the initial 1 TB drive (came with server) and the later added drives. Storage spaces doesnt apparently rebalance and the data in storage spaces is not readable in other windows computers; as in if the server were to crash, I could not just attach the drive by usb/sata to another windows PC and read the data. As a result i am looking into drivepool.

I was google searching for a built in technique to migrate from storage spaces to drivepool and saw one mention about copying files over but wanted to confirm.

Since posting this message, I found that it is not easy to remove a drive from SS either. Googling it suggests using powershell to retire a disk, repair the virtual disk and then extract. Complicating matters, storage spaces is now reporting low hard drive space despite having a total of 4+2+1 TB (so atleast 3.5TB duplicated) in the dell t20 storage spaces while i only have 0.84 TB of data in total!! Doubling that should be 1.68 TB (as reported by file explorer). Essentials dashboard claims i am using 4.27 of 6.36 TB space!

1. In any case, my current plan is physically remove the 1 TB drive using powershell or just manually pull it out, then add a new 4T drive in its place and assign it to drivepool. I will then copy the client backup folders and photos, videos etc to this new drive from the other drives. Is this the best way? And can i just drag them using file explorer or does one have to use the essentials dashboard to reassign folder location? Then i will delete the storage space and reclaim the remaining two drives (2 and 4t) and add them to drivepool to permit mirroring.

2. Alternatively, I can delete storage spaces completely (though that option worries me even though i have been backing up the server!!), then use veeam that has been backing up daily the server and hopefully extract the client backups and video, photo shared folders from it to the new drivepool.

Pleas advice me if these are the best options or if there is an easier way around. thank you.

Hi, just a heads up for anyone that might not have ever had to do a restore yet...

I had a pooled drive go down recently, it totally died and would no longer be recognised. Because of this, I now had random files missing throughout the pool as they were spread randomly and balanced by Drivepool.

The only way I could figure out to restore this mess was to:

• Open Crashplan UI, set to include deleted files, then hit the date column to sort by decending date.
• Navigate through the tree in the Crashplan UI, and tick everything that is grey with a deleted date of the day the disk died. This is quicker via the keyboard using arrows and spacebar.
• Spend an hour or so ticking files until you get tired, hit restore, remember where you where, then repeat until complete.

This took me ages as you can imagine. If only Crashplan could show me files deleted on a specific date and just restore those!

Since then I have tweaked my file placement settings to put music on one drive, pictures on another, etc. This way if it happens again I will have an easier time. Except that this requires manual management, and intervention once the disks get full to re-arrange stuff.

What might help here is a new balancer/placement plugin to keep all files in a subfolder together on the same drive? Food for thought for anyone out there into writing them. I'd also be interested to hear if anyone else has run into this and found a better way of dealing with it than I did!

Hi folks,

I have a 40TB NAS and due to some interest SMART results on 2 drives, I've taken the precaution to remove them formally through DrivePool, and pass the data off to the other drives in the pool.

(2x Global Duplication, 3x Duplication for "My Photos")

The first drive of the 2 has finished the Removal Process, but it seems that it has left maybe ~20 folders (with a bunch of files) in the now unhidden PoolPart folder.

I performed a simple SHA1 check on 1 of the files and compared it to the version that is still in the pool and it is an exact match. So I'm curious as to why it is seemingly random that a few files weren't removed from the removed drive.

The PoolPart folder on the removed drive is around 400GB, whereas it was originally 4TB.

Any insight as to what happened? I don't want to delete this folder unless I'm certain that this 400GB of content exists in the pool still, but not sure how to automatically compare.

Thanks!

edit: Just a thought, could it be the files were somehow in use so DrivePool merely copied to another drive them instead of moving them?

edit2: Same thing with the 2nd removed drive. Once removal completed around 400GB of the original 4TB remains on the drive. The contents appear to be in the pool as expected, as well.