Hi,

I currently have DrivePool on another large server (the SM 846 Chassis) and works good though I don't have the server in operation right now.

I am doing a smaller media server build with parts from a former video editing build that consist of these components:

Antec 302 case, with Rosewill 3 x 5.25-Inch to 4 x 3.5-Inch Hot-swap SATAIII/SAS cage

AsRock H61M//U3S3 mATX motherboard

Intel i5 2500 (non-K) 3.3GHz CPU

16GB RAM (I know overkill, and WSS will only use 8GB)

Silverstone 500W PSU

128GB Samsung 840 Pro SSD for OS

2x 2TB Toshiba hard drives

I've pretty much used all the on-board SATA ports on the motherboard which is only 6 ports. With the 5.25" 4 x 3.5" hot swap cage I can use up to 10 drives in the case. 

My question is, what's a good recommendation for an SATA controller that Stablebit Scanner will be able to read the SMART information from. I know there are many IBM M1015 variants on Ebay, but possible that Scanner won't read the info from any drives with some of those controllers, such as the Perc H310 controller cards I have in another system. 

Any help would be great!

EDIT: Ok being home from work now I see there are some topics regarding the controller cards. Still have to do some reading, though alot of the SAS cards on ebay needs to be flashed to IT mode, which I am not sure how to do. 

I do have an ESXi setup that's using an Supermicro X9SCL+-F-O 1155 board with the Xeon E3-1230 v2 CPU (which I think its equivalent to an I7). However, since the ESXi setup only has 3 VM's on it with only two active, I may just decommission it and use it for a solid physical server using Windows Server 2012 R2 Essentials since I have a license for it.

Only down side is that it while I believe it does Windows 7 client backups, it doesn't support XP clients so would have to use another backup product for those. 

Hello there, 

I am having a very peculiar issue here with Drivepool. I have a stand alone hard drive ( let's call it D:), that I use to download stuff to, rename it, and then copy it to my Pool (F:). When I started using drivepool, the copying speeds used to fluctuated between 80-300MBPS. But after a few months of using it, it starts at about 1.2GBPS and drops to a low low 9MBPS and stays there for the whole copying. Needless to say this takes me a lot more time to copy huge files. Like it took me 2hrs 15 mins to copy a 75GB TV Show. That is quite unusual. That should have been done in less than 20 minutes in normal copying time. 

Is there something I have done in my settings that could have caused this? Attached is a screenshot of my Balancing settings. 

Any help is appreciated. I go through at least 200GB of file manipulation a week. 

Just to add, Stablebit Scanner reports all the drives as being fine.

Any help is appreciated. 

Thanks.

Just wondering if there's a way to force a refresh of the Non-pooled drive list in DrivePool? I've created a new cloud drive, its present on E: and I can use the drive fine, I just can't add it to drive pool as it doesn't appear in the list. I've tried the latest stable and beta releases of DrivePool along with the latest beta of CloudDrive. Also tried offlining the disk in windows as well as detaching/reattaching through CloudDrive.

Hey all. Forgive me if this post is long but I'm having a hard time making a decision here.

So I have about 9TB of data that I am keeping on a small Windows 10 home server. It's mostly media, video projects and emulation stuff (I run a retro gaming YouTube channel and have tons of emulation sets.) It's about 485,000 files in total. Until recently, it was all kept on a Windows Storage Spaces JBOD volume through a 4-bay MediaSonic ProBox that was connected directly to my main PC. Problem is, because CrashPlan has such a horribly written client, backing all this up to the cloud was taking over 3GB of memory at any given time. So I built this home server and moved stuff there. The problem was, some of the data was still residing on my desktop PC and again because of CrashPlan's crap client, it was constantly rescanning terabytes of data off my main machine over the network which also was no good. So I decided to move everything to my home server.

I bought 4 new 3TB WD Red drives and decided to try FlexRAID RAID-F. I copied everything off the old Storage Spaces volume to a bunch of other drives I had lying around, installed the new drives and created a FlexRAID volume. 3 data drives, 1 parity drive. This was way more effort than it should have been as FlexRAID's UI isn't great, the documentation is terrible (tons of pages on their wiki are outdated), their forums are useless and the developer won't even talk to you unless you pay a ridiculous amount of money. Still, I got it working. Then I spent the better part of 2 days copying all the data back. Then I discovered that because of the way CrashPlan reads the file system, it is not capable of doing real-time backups with FlexRAID RAID-F and can only discover changes when everything is rescanned. Because of the size and number of files in my backup, this takes literally hours each time. That's no good, I pay for CrashPlan in part for real-time backup. I'm fed up with FlexRAID and am ready to copy everything back off it again and dump it before the trial ends.

I've been looking at alternatives and am intrigued by DrivePool. What you seem to offer isn't RAID per ce, it's storage pooling but with the option to have some or all of the data duplicated across multiple drives to protect against failure. As I understand it, this can't heal itself from a failure like a RAID can but it is possible to have a drive die without losing the whole pool. Truth be told, I think having a full RAID plus CrashPlan is probably overdoing it for my scenario. I have 12TB of storage available with this pool of Red drives but right now, only have access to 9TB of it as I have 1 drive being used for parity. If I convert the whole thing into DrivePool, I will have an extra 3TB I can use to duplicate the most important stuff, while entrusting the rest to CrashPlan. Hopefully that explains what I'm looking for.

So, before I take the plunge and copy all this data twice yet again, here's my questions for confirmation:

• If a drive fails, I can remove/replace that drive without it taking out the rest of the pool?
• If I pool all 4 of these 3TB drives together, I'll get a combined pool of roughly 12TB?
• Will DrivePool appear as a normal NTFS volume so that CrashPlan can back it up in real-time? FlexRAID RAID-F does not but their T-RAID option apparently does.
• I read a recent thread where someone talked about it being a nightmare to restore FROM CrashPlan after a drive failure, largely because of CrashPlan's crap client again. Should I run into a failure and it's with unduplicated data, is this what I can expect to deal with? It's not a deal breaker, I just want to know. I hate CrashPlan's client but unfortunately, they're the only truly unlimited option I have available.

Again, sorry for the long post but after wasting so many hours on FlexRAID, I really want to make sure what I choose next will do the job. As I said, I think with CrashPlan, I don't necessarily need full RAID with this data. But I want to make sure I'm not missing anything. Thank you very much!

My eyes are pretty light-sensitive, so I enabled Dark Mode in Windows 10 and also the High Contrast theme in accessibility settings in Windows 10. This is great because almost every app that I use runs in a kind of dark mode for Windows and I'm not blinded by bright white backgrounds in apps any longer. Well this is true for most of the apps I use, but yours is an exception.

With your app, you've chosen to allow the font color to change with theme changes, but not the background, so enabling the High Contrast theme puts a white font on your hardcoded white background. Here's what that looks like:

/

Can I ask that you do one of two things?

1. Hardcode everything so the text is black where it needs to be to stay visible. Why allow it to change when changing can only cause problems if you are not going to change any of the rest of the interface when the theme changes?

2. (Ideal) Properly support themes in Windows so that when High Contrast is enabled the interface is displayed properly, the background can darken, and the text will be more readable. It should look closer to this when High Contrast is enabled.

I work in a small team of developers and we wish to use DrivePool at some stage to distribute files across an array of drives.

We wish to distribute all files sequentially across the array of disks:

1. Copy folder into pool drive which contains:
   • file-001.bin
   • file-002.bin
   • file-003.bin
   • ...
   • etc
2. If we have an array of 5 drives labelled D:\, E:\, F:\, G:\, H:\, we want the files to be distributed like:
   • file-001.bin -> D:\
   • file-002.bin -> E:\
   • file-003.bin -> F:\
   • file-004.bin -> G:\
   • file-005.bin -> H:\
   • file-006.bin -> D:\
   • file-007.bin -> E:\
   • ...
   • etc

Is this possible? If not, could some sample code for a plugin be provided? The plugin documentation is incredibly minimal and we found that we were doing all the heavy lifting ourselves when it came to balancing and simply relying on DrivePool for drive virtualisation and nothing more, copying and balancing manually in the code.

Hi

Just trying out Drivepool and first question i have is Drive letters and what happens when you run out of them

I am building a large storage/backup server and its likely i will add more than 20 hdd 

Just experimenting with 4 hdd plus OS drive - created a pool which is assigned a drive letter but also the four drives that make up the pool are also assigned drive letters

The drives were not assigned drive letters before adding to the pool (un-formatted)

So what happens when you want multiple pools and have a large number of drives - do you have to use mount points?

Currently i am testing on win7 64bit

Any pointers or advice would be good

Thanks

Hi,

I have two pooled hdds (duplication).

Yesterday the scanner informed me that one of hdds is damaged (unable to read 8 sectors, problem concerns only one file) - see attachment.

I removed this damaged hdd from the pool, than I deleted this file from this hdd and I pooled this drive again.

Now only 15GB are duplicated and the checking still continues - see second attachment.

What should I do now?

Wait or remove again the broken hdd and replace with new one?

Yes, I know there's no substitute for backup, but its not feasible once you get beyond a certain size. And offsite backups would be best but again I don't think its feasible unless you have access to a data center where you can coloc a backup server.

So if I enable duplication doesn't that effectively achieve the goal of backups? The other option is to build a 2nd server and use it for backups which is just added expense. I am not worried about accidental deletions, even with a backup server I'd use rsync.

What do people use for backup?

First forgive me if this doesn't make sense. I have two 6tb drives and both of them are getting full and I'll need to get another drive soon. But until I have the money to get one, How do I tell Drivepool to use more disk space for each of the drives. Both show having around 1.80tb's left on each drive. I'm not 100% sure but I'm pretty sure my first drive got about that full when drivepool started putting my files onto the second drive. Seems like kind of a watse to have over 1tb of free space that won't get used, or over 3tb's between the two drives, if I end up getting another drive.

Odd one.... I lost write access to my pool so fired up the Drive Pool GUI and had a single screen asking to "Transfer Licence to this PC" which I did, and then my pool was all good.  No idea what caused Drive Pool to think I had a new PC / HW though I had been playing with some OC settings and had a Win 10 BSOD / repair check as a result, but that is the only thing I could think of.  Running 2.2.0.682 Beta

Thanks

Nathan

Hi...

I have 4x 4TB drives with data on it all formatted ReFS. I mounted the drives via a folder then created a pool. I can see the files via Explorer by navigating to and browsing the mount location. See below...

But if I goto the actual pooled volume that DrivePool creates I don't see the files. I thought you could import drives into a pool without having to re-copy the files. In DrivePool it shows the drives data as "Other".

I am currently running 11 disks in my pool, mixed capacities, drivepool version 2.1.1.561, Win 8.1 pro, os drive Intel 120gb ssd.

So far, no problems at all.

I recently realized that there was a problem with one of my drives a WD30EZRX, or at least I thought it was.

When trying to access some files located in the pool, this was not possible, and the specific drive was continuously being accessed, as if it was trying to read from it and couldn't. The same happened when trying to move the file outside of the pool. I double checked cables, data and power, swapped them with different ones, the behavior was the same.  All the disks have been double checked both with hard disk sentinel and either Seatools or WD datalifeguard. No problems there. All of them healthy.

I then assigned a drive letter to the specific disk, the unreadable files were in the folders of the poolpart hidden folder, but there was also another folder named .covefs/reparse. I thought that this caused the problem. Of course I didn't do anything before consultation. What I did, was to remove the disk with the usual process, all went smoothly. The pool remained with the rest of the disks. now, these unreadable files were apparently moved to another disk, which by the way, had this folder .covefs/reparse when assigned drive letters to it and was able to check the hidden poolpart folder contents. Perhaps these files are corrupt somehow.

Any help appreciated as to how to deal with it.

What is the best policy regarding balancers in order to remove a drive from the pool without transferring its contents to another specific drive?

I don't care if the contents will be moved to other ones, I just don't want them to be moved to a specific one during the process.

Should I use drive usage limiter plugin and deselect both duplicated and unduplicated options from that drive?

As far as the main balancing options are concerned, which ones should I select?

Need help with this.

I have a pool with duplication x2 turned on.

Deleting folders in the pool over the network causes the folder's permissions to become locked. It seems that only one set of files are deleted from the hard drives. Deleting files over the network doesn't cause this issue. This happens on both old and new folders in the pool.

The only solution I have at the moment after the permissions are locked is to manually find the folder in the hard drives, and delete them.

Running windows 10 pro 64bit.

Hi

Just planning to move 20TB to a new drivepool setup

i have the option to add a SSD cache to the pool(s) and I am wondering if i should not enable the ssd cache until after the transfer is complete - as it appears if you do not have the settings quite right (as i'm new at this) you can fill up the ssd before they have a chance to move the data into the pool and hence complicate the issue. I obviously want this to run unattended as its probably going to take more than a day to complete.

From experience should i also disable duplication until its complete to speed things up?

A test copy(samba/smb) shows the transfer will happen at ~ 117/120 MB/s which is about the max you can expect for large files anyway

Anything else to be away of/consider?

Thanks

Before I upgrade my Win 8.1 setup to Win 10, I would greatly appreciate your feedback by someone who's running Ibm m1015 in IT mode without any issues so far.

Furthermore what drivers are you using, cause avago hasn't officially released win 10 drivers for 9211-8i.

Thanks in advance.

I'm posting this info in case anybody else runs into the same thing.

Host: Win2k8R2 x64 running DrivePool 2.1.1.561

Guest: Win2k8R2 x64

1. In Disk Management on the host computer map the DrivePool disk to a path. Here is an example where I've mapped my DrivePool disk to a path on the C drive (it's the second entry): https://www.dropbox.com/s/ns93g4guhaoae3m/Screenshot%202016-09-24%2014.43.41.png?dl=0.
2. Share the folder containing the path. In my example I'm sharing C:\Volumes which contains the "P1" folder which is mapped to the DrivePool disk.
3. In the guest machine either map a drive to that host share or browse the host share without mapping a drive.
4. Browse into the DrivePool disk on the share.
5. Create a new folder and give it a name.
6. BSOD occurs in covefs.sys on the host.

In my setup when I create the folder the BSOD occurs immediately. When I reboot and go to rename the folder the BSOD occurs again and the folder does not rename. 

The workaround is to share the DrivePool disk directly. For me the error does not occur when I map the DrivePool disk to a letter (in my example drive "P") and then share that drive letter in the host.

I have been using StableBit DiskPool for several years. I'm a true believer.

I rarely have to touch it, sometimes it goes a year at a time without much attention.

But recently, I see something I don't understand. My U: drive, is up and down, on and 

off the pool. It gets reported as off, and within a few seconds it has reconnected.

I have installed a power supply I think is big enough, since most of the disks are in

an external enclosure with it's own power. I don't see this same problem with

any other drive. 

I have moved the drive to different location in the cabinet, to test wires, power, etc. 

When I put it in an external dock, still does same thing..

So I cloned it to an identical new drive, and put it back in the main cabinet. New drive,

still does same thing. I have run dskchk on it, and it has a few problems, then it should be ok.

Every time I reboot, dskchk wants to give it some attention, but not that much, so I'm not sure what to do now. I've moved the data to a new drive, same issue; I'm thinking filesystem problems..

This may be a Windows thing, but still, it's got exclusively DiskPool files on it. And I have attempted

to remove and add it back to the pool. No help.

I am a veteran windows user, and I have tried everything I can think of (so far) to isolate this to a disk, or filesystem, or something I can deal with directly to fix it. 

I'm seriously thinking of adding a new drive to the pool, then migrate files off the new U: drive, and see what that does for me, but I can't imagine that should really be necessary. 

Any suggestions?