Hello!

I'm trying to figure out how to best set up my DrivePool. My pool consists of:

• Two local drives A and B (2 TB each)
• Two cloud drives C and D

What I would like is for new data to be stored on A and B, and when they start to be full I'd like _old_ data to be moved from A and B to C. That way I have the newest data on my local drives, and older data is stored in the cloud.

Is this possible, and if so how?

What I have done:

• I've played with the SSD optimizer, and marked the two local drives as SSD.
• I've tried to play with the balancing triggers, but I'm unsure as to how I should adjust the balancing triggers to achieve my goal and I still have data being moved from local drives to cloud drive.
• I reckon I could set the balancing trigger to start if for example at least 1,5 TB needs to be moved, but then it would move _all_ off the data, correct? I just want some of the oldest data moved.

Before i do this wanted to check what is likely to happen

I have a pool in pc A and i want to move the drives to pc B

But pc B has an existing pool 

So will the drives be added to the existing pool once connected? - Hope not as Poolpart should be different?

Or will a second pool be created - automatically? 

Or will the drives just appear as "new" drives and i can create a new pool?

Wrong category sorry everyone, moved my post here

Though i would report some good news as forums tend to be all doom and gloom

Last night i did some maintenance on my main DP server and as part of that i removed all the drives

All went well and i replaced the drives booted the server - checked i could see the shares - and went to bed

This morning i logged in to see that one of the drives was missing (had hit the on off switch in the enclosure during the removal/reinstall)

During the night DP had re duplicated the data on the remaining drives

I powered up the missing drive and approx 30 seconds later DP picked up that the drive was back

During the night a backup had run from another server but not moved off the ssd cache drives - i guess as pool in read only mode as drive missing?

First DP did a remeasure - then a re balance (emptied SSd cache drives) - then a dup consistency test and then a duplication run(manual run) - the last is slowly reducing the duplication total

So in a little while i should be back to x2 dup rather than 2x+ for the 3.7TB which was on the missing drive

Also interesting that rather than "just" empty the missing drive - easy option - it appears to be trying to follow the SSD Optimiser rules (don't have any other plugins other than scanner)

Once its finished its duplication run i guess it might do a re balance - will wait and see

Impressed it's almost seamless

I'd like to backup my emulation folder since it took a bit of time to setup and would not want to deal with setting it up again if I were to have hard drive failure.  Does it matter if I'm backing up a ton of small files into the pool?  It's something like 200gb but it's actually over 40,000 files.

There are 10 disks my pool. 2 disks were pre-seeded.

Data is now only apparently writing to 5 of the other disks in the pool. 3 of the disks in the pool are not getting written to, based on the graph of how much each disk is full.  That doesn't seem to be in line with what I was expecting to have happen. Is that supposed to be that way?

Not sure if this has been asked before, so forgive the repeat...

I've been using Drivepool for years now with NTFS as the filesystem. I'm going to be building a new storage server with Windows Server 2016 for my home, and like to reevaluate how I do things from time to time...

I'm curious if there are any advantages to using ReFS as the filesystem for my pooled drives over NTFS. Are Is it a matter of preference, or are there performance pros and cons to consider (disk I/O)? I've heard that ReFS has the ability to recover from data issues (bad blocks), which is why I'm asking the question.

Before I start, let me say that I did my best due diligence and read through and utilized these three related forum posts but none of them helped me resolve my issues:

http://community.covecube.com/index.php?/topic/92-some-drives-not-recognized-by-drivepool/

http://community.covecube.com/index.php?/topic/1061-some-external-usb30-drives-not-recognized-by-drivepool/

http://community.covecube.com/index.php?/topic/1112-usb-hdds-no-longer-showing-in-drivepool-ui/

I am running the trial and doing extensive testing in a virtual machine before spending the money on a license for the DP software.  I initially had no issues getting set up and running and it was a smooth process.  However, I started playing around removing drives, deleting and re-adding vdi's in virtualbox, etc and now I am having issues with drivepool.

Here is my current state after trying everything else I could think of including the suggestions from the above threads.  My attempt here was to start with a clean slate:

1. I removed all drives in DP.

2. I uninstalled DP completely including deleting the associated appdata and programdata folders for DP.  I also searched the entire registry and removed any references to DP or stablebit.

3. rebooted.

4. ran DISKPART clean on all test vdi drives to wipe them clean and not initialized.

5. shutdown.

6. In virtualbox, I removed all the vdi drives and deleted them completely off the host machine.

7. booted up, verified all the drives are gone, shutdown.

8. In virtualbox, I added all new vdi drives with new names/IDs to my virtual machine similar in size to what I did originally when things worked the first time.

9. booted up, computer management, storage, initialized all drives as GPT (note that I did all these steps with the drives MBR and had same results).

10. installed the latest beta of DP (I've gone through this whole process several times and did this all with the stable version as well, but had same results).

11. loaded up DP with the computer management in background (screenshot 1.jpg).  Note that there are 7 "VBOX HARDDISK" options to choose from in non-pooled.

12. clicked add on the first "VBOX HARDDISK" in list (screenshot 2.jpg). New drive E created, new "drivepool" G created as expected.

13. click to remove E from pool (screenshot 3.jpg)

14. After removal, drive E no longer appears in the non-pooled list of drives as expected and there's 1 fewer drive to select from (6 instead of 7) (screenshot 4.jpg).  I cannot get drives to reappear in DP one they've been formatted and are available for use in the O/S.

15. Use computer management to reformat E as "M" and format all the other drives "G" through "L."  (screenshot 5.jpg).  The only drive that appears in the non-pool list is L and all the others are still missing.

Additional thoughts:

- The first time through when it worked for me I was only using 6 drives instead of 7.  It could be that L is only appearing because it's the 7th drive and therefore "new" to DP.

- The first time through, I gave the drives a letter and everything worked.  I removed them all and decided to use mount links instead to hide the drives in 'My Computer'.  This also worked without an issue.

- The problem may have come from the fact that I was reformatting, reinitializing, DISKPART cleaning, deleting and readding vdi's in virtualbox, etc without removing drives from DP pools first.  I did receive some missing drive errors before doing the above clean slate steps above.

Other things I've tried:

1. DISKPART cleaning and uniqueid of the drives.

2. Using mount links instead of drive letters.

3. Reset all settings in DP.

4. Nuking all drives from Virtualbox and adding new ones.

Obviously something is funky/buggy with DP here since the drives all work just fine within windows after formatted.  I am doing this testing in a VM specifically to try to break it or find issues.  I don't know if it's only a virtual machine issue, but this isn't filling me with a lot of confidence for use with my real data and drives on my main box.  I obviously won't be able to even do most of the steps above with real data without losing everything.

I have attached a log that I ran while doing some of the above (no errors so not sure how helpful that will be).

I have a drivepoolservice.dmp as per the suggestion in another thread, but apparently it's huge so I can't upload here...

I will try to upload it using this link:  https://stablebit.com/contact

EDIT:  The dumpfile zipped with 7z is still over 50MB and the filesize limit on the contact page is 10MB.  Not much I can do.

So...the SSD Optimizer looks interesting to me, but apparently it doesn't recognize the beta version as a version it will install on.

Is there a way I can I safely install the current non-beta now, without trashing the pool, so I can enable the plugin functionality?

So I've been doing a lot of work on my pool lately and am reminded that green drives are well...green and slow.

So I have about 5-8 extra SSDs laying around that are all 60gb.  I know I could speed up writes if I used the SSD optimizer add-in (files are written there first and then copied to the pool later).  However, these SSDs are small.  When moving a 40gb file, that's basically one/drive.

If I were to hook them all up, softraid them via Windows, could I then add say 480gb of raided SSDs to the Pool as the feeder drive?

Any problems with this?  Thoughts?

I need 4 additional SATA ports on my new Z170 board with SMART support. No RAID. Is the Marvel 88SE9230 chipset a safe bet?

Hi all,

I've been using DrivePool and Scanner for quite some time. Everything has been running great.

It's now time to upgrade some of my hardware. I am taking the plunge and am going to replace the tiring old Core 2 Duo 6420 2.13ghz with a modern i7 6700 3.4ghz processor and motherboard. I am looking at the H170-PRO/CSM LGA1151 ATX Motherboard from ASUS.

I am now running 2 PCI-x 8 port sata cards. Super Micro SAT2-MV8. Of course they will not run at full speed in a regular PCI slot but they do run. The new motherboard does have 2 PCI slots. So I can run the old controller cards if necessary.

So I am thinking about replacing both of them with: The SI-PEX40097 is the SYBA IOCrest 16-Port SATA III 6G PCI-Express Controller Card. This card, a x4 slot card from IOCREST, uses the newest Marvell 9215 Chipset to add up to 16 drives to your system for an overall massive storage capacity boost.

I guess what I'm asking is will this card will work with DrivePool and Scanner or am I better off using my old Super Micro controller cards?

Any advice would be appreciated.

Phil

P.S. I'm running Windows 8.1

Hi,

I've been a long time DrivePool user and love the software, but I recently noticed something that I'm not sure was intended. I have one bad disk that frequently keeps disconnecting from the machine. I have replaced the disk, but the damn thing keeps disconnecting, I just haven't looked into it further as doing a "Scan for Hardware" in Device Manager usually brings it back.

Anyways, I noticed that when the disk is missing I cannot write or delete files from the DrivePool disk (in this case M:\). If I try, I get an error message stating that I need permission from Administrators on the local machine. I almost went nuts trying to figure out the permissions within Windows thinking something was wrong, simply because the Administrators group on the machine was the owner of the drive and all subsequent folders. Reads from the drive still work as expected. I can replicate this by finding any drive in Disk Management on the machine, right clicking and then clicking Offline to turn off the disk (at least in Windows). Once I bring it back online, it works again.

Is this intended? As mentioned, I almost went absolutely crazy trying to figure the permissions out. The thing that made me look at DrivePool was that if I rebooted the machine, it usually worked for a little while before disconnecting again. I tried transferring files, and at roughly the same time I got an email stating the drive was missing which made me think maybe it wasn't permissions. As soon as it was back online, I could write to it again.

If it is intended, is somebody able to walk me through why this it is the way it is (I'm sure there is a good reason for it), and if it's possible to disable?

Thanks!

Hi guys, quick question.

I have a DrivePool with certain folders duplicated (not the whole pool). Those folders that are duplicated, I also want to backup with Windows Backup to another drive.

This doesn't seem to be possible as I've read somewhere that VSS is not compatible with DrivePool.

The reason I want to use Windows Backup is for file versioning / restoring. Having the files duplicated via DrivePool is great for disk failures, but what if something gets deleted accidentally? Or I want to go back to an earlier version of a file? Windows Backup handles those cases just fine.. which is why I'd like to use it. DrivePool isn't really protecting me from accidental deletion.

See attached screen shot of the error I received while attempting to do the first Windows Backup of the folders in my pool.

If Windows Backup isn't an option to accomplish what I want, does anyone have any suggestions for 3rd party software that can handle file versioning restore points / restore from deletion in conjunction with DrivePool?

Thanks!

As a paying customer, i'm concerned by the complete lack of release stable updates over this extended period.The latest stable version 2.1.1.561 which was released eons ago. I know there have been some subsequent betas into the 2.2.x range but as we all know, that means nothing if nothing actually gets released in some form of a reasonable time frame. If this software has been abandoned, please let us know so we can migrate to other solutions as no one in their right mind should be using software that doesn't receive at least semi-regular updates.

No response to this post would also be worrying as it would indicate a lack of attention and concern on the forum and in-turn the software itself.

I recently had to migrate data from 5 X 4TB HDD's that were in an old WHS 2011 setup when my eSATA enclosure's power supply died.  I was basically just using WHS 2011 as a file server, so I decided just to move on from WHS 2011 and build a Win10-based PC in a case with a lot of 3.5" drive bays instead.  Before I built the new PC, I backed up all the data on the 5 X 4TB HDD's to external USB drives.  I wasn't using DrivePool on WHS 2011.

Upon completing the build of the new PC, I decided to give DrivePool a try.  I purchased the 2.0 version, and installed it.  I then installed three brand-new 4TB drives, and created a new pool - adding those three drives to the pool.  I copied over as much data to those three drives from the external USB drives to the three HDD in the pool as would fit.  I still had two drives from the old WHS setup, which were less than a year old, and checked out healthy  -so I decided to re-use them at least temporarily.  Having read that drives with existing data could be added to a pool, I just installed those old 4TB drives and added them to the pool.  I moved the data out of the old WHS 2011 ServerFolders into new folders, and added those folders to the pool.  I ended up with exactly what I set out to have - five 4TB drives, and their data, in a pool.

I know DrivePool offers file duplication, but I just don't have enough free space on my drives to duplicate everything that I would need to.  I also prefer to have an offline backup, so I set up Allway Sync to sync all the data in my pool back to the same external USB drives that I had previously used to back up that data in the first place. I have added no new data to the drives in the pool yet.  Even the folder structure is identical between what's in the pool, and what's on the external USB drives.  

I am now attempting to set up a one-way sync from the pooled drives back to the external USB drives in Allway Sync.  When Allway Sync "analyzes" the data between the pooled drives and the external USB drives, it doesn't recognize that any of the existing files are already on the USB drives.  It wants to copy everything over again - which shouldn't be necessary.

I'm new to the pooled drive thing, so maybe I'm missing some elementary understanding of how it works.  Any idea what I need to do to set up the sync properly so I don't have to copy all the files over again?

Thanks!

Dear all,

after having read a lot about drive pool, I'm thinking to updade my old WHS 1.

I have a very limited uses case.

1) Every week I sync all my files from main PC to the server

2) I would like to set-up redundant policy by folder (drive pool should be able to do it)

3) Every month I make a backup on an external hard drive to keep it in a different physical location

Considering I would like 4 HD, 1 SSD for the system and 3 HD for the pool ( i could use the same I have in WHS 1) to have 3 duplication for top files, what do you suggest as hardware?

Thanks

Maurizio

I recently created a second pool at the same hardware under the same license consisting of a single spare drive that i had lying around. Today, I decided to delete the second pool that I have created and remain with the initial one. How am I supposed to do that. Is there an option somewhere, cause I tried to remove the drive and nothing happens. B.t.w. there isn't any data in the pool nor the drive, so if a force removal is indicated I wouldn't mind at all.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

I was wondering if it is possible to duplicate Pool A to Pool B?  I want to be able to duplicate my local storage to the cloud.  With the way I have the trial configured right now I had to add my Cloud Drive to the pool.  I dont want this storage reflected in the Pool size.  I want my pool size to only reflect my local storage.

Is there any way to do this?  Im trying to run DrivePool and Cloud Drive through their paces before I decide if I am going to buy the full suite or go a different route.

Thanks for the help.

I guess it does not matter - but was curious how DP decides which files need deleting when you change the folder duplication (re organising my pool and need a bit of extra free space to make it easier)