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iSCSI Migration Questions

October 2, 2017, 2:34 pm
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I am currently in the process of moving my storage drives to a new separate 24-bay enclosure. My original plan was to have Drivepool running in that storage box, and map the pool as a network drive to my new machine that I am building. However, I've realized that mapped drives have some limitations for my particular scenario. It would work, but it would be BETTER if the drives appeared as physical drives to the new machine instead of mapped. (Plex Media Server has a partial scan feature that can run a mini scan based on seeing if the contents of a folder changed. Works on normal drives, but not mapped network drives).

 

So I did some research into iSCSI as a solution. I've seen posts that say I should have no trouble adding iSCSI disks to a pool. At the same time, what I've learned about creating an iSCSI Target using Windows Server requires VHD's. Which I take to mean I will need to make a drive sized VHD on each physical drive, add those to the VHD target, then connect to the target from my new machine and add those iscsi connected drives to Drivepool running on the new machine. Am I correct with that course of action?

If I am correct, I will need to do this drive by drive in order to preserve my data. Basically my plan is:

 

1) Empty a drive from old pool.

2) Create VHD on empty drive that is the size of the whole drive.

3) Add VHD to iSCSI Target.

4) Connect to Target using new machine as Initiator, and add drive to new Pool on new machine.

5) Empty another drive from old pool onto the NEW pool and repeat the process.

 

END RESULT: 
-All drives reside in large enclosure

-All drives mapped to new machine via iSCSI

-New Drivepool running on New machine see's all drives as physically attached

 

Does that sound like a correct plan, or am I needlessly complicating things? 

 

 

 

I assume the following:

 

A. I cannot add a drive with existing data to iSCSI Target, because it needs VHD's, which is not how the drives are currently setup.

 

B. I cannot make a single VHD for the Target from the pool itself because a pool sized VHD is impossible; cannot have a VHD be bigger than the individual drives in the pool.

 

I would love to hear anyone's thoughts!

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Can you move a pool from one machine to another?

October 2, 2017, 8:42 pm
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Hi all, I wanted to know if there is a proper way to do this. If I wanted to move an entire pool (all drives) from one computer to another, are there any precautions to take? Will DrivePool on the new system recognize that this is a pool? Thanks.

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Very very high RAM usage in DrivePool

October 7, 2017, 2:23 pm
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DrivePool's footprint ranged from 2-5GB before I added all of the pool's drives to NOD32 anti virus's exclude list.  At least I'm pretty sure that's what fixed it.

 

Attached is a poolmon screenshot showing a few pools owned by covefs.sys (I think...please correct me if I'm wrong) at or near the top of the list, totaling over 4GB.

 

I wish I didn't have to disable antivirus for those drives, so would love any information from the developers about the cause of this problem or any other way I can mitigate it.

 

Thanks,

James

Attached Thumbnails

  • cofs_ram_usage.png
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Specified duplication drives

October 8, 2017, 2:40 pm
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I bought too many 8TB easystores when they were on sale and I've decided that I want to use the ones that wont fit in my case as backup drives. Just USB attached and sitting on top of the case. What I want to do however is make sure that in those 5 drives there is at least 1 copy of every file. If there's a fire or emergency or whatnot, I want to be able to grab the 5 externals sitting on top and be confidant that I have a full copy of everything (assuming working hardware). I know that at one point there was a feature that was similar to this but it didn't quite do this. Additionally i would ideally like all file access to NOT come from these USB drives, both for speed and wear on the drives.

 

My current setup (by accident due to a migration) is my main pool and a pool of 5 8TB drives that has a complete copy of the data. I know it would be easy to just set a scheduled task to backup to that pool, but I didn't know if there was a more elegant solution built in.

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Lost my pool

October 8, 2017, 5:29 pm
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I was messing around adding SSD's for optimizer (see the sticky thread above) when I started getting errors in adding 2 identical 256GB SSD's, one stopped at 95%, the other gave a message saying can't add same drive.

 

I accepted an option to apply default settings and now have lost access to the Pool.

 

The correct pool name is there in a largely blank screen but all the storage drives have the + option to add the drives. I get a message saying can't add the drives if I try.

 

The pool status bar at the bottom shows no pool when I run the cursor over it.

 

I think I have messed up Drivepool itself and the information on my normal pool is lost since I can't see the normal display (using W10) - thought I would post here for help before I try to reinstall DP beta version.

 

I did disconnect the 2 new SSD's since they had generated a message to DL new drivers 55005/-RST. I did try loading them but it came back with a wrong version error.

 

PC boots OK but DP doesn't load automatically and takes 2-3 minutes to load if I open the link.

 

Help please.

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Drive Scanning?

October 9, 2017, 7:35 am
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Came across a problem last week and wanted to ask.

 

DrivePool (Latest Beta Version BTW) - When system restarts, Re-check, of for some reason.  Default seems to be the order in which the system has identified the drive.  IE D: 3434395 (Disk 1) thru X: 3435787654 (Disk 15)

Drive Cloud (Latest Version) Settings in drive pool: duplicate only.  2 Virtual Drives set at 10TB  List as Disk 16 & 17)

 

 

I have watched it go thru a recheck many times and it always starts and ends that way.

 

I was tempted to try to link the Drive Cloud and Drive Pool together with the Drive Cloud handling all duplicate files and the local drives handling all the unduplicated.  Reason:  I could lose info in the cloud drive but if I had a local and offsite copy,  I'm happy.

 

I have tinkered around with the balancing plugins and now have made a mess.  Thankfully a lot has not been uploaded and I was able to clean up the mess before it got too bad.

 

Is there a current setting you can explain that will ensure the required outcome.

 

I can tell you that if you reset to default values after letting the system crunch on something for days, it makes a mess.  My drives got filled trying to duplicate and caused my system to crash.

 

Due to new Bandwidth caps being placed and a lot of wasteful trial and error, I was hoping someone could give me a little help.

 

Note:  I do have offline backup of the 20TB+ TV Series but that would take days to restore.

 

 

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DrivePool, ShadowCopy, SnapRaid and other amazing tales.

October 11, 2017, 3:54 pm
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Hi, I'm not sure if it's the right place, but I haven't found anywhere to post suggestions :D

 

* I understand that DrivePool and ShadowCopy are not compatible, and knowing Microsoft I'd wager that making them compatible is somewhere in the middle of "impossible" and "torture". So I'm not even going to ask :D

That said, Shadow Copies work fine in the pooled drive, but having to go look and find for the file in the middle of N drives everytime is a bit of a pain.

 

Would it be possible to implement, at least locally where DrivePool is installed, a context menu entry that opened the Properties/Previous Copies window of the file from the pooled drive directly?

Being able to do that from the network, maybe using an agent, would be even better, but I'd be plenty happy even without this.

Alternatively, any way to ask drivepool where the file is so I can code something on top would also be awesome (command line commands, powershell cmdlet, APIs, whatever).

 

* I also wanted to ask if there is any plan to integrate something different than file duplication in Drivepool, such as SnapRAID (which would have to be just a GUI for SnapRaid considering the pesky copy-left license) or some other kind of snapshot parity system to have a bit of resiliency without losing half the space. (At this point I'm using both and it works great, but having everything managed by the same software would be amazing).

 

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Multiple drives with specific data coming to Drive Pool

October 12, 2017, 3:25 pm
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I'm a newbie so be kind.  :)

 

I currently am getting ready to install DP under Win7 and abandon my wonderful WHS system. WHS is managing data for three computers.  I have 600+GB of data on three logical drives under WHS. I am using Crashplan to back all of this up.

 

I have a W: drive with music, an X: drive with data and a Y: drive with lots of downloaded stuff (400+GB). Each drive has many (hundreds)  folders.  I plan on pooling three 2TB drives after I copy the data to them and use the technique at http://wiki.covecube.com/StableBit_DrivePool_Q4142489

 

Can I keep the three logical drive types with their folders using DP?

 

I'm going to create one more drive letter after the pool is set up that will be used for backup for my home computers. Can it be kept separate also?

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Pool going Read Only on Bios change - NO Notification

October 12, 2017, 6:08 pm
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I updated my Bios and this caused DP to go into read only mode - But i had no indication of this - i.e. no pop up or anything

 

I found out as i could not create any files on my pool and windows was complaining about permissions not being in the correct order when accessing the properties > security tab for a folder.

 

Fortunately i did not change any of the permissions prior to the penny dropping that DP might be the problem - as that would have generated a mess for no reason.

 

On accessing the GUI - i was asked to transfer the licence (or something like that) - clicking the option provided brought up the license number and applying the change brought the pool out of read only mode.

 

Now i accept this is probably a security check for people cloning drives and trying to bypass you protections but the why you do not inform the user this has happened is poor.

 

A simple notification of some sort to the user to go check this or that should be added to save wasting time and causing confusion etc and the possible consequences of trying to reset permission when not needed!

 

Please improve the notification of this situation.

 

 

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None of my drives are showing up in Drivepool

October 14, 2017, 12:27 pm
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Hi all, I am using the latest beta (*.852). For some reason, no drives are showing up, including system drive. All the other drives are mounted to folders in Windows 7. I have tried a repair install to no avail. Additionally, I found a setting for boot-up logs so those are attached. Also submitted logs under the troubleshooting tool, hopefully linked to this topic number. Thanks.

Attached Files

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I/O device error when trying to remove drive

October 16, 2017, 1:27 am
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Can anyone please provide some guidance regarding the following?

 

I currently have five hard drives within my drivepool, housed in a microserver, totalling 16TB.

 

However, I have received an alert via Drivescanner warning me that one of them, a 3TB drive, might be heading towards failure - let's call if Drive F.

 

When I try to remove Drive F from the pool it gets to the stage of migrating the files before telling me it cannot proceed due to an I/O device error. However, the content of Drive F *has* dropped down from 2.72TB to 700GB, so some migration appears to have occurred.

 

I know that I can force Drive F out of the pool if it comes to that, but I don't know what happens to the files on it. Are the files self-contained, or shared across the other drives in the pool? Would I be left with only parts of a file - both on Drive F and in the remainder of the pool?

 

Drive F is currently showing as having about 700GB of material on it.

 

Across the rest of the pool, I've freed up 2.74TB of free space. And what I've started to do is look to remove the files which are listed as being on Drive F out of the drivepool and onto non-drivepool areas of the remaining four hard drives. 

 

Is this the best approach? Once all those files are moved by me, should I then be able to force Drive F out of the pool without losing anything? I guess one of the issues might be that the files listed as being on Drive F may only be *parts* of a file? Would 2.74TB be enough to take the parts off Drive F as well as the remainder of those files which are spread across the rest of the pool?

 

One further quirk which has developed is that one of my shared folders is coming up as not being accessible either in the general Drivepool Drive or via Drive F, but I can get into it on the other drives in the pool. 

 

Any advice very gratefully received.

 

Best,

 

Desk

 

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Toggle Drive Letter?

October 16, 2017, 7:49 am
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Drashna, I see a new option in the beta - "Toggle Drive Letter"

 

Can you explain what this does?  Is it for the pool drive letter or for the individual drive letters that are added to the pool?

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Disk showing RAW even though it is okay

October 16, 2017, 12:49 pm
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I have a weird problem following the repair of a corrupt disk.

 

When I hover over one of my disks in DrivePool, the little popup shows my disk is RAW even though it is readable. The other details (unduplicated 14.0GB, duplicated 4.01TB, other 472MB, free 531GB) all appear correct.

 

Chkdsk shows the disk is okay and reports the filesystem as NTFS. The pool is working and I can access the files without issue.

 

I'm 99% sure the problem is cosmetic and I just need DrivePool to re-read the disk. Is there a way to do that?

 

Capture.PNG

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Yet Another Balancing/Measuring Question

October 16, 2017, 8:20 pm
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Hello there,

 

Sorry for asking a question that has almost certainly been solved already on this forum, but I wasn't able to find a solution.

 

Some background: I have a ~20TB pool made up of 3TB and 4TB drives and 2 SSDs (with SSD optimizer) witha  mixture of duplicated and unduplicated data. 

Last week I had a 3TB drive fail. I knew it was on its way out and only had duplicated data on it. It failed by simply disappearing from my system ("Drive Missing"). 

From there I:

  1. "Removed" the missing drive and let DrivePool do its thing.
  2. After a day or more the drivepool was still stuck in a balancing/measuring act. It looked to me like it might be struggling because there simply wasnt enough room to properly duplicate everything again.
  3. I proceeded to disable duplication on a few unimportant folders to free up space. I was running with about 1TB of free space. Things appeared happy although to be honest I wasn't paying much attention to it.
  4. Today I installed a new 8TB drive into the pool. For the next 7 or so so hours it was stuck in a "measuring" loop I will call it. Just when it looked like it was about to finish figuring out what is duplicated and unduplicated, it would start all over again. It did this all day I think. It may have tried to do some balancing as well, but it didn't get anywhere. I tried rebooting. Disabled anti-virus. Disabled anything that regularly accessed the drive.
  5. No data was ever moved to the 8TB drive.
  6. I changed the balancing settings to attempt to force it to balance (Unchecked "Not more often than...", changed balance ratio to 100%). 
  7. For 30 or so minutes it looked like it was balancing (got up to 2.1%). Some data showing up on the 8TB drive. Then it reset and started measuring again.
  8. Now it's just in a measuring loop again where it figures out what all of the "Other" is (Duplicated or Unduplicated) and then it resets and starts figuring it out all over again.

The main concerns I have now is that

  1. The SSDs are completely filled for some reason (refer to first screenshot). The SSD optimizer setting is Fill up to 75%.  They have been filled like this since before I put the new 8TB drive in.
  2. There is 6.10TB of data "Unusable for duplication" and I don't know what that means or why that is?
  3. Every time it starts balancing it goes back to measuring after some time. (refer to second and more recent screenshot)

Will these items resolve themselves or is there something I should be doing to alleviate the issue?

 

Edit: Update: After another 8 hours it is still in a "Measuring" loop and only about 300GB has moved to the 8TB drive. SSDs are still basically full (well, one is, the other is about 85%).

Attached Thumbnails

  • 2017-10-16 21_10_02-.png
  • 2017-10-16 21_11_28-.png
  • 2017-10-16 21_11_28-.png
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Drives suddenly missing

October 16, 2017, 9:54 pm
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Suddenly today all of my drives went missing from Drivepool, Scanner showed them as fine and windows disk manager sees them. I reset all setttings in Drivepool and it now sees the drives but not any kind of pool. When I try and add them to a pool it says "Cannot add the same disk to the pool twice"

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Server randomly crashing.

October 17, 2017, 6:14 am
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I hope someone can help me with this issue and pinpoint the problem i am having with my server.

 

Basically what happens is that when I RDP into my server I see the server as randomly rebooted. Searching through event viewer I find errors/warnings like this:

 

 

The application System with process id 4 stopped the removal or ejection for the device PCI\VEN_8086&DEV_6F04&SUBSYS_00008086&REV_01\3&11583659&0&10.

The application \Device\HarddiskVolume4\Windows\System32\svchost.exe with process id 8 stopped the removal or ejection for the device PCI\VEN_8086&DEV_6F04&SUBSYS_00008086&REV_01\3&11583659&0&10.

The application \Device\HarddiskVolume4\Windows\System32\smss.exe with process id 476 stopped the removal or ejection for the device PCI\VEN_8086&DEV_6F04&SUBSYS_00008086&REV_01\3&11583659&0&10.

The application \Device\HarddiskVolume4\Windows\System32\csrss.exe with process id 616 stopped the removal or ejection for the device PCI\VEN_8086&DEV_6F04&SUBSYS_00008086&REV_01\3&11583659&0&10.

 

 

 

The IO operation at logical block address 0x40800 for Disk 3 (PDO name: \Device\00000039) was retried.

 

 

Reset to device, \Device\RaidPort1, was issued.

 

 

Dump file creation failed due to error during dump creation.

 

Now I am in the process of removing Disk 3 from my DrivePool but can a bad disk in my pool cause my entire system to crash? Or am I looking at hardware related trouble elsewhere?

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Looking to build a pool of drives whats hardware should i get?

October 17, 2017, 8:02 am
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So right now i have a WDC 12TB Mirror drive.  I am looking to upgrade my storage but not looking to have a bunch of USB drives.

 

Is there any hardware that works great with Drivepool so i can maybe install a few drivers and pool them with the software? 

 

I was looking at pre config hardware like WDC devices or Qnap but i would rather maybe have a software raid/pool then a hardware.

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Balance to multiple drives when receiving multiple incoming file transfers

October 17, 2017, 11:35 am
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I'm in the midst of transferring a large volume of data from an 8-bay NAS into a new DrivePool setup and I'm trying to speed up the process a bit. I tried using the SSD plugin with a 500 GB SSD to enable greater bandwidth for multiple file copy operation simultaneously, but the balancer can't keep up with the workload and the SSD fills up faster than it can evacuate. The issue seems to be that while the balancer is evacuating files from the SSD, it only places them on one drive at a time, despite the fact that several of the drives in the pool are below the "full" threshold. Many of the drives in my pool are slow Seagate Archive drives that have poor write speeds, so if the balancer limits itself to writing to only one drive at a time, it'll never be able to keep up with large volumes of incoming data.
 
How can I configure DrivePool to balance incoming transfers across multiple drives in the pool simultaneously so that it can better handle large volumes of incoming data, either with OR without an SSD landing zone? The Archive drives are able to sustain reads at the normal 100+ MB/s, but writes are extremely variable, dropping into the single digits at times. Therefore, my pool is presently unable to accomodate the full speed of even ONE single incoming transfer. If it could be configured to balance incoming transfers across multiple drives simultaneously, it would really speed up the process.
 
I've also been evaluating Drive Bender, and while I prefer DrivePool's interface, Drive Bender appears able to send multiple incoming transfers to separate drives in the pool without issue, and without any special configuration required.
 
Just FYI, I'm NOT doing any file duplication or redundancy.

 

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DrivePool duplication hangs at ~0.1% after drive replacement

October 17, 2017, 11:21 pm
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Hi - running WHS 2011, DP version 1.3.7585.

 

I had one drive go bad in a three drive pool. Moved the data off the bad drive, installed a replacement, added it to the pool and DP wouldn't write anything to it.

 

I forced writing to the drive by deleting shares and re-creating the share. Duplication hangs at ~0.1% for a week after the shares were re-created.

 

Tried turning off duplication for all shares. Duplication still hangs at ~0.1% even after several days.

 

How can I get duplication working again (short of blowing out the pool and rebuilding it)? 

 

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ready to re install windows (again), but no deactivate option

October 18, 2017, 8:39 am
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After having problems with windows i did a clean install yesterday and prior to this i deactivated drive pool and scanner.

i reinstalled windows and registered without issue and pool was recognised .

however i have a new hard drive today and wish to carry out a clean install on the new drive , but on checking there is no option to deactivate only transfer to another computer.

i wish to keep my pool so can i use this option?
any advice as i dont want to mess up 
thanks
john
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