Randym8888

My Seagate ST3000DM001 is 1 year and 47 days old and has a load cycle count of 356,600. I.e. about 1 per minute after accounting for a little down time over the year. However it is one of three 3TB pool drives and the other 2 non-Seagates have far lower counts. I've tried a number of things for months to try and stop the disk from parking its heads so much. No software solution (e.g. hdparm) has worked even when staying logged in permanently to ensure it keeps running. This seems to be a common complaint yet there still is no new firmware. The above change appears to have stopped the parking for the last 30 minutes. So I guess the Seagate actually parks its heads after every SMART query? I doubt this is intended behavior.

Drivepool v2 on whs 2011: I poked around Google and here but didn't find anything. I can't see my Drivepool drive when accessing my server via WHS' Remote Web Access. The DP drive is shared to Everyone and shows up fine to all machines on the local network. The other two shared (non-DP) drives show up and are accessible on the Remote Web Access screen. I'm sure I'm just missing something simple. Thanks!

Actually I have nothing on D:, the client backups are pooled on F, G and Z. It was the inclusion of a separate E: drive in the server backup that made the OS disk size requirement jump to 2 TB. I.e., C: + D: on disk 0 is very small, about 100 GB total, mostly empty space. WHS Restore should be smart enough to leave out E: in its disk size requirement because you don't have to restore the E: drive when restoring the OS disk. Anyway, I'm only using "server backup" to provide a restore of the OS unless MS fixes this size calculation problem in the future. A nice simple fix would be for WHS to allow multiple server backup profiles that create separate images, e.g. one profile to backup the OS, another profile to backup the other volumes. I haven't set up more than one external disk for server backup - maybe the multi-profile capability is there with multiple backup disks, I haven't investigated.

I guess as dbailey said there is a 2 TB server backup size limit, with some 'qualifications'. (I think that's on the "writing" side, not the "reading" side.) But here is my 2 cents on why I think it's moot, from experience: If you have to replace the WHS system disk, you have to replace it with a disk at least as large as the existing one. But what this seemed to mean in reality is that you need a replacement disk as large as the total image size generated based on your server backup selections. So, if you include more than just the "System" and "OS" in the server backup setup, your new replacement system disk has to be large enough to accomodate your additional selections (D:, E:, etc.) even though their data may be located on separate physical disks. (This behavior appears to be just bad programming.) So I just use duplication as my principal "backup" for pooled data, and my WHS server backup only includes the "System" and "OS", not D:, E: etc. If you want additional backup besides 2x or 3x duplication (which remember does place duplicated files on separate physical drives), I use a separate backup program scheduled to run on the pooled drive (or each separate drive within the pool, your option). Restoring the system drive in WHS 2011 was easy and fast except for that replacement disk-size snag. You only need a 160 gig disk to restore just the OS. But I had an E: drive included in the server backup which forced me to use a 2 TB drive to restore the OS disk. This was a real nuisance that "wasted" a larger drive and also the time it took me to figure out why smaller disks weren't being accepted during restore. I went back later and removed D: and E: from the backup settings, and restored the system disk to a 250 GB drive to get my 2 TB drive back. - Randy

I cannot upload the log. I get an error "you aren't permitted to upload this kind of file." And the scanner service memory dump is 258 meg. I will go ahead and send both via the crash dump submission page. Question about the log: After the first error, why does the time go from 07:02:40Z to 17:20:49Z ? The server was about 13:02 at the time. Or is this number just a counter of some sort? Also, I just noticed that the size limit on uploads in the forum is cumulative, so I have only 25K left for uploads. I found "Manage Attachments" under my account settings and see that the limit is 500k. If I delete the attachments, won't that make them unavailable in my prior posts?

Balancing was set to immediate. Since the OP, I tried various things and a couple of restarts, but duplication usage of the drive has continued. The G: drive (the last disk) is flagged to not hold "any" files, per picture 1. The last thing I did a few days ago was changed to 3X duplication to see if I'd get a notice that there weren't enough disks for 3X (because the 3rd disk was set to not hold files), but I didn't receive a notice. After a duplication and balance you can see from the 2nd pic that 3X across all 3 disks is occurring. You can also see that the blue and red triangles are located at zero, which is correct per the cleared checkboxes in the first picture. Not a big deal, but I was trying to keep duplicated files off of this drive while leaving it in the pool, and that option isn't working. Thanks!

I set balancing options to exclude my 3rd pool disk "G:" from duplicated files. But duplicated files are still placed on G:. See attached. I have rebalanced and re-measured but there was no change. I would like to keep this disk from storing duplicated files. I am using release 2.0.0.420. Thanks! Duplic exclusion not working.pdf

I apologize I didn't take the time to do the dumps you requested (see original post). I went to beta 447 but got no change in behavior. Then I started a balancing which did populate some info in the mouseover windows, which I imagine is a helpful clue to the problem. But the balancing never progressed and the graph stayed gray and so I went back to 2.0.0.420. The mouseover popup images now all contain info, and the graph is restoring itself to blue from gray.

I had two new identical model seagate 3gb sata drives in the pool, and each one dropped out of the pool at one time or another over several days. A reboot brought them back for a while, then 1 would drop again. It happened at least once to one physical drive, and 3 times to the other. They are on separate ATA channels in case that matters, and there are no SMART issues. (Unfortunately I didn't confirm for each dropout that the drive was lost to Windows or just to DrivePool.) By leaving one removed from DP the last few days, all has been stable. The other drive is still there, seen by WHS and by Stablebit Scanner, but not in the pool. Makes me wonder about some odd compatibility problem. I originally thought there might be a drive or controller problem, but that seems less likely since they now coexist fine when one is "outside" of DP.

Excellent product, I have had it on WHS 2011 for the past week. See the attached pdf. The first pic shows the mouseover info for drive 2 in my pool. The second pic shows the mouseover for drive 3, which shows no info. (No info shows for drive 1 either.) Maybe I'm missing something, or it's a bug. Thanks!