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talex

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  1. Thanks again - yes the one I want to use the SSD's for has 6 discs in a 2x pool - I only added 1 SSD for cache - guess I can remove it and then add it back in when I get another to add, then re-enable the cache plugin. I used to "hoard" but the wife is kind of sick of all the computer stuff lying around - We had 3 gaming teenagers who upgraded alot over the years - the last just finished college and got his own place so I have a ton of hardware I am still sorting through - much of which makes excellent "home server" hardware - probably have about 6 gaming motherboard with as many Phenom Quad Cores lying around and plenty of DDR2 to go with it... and even more gaming video cards - stacks of those.... those not so good for a server though... it's hard to discard that type of stuff so I understand.
  2. Thanks Chris, WIth the iSCSi - I have a couple of Dell R710's - loaded with ram, each has mirrored SSD's for the OS (one has Hyper-V core, the other vmWare - I want to put the VHD's for the OS's of the VM via iSCSi so I think this will work then and the VHD's will certainly be much smaller than the pool they will reside in, this may or may not work I will have to see as I have all pools 2x duplicated - but who knows, the VM's are mainly SQL instances and I might just decide to slap in some old physical drives for each since I have a few lying around and there are 4 trays in each empty... at a minimum I want them to all use a shared storage target... Not to confuse, I understand that freeNas rides on top of FreeBSD - my point was more that Windows is more vulnerable than Linux is - and my storage box is used just soley for storage, nothing else - I can spin up VM's for other things... and from what I have been reading up on freeNas, looking at the performace using basic hardware at least - I see many people getting around 50-85MB's over gig ethernet... with my current setup which is just a gigabyte board using it's built in realtek and standard 7200rpm sata drives - connected through a supermicro SV8 I think it is (4x PCI-e) I regularly get 100-125MBs using Windows server and drive pool so it would seem at least on the face of it that unless you do some serious striping freeNas offers nothing in a performance jump... but is a helluva lot more picky about it hardware... drivepool has worked pretty flawless for me since I bought it right around when released so I am sticking with that - just don't like the idea of having to buy all identical drives and all up front more than anything else, not to mention to many stories about any form of raid where a failure won't rebuild and of course the disks are unreadable as with Drivepool you can mix and match drives and your controller or MB could literally explode and the data is still readable - these are the same reasons I chose Drivepool back when I did, the only real competitor was unraid and it just felt clunky. You have a very nice setup - I am heading in the opposite direction - I have my 42U compact rack up on craigslist and have a home built 22U now, also selling my Norco 4220 with the 2 supermicro controllers... moved my AD / DNS server onto a mini ITX Atom based system - super low power but plenty enough for AD / DNS in a home environment.. and moving my storage server to a 3U case with 10 bays (HDD's are much larger for the buck now then when I last built so I don't need (nor did I ever use) 20 bays... I have around 14TB's of data after deleting many, many, many ancient MSDN and technet ISO files as I don't think I will need 2000 Advanced server or Windows NT or 98 for anything in my lifetime... so that's my setup - 2-Dell R710's Hex Cores with 144GB Ram, the Mini ITX AD.DNS and the 2012R2 Standard w/Drivepool in a generic 3U with 2 5 bay- icy docks... or at least it will be... I just do a synch to external USB's off the server and keep those in a safe in my non-attached garage for "off-site" storage : ) Anyways, your saying the cache drive is only good if I have a 2x pool if I have 2x SSD's set to cache? only then will the cache work? I was thinking it worked like the "landing zone" in WHS v1 - where everything copied out landed on that drive and then it was moved... would be good to know as I am in the process of rebuilding the storage server.
  3. Hi all, I have been running drive pool several years with no issue's on a 2012 Essentials build so to start, thanks for a great product. I am in the process of upgrading this server to 2012 R2 Standard for several reasons battling with some short comings of essentials v1 unrelated to the file server - I have already gotten the new OS installed as well as drive pool and everything looks good but since I am going through this process I am also in the process of looking into other solutions such as unRaid or freenas or sticking with Windows / drivepool. I plan on running a couple physical VM servers (Dell R710's) and want to use iSCSi for these - freenas has this baked in, unRaid I don't think can do it at all, but Windows Server 2012 R2 can setup iSCSi targets for these VM servers.... sooooooooo.... Are there any issue with setting a VHD iSCSi target inside a pool? if there are issue's, what are they? Would it better to have a drive not in the pool serve this purpose? if so why? In reverse are there any reasons not to use an iSCSi drive in a pool? freenas is very tempting as it is it's own OS not very vulnerable to attacks but is heavy on the hardware requirements due to having to have the same drives, recommended ECC ram, 1GB per TB etc so I feel like it's more for an enterprise where extreme up time would be the worry but for Home, Small business it almost more of a toy to play with and I cannot see a compelling reason other than Drivepool having to be "hosted" by Windows not to just stick with what I have if iSCSi stuff presents no issue's - thus my questions. I did search iSCSi in the forums and the results did not provide answers so if this has been asked, apologies. 1 side note question unrelated to iSCSi this one on the SSD Optimizer plugin - I installed and set up a 240GB SSD as "cache" and the rest of my pool drives are set to archive but when I copy a fairly large file say 5GB and watch performance area in drive pool, it shows drive activity, just not on the SSD - this puzzles me. Thanks ahead of time. Tom
  4. talex

    License transfer

    Having problems with license transfer. Had OS (Server 2012 Essentials) running on a WD Black 2.5" Laptop drive, decided to try an SSD for the OS, cloned drive to SSD, booted SSD, said I needed to transfer the license... put the WD back in booted, deactivated, took out the WD, put the SSD back in and then activated, the program says license transferred but does nothing. Scanner transferred ok but drive pool right now is useless in it's current state as it just sits at the screen with the transfer button.
  5. consider it a "feature" request... for me at least that would be the best way to do it. I suppose though that in a way that is already built in, if you just physically remove the drive, it would then be "missing". If you were to then remove that "missing" drive from the pool then drivepool would re-duplicate what was needed at that point - is that correct?
  6. Why would there be risk? Can't you tell it just to remove the drive from the pool but leave the files on the drive to be removed in place thus actually leaving 2 copies of the file - 1 still in the pool and another copy on the drive being removed?
  7. Hi, Wondering the quickest way to remove drives from a pool. I have 6 drives currently in the pool, 3 had smart warnings the drives are 1.5TB about 3/4 used. I added 2 - 2TB drives to the pool and last night and I removed one of the 1.5TB (2 to go) but the process took all night (almost 12 hours so far - it's at 97% Duplicating) just to remove a drive and re-duplicate. Duplication is set on the whole pool. Before I try it the same way again, what is the quickest way to get the 2 remaining drives removed, I also plan on adding a 3rd 2TB drive today as well. Thanks
  8. talex

    Moving drives

    Thanks drashna, I understand it can take a long time and I am not faulting Drivepool at all, was just thinking of stopping the duplication because there is 1 particular folder that has thousands and thousands of small files, these I don't want to lose but they also don't need to be in the pool (I should have thought that out better) but there are other files I don't want to risk so I was considering stopping the duplication process, moving that folder out of the pool then restarting the duplication process because I will be moving them as soon as it finishes, I just don't know the way to go about that. I have a bunch of folders under Serverfolders which resides the pool and I set duplication at the pool level and I should have set it at the individual folders... don't know the best way to revert that is where I am at now although the process will probably finish by noonish tomorrow at the current rate then I could zip and move that folder which is causing the delays.
  9. talex

    Moving drives

    You wouldn't happen to know what would happen if I stop the duplication process? Right now I turned on pool duplication and everything is in the pool under shared folders. The folder that I think is taking all the time would be the ROM's folder which is about 1.5 to 2TB. I changed my mind and think I will just put all that on an external drive but wonder what would happen if I turn off the duplication, move that folder then turn it back on again...
  10. talex

    Moving drives

    Ya it was 551GB. It's seems to be going well other then the % indicator is not updating. Currently Unduplicated = 1.75TB - Duplicated = 1.07TB so it's chugging along, "other" changes but stays roughly around 2GB, I have no clue what that is. looks like in about 1 3/4TB it should be done, then I will add the other drives 1 at a time, copy the files, format, rename to correspond with their physical position in the case and add to pool... those should go much quicker - they are all 750GB drives with larger files on them (mainly ISO from my TechNet and MSDN subs).
  11. talex

    Moving drives

    That is what I am doing, letting all the current data duplicate and stabilize, then I will add the other drives. I want to add them 1 at a time to the pool so I can name them for their slot in the case and I am naming all the drives by row and column number... once I rename them I know the data has been moved and then I add them to the pool...
  12. talex

    Moving drives

    I have many of the files copied, there are a couple of drives I still need to copy to the pool which will then get added to the pool after this duplication is complete. I have 6 more drives to add which are newer and once I get all the data in the pool I might remove the drives that have smart warnings. I have about 10TB total data but have a few 2TB drives on the way to backup the entire server (drobo also on the way), just want to get everything transferred, put in the duplicated pool before I put this back in my server rack at which time I will deal with any smart or drive issue's as needed.... for now just getting this WHS v1 to Essentials 2012 r1 transfer completed and have to do a little "dance" with the drives to get it all done. IN case your curious - the server build (which has run WHS v1 excellent): Norco 4220 Case Gigabyte GA-MA785G-UD3H Mainboard WD Black 2.5" 320GB System drive (new, replaced same drive which ran WHS v1 for almost 5 years). Athlon 9600 Quad Core CPU (changed since WHS v1 which was a x4 9550) 4GB DDR2 (thinking of upping this to 8GB as 2012 E Seems to eat a lot more memory) 2x Supermicro SASLP-MV8 controllers (PCI-e x4) Intel Gigabyte network adapter (PCI-e x1) Ultra 750 PS b.t.w. is there any recommendation on where to locate the PC backup folders? Should that be in the pool, in a separate pool or??
  13. talex

    Moving drives

    Here are some screen shots 42.3% still.... BUT I the duplicated GB and Unduplicated GB have changed - this image shows 475GB Dup, 2.06TB UnDup and the current screen shows Dup = 5.51GB, UnDup = 2.01 TB... So it must be working but the % graph is not updating as you would excpect because the .% should have changed.... as long as it's working I can live with that although at the rate it's going it will take the remainder of the weekend.
  14. talex

    Moving drives

    I seem to have run into an issue. Last night I turned on duplication I have about 3TB of data in various folder, when I awoke the screen was sitting at 42.3% "Duplicating...." After seeing no progress for about and hour I decided it was time to reboot - Windows installed some updates then re-booted a couple times. Upon starting up DP it went through a process "Checking...." (42.3%) - that seemed to finish after about 45 minutes, now it's been sitting back at "Duplicating..." (42.3%) for about an hour. There are ALOT of small files (Tens of Thousands of Mame, SNES etc ROM files) so I know duplication will take some time but this seems crazy and I am not sure how long to wait and what to do if I am to take action. Any suggestions? I currently have 5 1.5TB disks in the pool, would adding a 6th maybe jar something loose"? I don't see anything in any logs to indicate issue's. Stablebit scanner did detect one bad sector on 1 of the drives but I don't see how that could be the problem... I am perplexed.
  15. talex

    Moving drives

    good to know... will install and then turn on duplication
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