airjrdn

pclausen, would you be willing to detail out your hardware? I'm just curious about how you have that many drives connected, cards/connectivity type used, if you'd do things differently a second time around, etc. Thanks in advance

In addition to what others have said (and what RobbieH said is something I'd say is very important), I think your second sentence is key here... With DrivePool, you'd simply buy another disk (or more - of ANY size) and increase the size of the pool. There'd be no need to replace the entire array/pool all at once, spend time copying the data, etc.

Crashplan has continued to back up to the dropped drive for over a week now. I re-marked all readable blocks as as unchecked and kicked off Scanner one more time. It's about 55% done as of right now. If that comes out clean, I'm going to assume this drive is good and re-purpose the drive it's replacing. Fingers crossed! lol

If it helps, I'm running three IO Crest 4 port cards in my machine with 11 total drives so far and have yet to have a single issue. Might be worth looking at if you're looking to replace the HighPoint card.

So far so good. Scanner gave it a clean bill of health and CrashPlan has been backing two computers up to it for a couple days now. In another week or two I'll consider it good and add the old one (4TB) to DrivePool.

Ok. Scanner is about 70% done. It's the destination for local CrashPlan backups, and was replacing a 4TB drive I haven't wiped yet. I'll leave the 4TB drive alone for a couple weeks in case this one dies. If this one get a clean bill of health from the scan and lasts through a couple of weeks of CrashPlan backups I'll assume it's good and wipe the 4TB. Technically, if the 5TB drive dies and I revert back to using the 4TB drive, I'll lose a few versions of files, but given the data that won't be a problem. Thanks!

The absolute best luck I've had is with SpinRite, but it isn't free, isn't fast, and I think I read somewhere that it had compatibility issues with drives larger than 2TB, but I can't swear by that one. Anyway, if you're only looking to get back your non-important stuff, it may not be worth it.

In a boneheaded move I dropped an external drive off the desk onto the floor. A quick chkdsk turned up no issues, but I've gone into Scanner and Marked all Readable blocks Unchecked then initiated a check. If that comes back clean, are there any other checks I could/should do to verify if the disk received any damage?

Hey Christopher, do you know the answer to my last question?

Are you referring to the SSD Optimizer? If so, one of the notes you might want to get clarification on is: Meaning, your RAID 0 setup is seen by DrivePool as a single drive, and if you have things duplicated, you probably aren't getting the functionality you're expecting. Personally, I'd think SSDs would be fast enough you wouldn't need to mess around with the complexities of RAID, but another option might be RAID 1 instead of 0. Another question I have about that plugin is, based on the note I quoted above, since I have duplication set at 3x for almost everything, would I need 3 SSDs to avoid "falling back" to an archive disk and negating the performance benefit I'm trying to get using SSDs?

Ok. It just seems strange that I'm getting the error now, but wasn't before. Strangely, I wasn't able to find the problematic .exe when I looked. I have the drives mounted in folders and looked at them individually but didn't find it there either. I'll look again in a bit.

Yes, the message is coming from DrivePool. Message Link I'll open a ticket w/the logs. I have to stop the service for the logs to be unlocked so I can zip them up. I have friends hitting files (Subsonic). That can continue while I stop/start the service can't it? As for antivirus, Windows Defender is running on the machine, but that's it. Nothing else is using the files. They are just backed up from websites I have/had.

Strangely, I'm getting this error attempting to set duplication to 3x on folders that were already set to 2x. I'm not sure how a php file would contain a virus in this context (on a Windows machine not running a webserver), but either way, I'd like to have it duplicated. I selected "Duplicate now" (as opposed to cancel) the first time, but the message just came back after a few minutes.

I ended up biting the bullet on a 3rd cage and SATA card last week. I had a couple extra 2TB drives and one 1TB drive lying around and wanted to get them added to the pool. Total usable storage now sits at 19.1TB. I've since enabled 3x duplication on almost everything and DrivePool is in the process of working its magic. I love that software!

I have a question relating to this. Not long ago, I had a drive that DrivePool or Scanner, I don't remember which, reported as bad. I ran to BestBuy, picked up another 2TB drive, replaced it, and went on my way. This weekend, I plugged that drive into an enclosure, and ran ActiveDisk to "kill" it which writes 0's across the entire disk. Given that the process successfully completed writing the 0's, is there any reason to believe the disk is actually good? Would creating a partition, formatting it, and running a chkdsk suggest whether or not I could trust the disk again? I understand the risks if unduplicated data were to be stored on it, I'm just curious what other's thoughts are.