SantiagoDraco

I don't think you need (or would benefit from) 10G for DrivePool based drives since unless you are duplicating more than 2x you will only see a possible boost in read performance from DPs performance boosts from split reads. I have a Synology 3615xs NAS with 2 10G ports and I have that directly wired to another 10G adapter in my Windows 2012 Server Essentials box. The Synology is running 10 drives in Raid 6 with 2 SSD cache drives and I host all of my high data rate files (blu-ray etc) there. All of my lower overhead data resides on a DrivePool. So long story short unless you are running SSDs under DrivePool I don't see you saturating 1G with spindle drives on a DrivePool "pool". Certainly the cost for a switch is overly excessive and you will not see the benefit of that expense. The cheapest switch will run you about 750. Better to run direct with adapters and run another 1G back out to the LAN if you are focused on file transfers between servers.

I'm pretty much completely lost as well. Where are "drive options"? I see this nowhere. Here are my issues so far: 1. Can't figure out how to "reset" a connected profile to point it to another account. For example I authorized OnDrive through my hotmail account but decided to create my own business office 365 account but cannot for the life of me figure out how to relink. All I can do is connect over and over again. 2. Can't figure out how to view the details of a linked account. I want to see the account name that was used and other pertinent details (and change them as needed similar to 1 above). 3. Expected to be able to "right click" on each provider to bring up available actions (such as requested above).

Thanks for the responses! Looking forward to enhancements to this great product.

First off... great start! Been waiting for this for some time since posting a while back and so happy to see it. Now to get more drives to make room for this to work So to my questions and suggestions. In the Balancing > File Placement > Folders section I see the list of folders and then the list of available drives on the right for creation of that relationship... 1. Would it be possible to add the actual drive model/size to the list of drives? 2. If I remember correctly you said you do some level of performance measuring in DP (not sure to what extent). Does this info lend itself to applying a "good/better/best" color flagging to the drives in this list to gauge relative actual performance? 3. If not (or maybe as an enhancement to 2 above) have you thought of adding the ability to, on a schedule or manually, "test" all drives for performance indexing that can be applied to my suggestion 2 or some other way? 4. If you are selecting folders/drives in the folders tab and you hit "save" the entire dialog closes. Please add an "apply" button to create the actual rule rather than having every click create a rule. The problem here is you can easily end up with rules that don't automatically remove themselves if you "uncheck" what you changed. 5. When navigating down folders in the tree child folders should always display the drive selection of it's parent folder unless explicitly changed. 6. Along the lines of the apply/save comment maybe it could be "apply to rules" in the folders tab for the current selection(s) and then a ". Of course I know buttons should usually have single word but just stating as for examples sake. Have you thought of creating more traditional rules that can be grown/expanded as needed? For example I might have a rule called "HD movies" and within that rule are all the folders and drives that apply to that rule. So I can have one rule for a given set of folders and assigned drives. If I delete that rule I remove all those custom relationships. If I ever want to assign a new folder to the rule I can just add the folder to the rule without having to create an entire new set of folder/drive assignments per folder. Assuming this makes sense. So in your Rules pane you'd have: RuleName1 +Folders: -- Folder 1 -- Folder 2 -- Folder 3 +Drives -- Drive 1 -- Drive 2 -- Drive 3 RuleName2 +Folders -- Folder 5 -- Folder 6 +Drives -- Drive 2 -- Drive 4 -- Drive 5 Questions/comments aside thanks for such a great product. I don't know what I'd do without it... maybe use raid again /shudder.

Here's a few tips on using 4tb drives based on what I've had to go through. 1. If Windows doesn't see the "new" (uninitialized drive) as 4tb (3.6 or whatever) then most likely the sata controller you are using does not support it properly. This is usually a driver issue or controller. As Drashna said beware the cheap dock external enclosures as many don't properly support 4tb drives. 2. If you run into this issue consistently then you should think about getting a new controller, if feasible. 3. Assuming you DO see the drive as a 4tb drive you MUST initialize as GPT, not MBT. GPT is capable of supporting dirves in the petabyte range I understand 4. Let's assume you put the drive in and it saw it as 2tb and you initialized and formatted it and are stuck with just 2tb. No problem. Assuming you have no data on the drive! take the drive out, put it into another system that does see the drive as 4tb. Once in the new system I would do the following: a. In the Windows Disc Management tool find the drive in the list and verify it sees the drive. Be sure you have the right drive located! b. Right click the left column block next to the drive in the lower middle area (you'll see Disk 0, Disk 1, etc) and in the resulting popup look at the options available for Convert. If it's GPT you will see "Convert to MBR" as an option. Go ahead and convert to MBR. You will now see two partitions on the drive. c. Repeat b above except this time convert back to GPT. This process (as far as I understand it) will have effectively rebuilt the GUID partition table (GPT) correctly for the 4tb drive. 5. Now go ahead and format the drive as NTFS. 6. Verify the drive is working and you can copy data to and from the drive without issues. 7. Move the drive back to your server and try again. I followed this process on my server since my RAID controller will not present the drive to Windows as a legacy drive unless I initialize it elsewhere first. However it works flawlessly once prepared. Also keep in mind that you COULD get an external adapter that you KNOW works and do the same process on the server itself. I used this adapter: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000UO6C5S/ref=wms_ohs_product?ie=UTF8&psc=1 Lastly verify that your controller will support a 4tb drive at all. The process above is not necessarily a guarantee as I do not have the knowledge to state that it will work for all systems. It just worked well for me. Good luck! And be sure to double and triple check things are working before committing, as Shane said.

It does and it works great. I'm running Windows Server 2012 Essentials R2 with Drive Pool 2.0 and loving it. Unless I had serious money to burn (like enterprise drives, enclosures and high end raid controllers) I can't imagine having a home server without Drive Pool. It's the shiznit

<p>After more investigation it appears that removing the drive letters may have just been coincidental timing and another change (activating the directIO for scanner to get S.M.A.R.T. to work) may have caused the issues. Testing now to see.</p> <p> </p> <p>Update: After two hours of testing it was definitely turning on directIo in the scanner config that caused the errors. Now to try turning off drive letters again to prepare for adding more drives to the pool </p>

I just tried removing the drive letters for all of my pooled drives and ended up with fairly chronic "ntfs errors" where there were numerous event log errors stating that the ntfs file structure was corrupt or errors were found and were repaired. I should add that this is on Windows Server 2012 Essentials. This is an example of the errors I am now seeing. They are appearing even after restoring drive letters to all of the drives... Log Name: System Source: Ntfs Date: 10/23/2013 10:07:19 PM Event ID: 55 Task Category: None Level: Error Keywords: User: SYSTEM Computer: Skeeter-HS1.SKEETERSSPOT.local Description: A corruption was discovered in the file system structure on volume U:. The exact nature of the corruption is unknown. The file system structures need to be scanned online. Event Xml: <Event xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/win/2004/08/events/event"> <System> <Provider Name="Ntfs" Guid="{DD70BC80-EF44-421B-8AC3-CD31DA613A4E}" /> <EventID>55</EventID> <Version>0</Version> <Level>2</Level> <Task>0</Task> <Opcode>0</Opcode> <Keywords>0x8000000000000000</Keywords> <TimeCreated SystemTime="2013-10-24T03:07:19.551471500Z" /> <EventRecordID>4721</EventRecordID> <Correlation /> <Execution ProcessID="4" ThreadID="628" /> <Channel>System</Channel> <Computer>Skeeter-HS1.SKEETERSSPOT.local</Computer> <Security UserID="S-1-5-18" /> </System> <EventData> <Data Name="DriveName">U:</Data> <Data Name="DeviceName">\Device\HarddiskVolume13</Data> <Data Name="CorruptionState">0x1c</Data> <Data Name="HeaderFlags">0x802</Data> <Data Name="Severity">Critical</Data> <Data Name="Origin">File System Driver</Data> <Data Name="Verb">Force Proactive Scan</Data> <Data Name="Description">The exact nature of the corruption is unknown. The file system structures need to be scanned online. </Data> <Data Name="Signature">0xe2b3f0fb</Data> <Data Name="Outcome">Pseudo Verb</Data> <Data Name="SampleLength">0</Data> <Data Name="SampleData"> </Data> <Data Name="SourceFile">0x42</Data> <Data Name="SourceLine">1436</Data> <Data Name="SourceTag">345</Data> <Data Name="CallStack">Ntfs+0x178e59, Ntfs+0xb9ce1, Ntfs+0x178d6b, ntoskrnl+0x3a65d, ntoskrnl+0xe3c80, ntoskrnl+0x1542c6</Data> </EventData> </Event>

I think manual would be an awesome start and we can always use other performance tools to make our own indexes. Adding an automatic method in the future would be icing on the cake

Worked great! Thanks for the file. Much appreciated Now back to organizing my media libraries... there's not enough time in the day...

I'll give this a try today! Thanks Drashna!

I've never really given ECC memory much thought, to be honest. Why the importance? Does it help assure the integrity of the data? I can't say I've ever noticed a difference without it but I'm also a bit ignorant of it's practical use for a home server environment for example. I think it's time for me to do some research! ;D

I tried changing the UnsafeDirectIO value to true in the config and after this I received this error when attempting to start the service: "Error 14001: The application has failed to start because it's side-by-side configuration is incorrect. Please see the event log...." This occurs if I make the config file active by renaming it. If I rename it back to _default then the error does not occur. Thanks again!

As the title says I'm trying to read SMART data from Scanner on drives connected to Sans Digital 8 bay enclosures (TowerRAID TR8M-. The controller card is a HighPoint RocketRaid 2522 (hardware raid with port replicator support). So far no SMART data, all Scanner can do is see the drives and scan them for surface health. Have tested on both WHS 2011 and Windows Server 2012 Essentials R2. Thanks.

Related to another topic I started for DrivePool I was thinking it might be helpful to add a feature to Scanner that would do the following (and also work in conjunction with DrivePool). 1. Once (or manually) Stablebit Scanner would perform a set of performance tests on a drive and set a Performance Index value. 2. The index value could be a single average of certain types of reads/writes or maybe an index based on file size. The idea here is to create an index value that can be used intelligently to optimize performance of drives in a pool. 3. In DrivePool a user can flag folders as needing "high/medium/low" performance (or high/medium/low data rate, whatever is most intuitive to the user). 4. Drive Pool's balancer function could then have "performance optimize" turn on/off and this optimization function would reference the drive performance index values from StableBit Scanner to then intelligently move folders around to best optimize performance. Hopefully that makes sense. The reason for the suggestion of the performance index test is that there should probably be a consistent way of designating high/medium/low performance drives relative to each other (the index should be relative) rather than using some external manual tools then having to add UI management functions for users to associate folders with drives explicitly. Automatic is always best Thanks! I think this would also help sell more licenses of Scanner! For myself Scanner has been of limited use since Smart doesn't work in my configuration. A feature like this, a synergy between DrivePool and Scanner, would make me run out and buy a license right away ;D