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Pool down


tman

Question

I've been running the original Drivepool WHS2011 plugin for a few years now. There are 5 disks in my pool, and things have generally been fine... up until now.

 

Three drives in the pool (all Seagates!) have been reporting SMART problems recently. I've three new (non-Seagates!) ready to replace them, but one of the drives has now gone into a SMART unhealthy state (I also run Scanner). The pool now won't come up properly, and files are inaccessible. I'm trying to start a 'replace drive' operation on the unhealthy disk, but that's proving problematic. All of the total amounts for the various folders are missing in the DrivePool tab, but it does show 5 disks in the pool. Pool status is stuck at 'measuring 0.1%.

 

I do have backups - thankfully, but what's the best course of action? I can just pull the unhealthy drive, but that's not going to help with the pool state. I'm not sure if there's any way to do this 'cleanly'. Absolute worst case, I'm going to have the blitz the pool, add the new disks, recreate and restore, but that sounds pretty extreme.

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Pull the problem drive.

 

Specifically, it is likely what is causing the other issues with the pool state.  The folder size listing is controlled by "Windows Search", and if it's unable to index the pool.... it will cause this sort of issue.

Additionally, if the pool isn't "coming up", then it's because one or more of the underlying disks is causing this issue .... and I'd place bets that if you tried accessing the individual disks, the failing one is having the same issue. 

 

And as for the measuring... disk issues will cause the measuring to fail. 

 

 

So pulling the failing disk will be the best course of action here, and likely fix all of your problems.

 

 

 

 

And I'm sorry to hear about the drive failures. That's never a pleasant experience.

That said, Seagate Ironwolves and Archive drives are fantastic, and would serve you well.  But either way... hopefully no more issues.

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I think I've lost some files, but I did as you said and just pulled the drive. I added one of the new ones, and the pool started to recover. I also took the opportunity to upgrade to the latest DrivePool/Scanner (which do look a lot nicer!), and it picked up the pool fine. Fortunately, most of my critical files were in mirrored folders, so the re-mirroring process recovered them.

 

One question. Aware that I've lost files, but browsing through the unmirrored areas, I can't actually see anything missing. I have a feeling though I'm just seeing file placeholders and the actual data won't be there - correct? Is the only way of knowing which files to recover going to require me to try and access the failed disk?

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If the files on the drive were not duplicated, then yes, pulling the drive would "remove" them from the pool.  

This is one of the reasons that I personally recommend enabling duplication for everything. That way, if you ever need to pull a drive, or a drive just fails, you just need to remove it from StableBit DrivePool, and let it "do it's thing". 

 

But I'm glad to hear that they are mirrored elsewhere, and can be recovered. 

 

 

One question. Aware that I've lost files, but browsing through the unmirrored areas, I can't actually see anything missing. I have a feeling though I'm just seeing file placeholders and the actual data won't be there - correct? Is the only way of knowing which files to recover going to require me to try and access the failed disk?

 

Sorry, no, this doesn't happen.  StableBit DrivePool doesn't use placeholders or anything else like that.  The directory list is dynamically generated from the underlying disks and merged ("concatenated" is a better/more accurate term), and then presented as the pool.  So if a file is deleted on the underlying disk, or the disk it's on "goes missing", then the files will "just disappear" from the pool. 

 

So the only way to have a record of everything is to have generated and saved it prior to this. 

 

 

 

That said, this is one of the biggest "flaws" in StableBit DrivePool.  I use quotes, because ... it really isn't a flaw.  Other solutions (such as WHSv1's Drive Extender, or FlexRAID's pooling) use reparse points (symbolic links, junction points, etc) to create a virtual pool on an existing file system.  Unfortunately, these can cause their own sorts of issues, (and even caused a nasty corruption bug in Drive Extender, requiring Microsoft to call in some NTFS developers/architects to fix). 

 

That said, there are a number of threads here about this specific issue, and how to "deal with it".  And this is something we want to address in the future, as well. 

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