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Went for it & it worked. Put the drive back in the bad enclosure & sure enough there it was on restart. Let Drivepool settle down then removed the drive from the pool with duplication later. Took 2.5 hours to remove a 3TB drive. Powered down put it in the new enclosure (with fan) & used Mini tool Partition Wizard free to re-partition & reformat. Added it back to Drivepool & its balancing away. I'm out one cheap enclosure & not a $100 drive or 2.5TB of data. No short way around I could see, took most of a Saturday afternoon while I watched my college team get pummeled. But that's another story. Hope this helps out someone who swaps USB enclosures or moves a drive to internal get out of jam & get their data back. Found an old post where Christopher made a suggestion to a poor soul with the same problem as me, worked both times, so thanks Chris for helping without even seeing this post.

I had a massive power outage & surge here due to a storm and when the server came back up the 3TB drive in a USB enclosure (Sabrent) showed as GPT Protected Partition and alot of un-allocated space. Unable to access or be seen by Drivepool or windows & you can't touch it. Putting it back into the malfunctioning enclosure & it works fine and is seen by all. Only problem is the drive runs full tilt all the time and overheats (passive cooling in the "working" enclosure) How do I go about removing the drive from the pool and then making it usable in the new enclosure to re-partition and reformat? The drive is locked (GPT protected partition) by any other method of connecting it to the computer. Just don't want to lose 2+ TB of data or my hard drive. Any help would be appreciated. Thanks.

Sorry to bring up an old post but I had a massive power outage & surge here due to a storm and when the server came back up the 3TB drive in a USB enclosure (Sabrent) showed as GPT Protected Partition and alot of un-allocated space. Unable to access or be seen by Drivepool or windows & you can't touch it. Putting it back into the malfunctioning enclosure & it works fine and is seen by all. Only problem is the drive runs full tilt all the time and overheats (passive cooling in the "working" enclosure) How do I go about removing the drive from the pool and then making it usable in the new enclosure to re-partition and reformat? The drive is locked (GPT protected partition) by any other method of connecting it to the computer. Just don't want to lose 2+ TB of data or my hard drive. Any help would be appreciated. Thanks.

I use Remove Empty Directories from this website https://www.jonasjohn.de/red.htm You can use the simple method with the GUI. I just select the PoolPart for each of the drives. Scan it and delete. Since I only use the Main Drive letter I must assign a temporary Drive letter to each partition. I use it because sometimes the directory has sensitive information in the label. Once a month is good enough.

gtaus, the Sabrent is a really nice enclosure. Looks to be all-metal and would undoubtedly kill someone if dropped on their head, even empty. Doesn't even need drive sleds, which a lot of server-style enclosures force onto people, like my old Norco (now Secdin). On the expensive side, but the build quality and it only needing the one USB-C port are terrific selling points. Unfortunately, I have no idea regarding drive speeds, as I haven't run any tests. I would guess that it's just as quick as if the drives were directly connected to the motherboard. I've streamed several near-100 GB UHDs and haven't run into any stuttering, which is all I wanted. It sounds like DP is, to put it charitably, "slow" when it comes to drive evacuations. I'm not sure a faster USB connection would help in this regard, as DP seems to have its own game plan when shuffling stuff around. If you have any other questions about the Sabrent, feel free to ask.

Yep, it took 25 hours to remove my 4TB HDD. As I stated, I could see the transfer rates going up and down in speed depending on the size of the files. Although speed is important, I have stayed with DrivePool for years because the program just works so well and does not crash like other systems I had including RAID and Windows Storage Spaces.

I don't use duplication on my Home Media Center storage DrivePool. I have all the files backup up on HDDs in the closest. So, if I lose an HDD in DrivePool, I could reload them from the backups. Nothing critical if I lose a drive. As far as time required for removing a drive, I initially estimated 54 hours to remove my drive after the progress in the first 3 hours. However, my transfer rates improved over time and the remove drive task completed last night at about 25 hours total run time. I suspect it's a matter of what files are being transferred. Small files will take considerably longer to transfer than larger files. I can see the transfer rate drop way down on those small files, but build up speed on larger files. Thanks for the offer, but you don't have to perform any comparison tests for me. I am just hoping that DrivePool will someday include an "estimated time to complete" for the remove drive task. The % progress in DrivePool is OK, but it really does not give you any idea how long it will take to complete.

Both duplicated and unduplicated are unticked. Changing the toggle between equalize by free space did shift things around a little. Is there a best practice to use SSD optimizer and keep things balanced on the archive drives? Should I stripe the SSDs in Windows, maybe?

Sync.com cannot be added, as there is no publicly documented API. Without that API, and a way to officially read and write files/data on the provider, there is no way to support it.

No, no changes have been made, in this regards.

That's positiviely bizarre. Though, I can't really say that it's surprising, unfortunately.

YOu can use the "Quick settings" to reset these values. And the different profiles do have slightly different profiles. As for the settings, and what they do, there is some basic information about that here: https://stablebit.com/Support/Scanner/2.X/Manual?Section=Scanner

Setting the balancing ratio to 100% may help. But to be blunt, the SSD Optimizer and the Disk Space Equalizer balancer are at odds. The Disk Space Equalizer wants to fill every drive, equally, but the SSD Optimizer wants to clear out several of the drives.

There isn't a set amount of time, because tasks like balancing, duplication, etc run as a background priority. This means that normal usage will trump these tasks. Additionally, it has the normal file move/copy issue, estimates can jump radically. A bunch of small files take a lot more time than a few large files, because it's updating the file system much more frequently. And for hard drives, this means that the read/write heads are jumping back and forth, frequently. But 6-12 hours per TB is a decent estimate for removal.

Totally agree. I've cancelled my Cloud subscription but I'm not sure I can extricate licensing so it may be something we are stuck with. If it happens again, much as I love Drivepool and Scanner, I shall be looking elsewhere. I lost a day's work. Let's hope Stablebit provides something more than bland assurances that 'we've taken steps...'

I know the overhead's more noticeable when moving smaller files, but I haven't kept any hard numbers sorry. I also try to always keep at least one spare port (internal or external) available so that I can just plug in a new drive and let DrivePool take care of the rest, and everything at least x2 duplicated (and backed up) so if I'm in a hurry for some reason (e.g. a drive failing in a way that panics the OS) I can simply just ditch the culprit and let DrivePool handle re-duplication. I'm shifting things around at the moment but I've a mostly-full 4TB drive (internal SATA) I could test removing both normally and manually afterwards if you're interested (not that such a test would be rigorous, since pool content varies, but the offer's there). Do you use duplication?

That looks like a real nice 10-bay enclosure. When I started out with DrivePool, I had two 4-bay enclosures and a handful of individual HDD enclosures. Unfortunately, after a few years, one of my 4-bay enclosures died so I lost access to all 4 drives. It was less expensive for me to replace the 4-bay enclosure with 4 separate HDD enclosures, so that is what I did. Currently, I see the 10-bay enclosure sells for about $540 on Amazon. That's $54 per slot. Again, I am comparing that price to individual HDD enclosures at about $20 per case. I know the multi bay enclosures have many advantages, but I wish they could bring down the price. Also, for me, I don't think I would ever lose 10 individual HDD enclosures all at one time whereas I know that if the board in the enclosure goes down, I would lose access to all those drives. Do you think your 10-bay enclosure is moving files among the drives faster than what you could see if you had separate HDDs in individual cases? From your post, I don't see any great speed removing the drive within DrivePool itself. Well, frankly, DrivePool is not nearly as fast as my old RAID system or Wndows Storage Spaces, but DrivePool just works better, and I have had no catastrophic data failures as I did in the other systems. I am currently removing a 4TB HDD from my 23 HDD DrivePool Media Server. I calculate it will take about 54 hours to complete the task within DrivePool. That's a long time, and with my newer 8TB drives, I suppose it will take almost a week to remove one of those. I think it would be great if DrivePool had some kind of way to estimate how long it would take to complete the remove drive task. I see my remove drive task is clocking at about a 40 MB/s rate but I think the HDDs can transfer over 80 MB/s on their own. And I have an older computer with a USB 3.0 system. I'm sure the bottleneck in my system is the USB 3.0. So, just curious on what transfer speed you see on your 10-bay enclosure as you remove your drive. Thanks.

That's the info I was just looking for, how to speed up removing a drive from DrivePool. Currently, I am removing a 4TB drive to replace it with an 8TB drive. I logged the progress of the task and it took 3 hours to move the first 5.5% of the drive. At that rate, it will take about 54 hours to complete the removal task. Good thing I started the removal process 3 days before the new HDD is to be delivered. Any idea on how much overhead DrivePool adds to the process in the drive removal process? With larger and larger HDD's, this is becoming more of an issue for me. I like to keep my DrivePool up and running while I remove a drive, so I plan for a good 3 days to remove a 4TB drive. But it would be nice to know how much longer DrivePool takes to remove a drive compared to stopping DrivePool and manually moving them yourself.

Sorry, I'm stumped. Your settings look like they should be resulting in an even distribution. Is there anything active at all in the File Placement tab, or lower down in the Balancers tab? Is "Balancers -> SSD Optimizer -> Ordered placement -> Duplicated" unticked? Does changing to "Equalize by the free space remaining" have a better result?

Accidently bumped the reset toggle and have been trying to get things set back the way they were. For some reason it wants to fill up some hard drives almost to capacity whereas before it left the archive drives balanced and emptied out the cache drives as needed. Help?

Well, this is why always online functionnality is really bad. They need to add at least a grace period or something because my tools aren't working. Before the stablebit cloud thing, I never had any problem with stablebit software.

Thank you. Unfortunately a bummer, but I can definitely see how complex that can get.

I've been using Czkawka. Select individual disks (not the pool) in "Folder to Search" and then run "Empty Directories" and delete them all. My workflow has been: - Run Drivepool balancing by space used - Stop Drivepool service - Run Czkawka Empty Directories - Run SnapRaid Sync/Touch/Scrub - Start Drivepool service It's been working pretty well. You can also create a .bat to make it even easier.

Sadly no. As I understand it, only "single thread" (so to speak) balancing was implemented due to the considerable extra complexity that would be involved in getting "multiple thread" balancing to work well.

During balancing, I notice only two drives being used out of 10 total. All 10 drives have a new balancing target. Is there a way to use all disks simultaneously to speed up the balancing?