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Welcome!

Ok, thanks.

Then the "balancing immediately" and checking the "but not more than once ever X hours" option may be better, as this should balance the data periodically and be a bit more aggressive than the "balance daily" option. However, you may still end up with other drives being active, depending on how much data needs to be moved, and how long that takes. Eg, there may not be a good solution that will prevent the hard drives from being used. It may be simply a matter of finding a balancing that works while making compromises.

hmm i'm set to balance daily at 3am. my ssd cache is constantly sitting full, advice?

If this is an inplace upgrade: Uninstall, upgrade, reinstall. If this a clean install of windows: deactivate, wipe+reinstall, install StableBit DrivePool, reactivate.

I'm looking to upgrade the computer hosting my DrivePool installation from Windows 10 to Windows 11. Has anyone done this yet? Any recommended best practices I should follow? Thanks!

Yes and no. The scan themselves are limited by the drive's speed, other activity on the drive, other activity on the same controller, etc. But, in general, should be a consistent speed. That said, the automatic scans (or really any scan after the initial scan) won't be scanning the entire disk. StableBit Scanner keeps track of what sectors have been scanned, and when they were last scan. Manually triggering a scan will still abide by the scan history and scan settings (eg, it won't scan sectors that were scanned less than 30 days ago, assuming the interval for scanning is set to 30 days). You can see this sector map, as well as the "condition" of the drive here: https://stablebit.com/Support/Scanner/2.X/Manual?Section=Disk Scanning Panel#Sector Map Also, on the left side of the sector map, there are 4 buttons (the 4th may be hidden due to sizing). But you can reset the scan history for the entire disk (using said 4th button), and rescan the entire disk. However, because of how the sector map works, over time it should scan when the drives aren't in use as much, and should break it up over the month. Resetting the sector map will reset this "learning" too.

The short of it is that CloudDrive allows you to designate a supported storage provider (e.g. dropbox, a network share, even a local drive) and 'format' a specified amount of space in it to present that space as a cloud-based drive to Windows. If you're familiar at all with mounting disk image files over a network share (using tools like VirtualBox, HyperV, etc) that's basically what CloudDrive lets you do except the "image file" is a folder full of block files kept in your cloud account. E.g. if you had a Dropbox account and you reserved 1TB of space as a CloudDrive drive, Windows would see a SCSI drive of that size in File Explorer. Pro: you can treat your cloud storage just like it's a physical drive on your computer, and you can do things like encrypt it locally so it can't be read by anyone in the cloud without the password you set in CloudDrive. Con: just like a physical drive, it can only be "plugged into" and readable from one computer at any given time (unless you have a way to share it out - just like a physical drive). As far as syncing/storing Dropbox files locally, you could use a CloudDrive drive as a drive in a DrivePool pool and mirror via duplication or you could use a tool such as FreeFileSync or SyncThing to mirror between your dropbox folder and your pool drive. There are technical pros and cons to either approach. If you just want to mount your entire Dropbox as a network drive (basically just give it a drive letter instead of being a folder) there are other third-party apps that can do that.

Thanks a lot for the detailed explanation! In the meantime I did go through my two disks and removed all the duplicates I found. I did this with FreeFileSync. Everytime a file existed on both disks I deleted it from one. And I resolved all conflicts where the file had the same name (and modified date?) but different filesize. Last thing remaining is to back up my data. Which will again take a lot of time but it is inevitable. After that I'll create the new pool and move everything into the PoolPart folder.

I'm a new StableBit user. I've been pretty pleased with the ability to combine multiple drives on windows. I digress. I'm looking at CloudDrive and I am trying to understand it's limitations. To my understanding you're able to upload your data in StableBit to whatever provider you chose? Basically a cloud backup of your data? I was curious if I could do the other way around? I basically want my Dropbox Data to be synced/stored locally? Since I can't mount Dropbox to a StableBit drive, I thought I could do something similar with CloudDrive? Help me understand, thanks!

Condolences on the data loss. Sounds like you got hit by something nasty. Yes, that's correct. DrivePool considers a file that is in the same folder tree (e.g. folder\subdolder\name.ext) on multiple poolparts inside a pool to be a duplicated file, because that's how it does duplication. However if you weren't using duplication then yes it is most likely due to balancing and the recovery software un-deleting the moved files: 1. If the "duplicated" file has different last-modified dates on those disks DrivePool will consider that an error and offer to keep only the newest file or let you resolve it manually. 2. If the "duplicated" file has the same last-modified dates on those disks but different sizes DrivePool will also consider that an error but leave it up to you to resolve manually. 3. If the "duplicated" file has the same dates and sizes on those disks DrivePool will presume there is no problem even if the files are not identical in content, and proceed normally - which if you have duplication turned off means it will delete one of the "duplicates" to free up space in the pool. In theory so long as the what happened to the old lost pool was only the deletion of its files, the recovery process restored the deleted files in full, and the files going into the new pool are only from the old lost pool, then you could simply seed the new pool and you should only run into issue #1. In practice it's possible that the recovery software may have only partially recovered some file contents, leading to issues #2 and #3. Another issue you'll run into is that recovery software can't tell the difference between deleted files you wanted deleted and deleted files you didn't want deleted - so you'll have to get rid of the former all over again. If possible make a back up of the recovered content before you do anything else with it (including recreating your pool). Then perhaps use something like DigitalVolcano's Duplicate Cleaner (I used this as an example because it's the one I know best) to identify duplicates and uniques by date, size, name and content so you can resolve the above issues in an interface that's designed for it, again before you recreate your pool. While there's a bit of a learning curve, as a dedicated tool it has a lot more capabilities (such as being able to detect files that look identical but have different content) than DrivePool's basic same-name-but-different-date detection. P.S. If you do plan to use duplication in the new pool, remember to turn off read-striping.

A little while ago I did a manual scan, and it took over a day I believe for my 11 TB drive. Now I am looking at the scanner doing the automatic scan and it seems to be going way faster. Is that normal?

Hi, I had a very severe issue on my home server (Windows 10) where all of a sudden all the data on my DrivePool drive and some data on another disk, which was not part of any pool, was suddenly deleted. The entire pool suddenly showed as completed empty. All individual drives of the pool also showed as empty. I don't know what caused this. I'm honestly a bit shocked that something like this can even happen at all. In any case I have now done a fresh install of my server. (previously I had upgraded it already a few times from one Windows version to another and I replaced the internal hardware including mainboard and cpu a few times... I guess it was not in the best shape anymore after all these changes over the years) And I used (expensive) data recovery software to recover as much of my data as I could. So now I have two 20 TB disks with about 30 TB of data on them and I would like to create a new pool for those two disks. I understand that the fastest way of doing this is to create a new pool with those two disks which means that DrivePool only uses the available empty space of those drives and creates a pool with that. Then I could move my data into the hidden PoolPart folder to fill the pool with my data efficiently. But I now have two disks with the same folder structure each. So can I add my data to the PoolPart folder of each of the disks like this which would mean that I create the same folder structure on both disks? E.g. I would have a "BACKUP" folder in PoolPart of disk 1 and disk 2? (I assume yes, cause that's what DrivePool also does) And what happens if I add a file with the same name (and same path) on disk 1 and on disk 2? This can be the case because the data recovery software may have detected the same file on multiple disks of the old pool. Maybe the file was on one disk at first but then was moved to another becasue of balancing. In any case it can be that I now have a file of the same name (maybe different file sizes, maybe on of the even has filesize 0) on both of my 20 TB disks. I would be grateful for any help or past experiences any of you may have. With this amount of data it's not so easy to back up everything quickly. It always takes days.

Absolutely: https://stablebit.com/Support/DrivePool/2.X/Manual?Section=Balancing Settings Change it to not balance immediately, or increase the "not more often[...]" value.

I bought an ssd to use as cache, so it could fill it, and then once a day dump the cache to the archive drives, rinse repeat. but now that the archive drive has filled up, I hear constant clicking from writes to the drives 24/7. Is there anyway to setup a scheduled dump of the cache to the archive drives so they can idle for the vast majority of the day?

Unfortunately, StableBit Scanner doesn't support SAS drives, so doesn't manage them. That said, the StableBit Scanner plugin is reading the disk status from WMI, so if you "jerry-rigged" up something that read from the SAS health information and created the proper structures in WMI, you could fake it. (however, the information is very basic, but at least that's simpler to manipulate)

As above, by default, StableBit Scanner should only be scanning 1 disk per controller. This can only be changed by getting into the advanced settings. You can see how StableBit scanner sees the controllers by right clicking the column header in the UI and selecting "By Controller". If you do this, do you see all of these disks on different controllers, or on one controller?

It would also be worth double checking the sector map, as that may be updating. So the percentage may be based on the current scan, not the whole disk's status. https://stablebit.com/Support/Scanner/2.X/Manual?Section=Disk Scanning Panel#Sector Map

Can confirm that there is no issue with mounting the drives to a folder path. StableBit DrivePool doesn't use the drive letter or path, but uses the volume ID via the UNC path (eg, what you see when you run "mountvol" in a command prompt, the "\\?\Volume{GUID]\" path).

It's flaky because multicast detection can be flaky. That said, you can manually add entries, if you need to: https://wiki.covecube.com/StableBit_DrivePool_2.x_Advanced_Settings#RemoteControl.xml

Yeah, sometimes .... Windows will double add the disk, if it's mounted too quickly. It's ... weird. ALso, if this happens again, you can uninstall the drives (all of them) in Device manager (but don't delete the driver), and reboot the system. This should also correct the doubled drive.

THere isn't any such option, currently. Just for the pool itself and doing it manually for the pooled disks. Also, when removing the drive letters, if you run into issues with the drives showing up after rebooting when doing this, there is a known issue with Windows. Fixing it is relatively simple: https://wiki.covecube.com/StableBit_DrivePool_F3540

There's an option under Manage Pool to turn off / on drive letters. Sorry, I thought this did all disks in the pool but it's just the pools main letter. I swore somewhere I came across this capability. I will update if I find it.

Ah, thanks! I was trying to find something like that, I'll dig around the GUI again and look for that option

Hi Shane I ran HDD regenerator & seatools on a different PC, which doesn't have SB scanner installed. Although HDD regenerator reported issues with 7 sectors & recommended backing up the HDD, it didn't actually report any bad sectors in the section below the progress graph but obviously it found something it didn't like, hence the suggestion. I've 6 HDD's & 1 SSD on the PC that reported the problem; one of the HDD I only replaced after the issue with the problem drive & everything is normal even using the same SATA port & data cable, so it seems the HDD that has the problem is actually faulty but seatools says it's OK! I've RMA'd the HDD & returned it to Seagate so can no longer test it.