https://community.covecube.com/index.php?/discover/Covecube Inc. - All ActivityenRoger that. I haven't had any crash issues since the last update to 2.3.13.1687, sorry, I cant find which version I had before. Is there a log file somewhere I can check?Fri, 12 Jun 2026 02:47:37 +0000Hello! I was wondering if it were to be possible to develop a balancer that will help with media servers. If someone has a large collection, currently, new files are parsed between all the drives in an array. If a drive were to die, you would lose random files of many different collections. For example, one or two episodes of 500 TV series. An ideal balancing would be to store all files of the lowest-level folder together. This way, if you lose a drive, you lose an entire series that could be replaced in batch, rather than piecemeal restoring episodes from a lot higher number of total series. Any thoughts?Thu, 11 Jun 2026 22:34:26 +0000From the image, and text, it would appear that the J:\ drive has been scanned yet, rather only the beginning has been scanned. Note that resetting the settings does reset this status. StableBit Scanner keeps a map of what has and hasn't been scanned, and when it's been scanned. And as scanned sectors get older, they shift towards yellow to indicate that they haven't been scanned recently. Once a section hits the threshold, it will be queued to scan. Over time, this should lead to scanning when the system isn't as active or in useThu, 11 Jun 2026 05:53:45 +0000To clarify, new files are placed on the drive with the most available free space. This is checked for the absolute value, not for the relative value. Adding the 3rd drive would usually put new files on the new drive, and alternate between the original two (assuming they were equally filled). Also, likely, you'll have a good chunk of "unusable for duplication" space after adding the third drive. In this case, the "Duplication Space Optimizer" balancer will attempt to move files around to eliminate this "unusable for duplication" space. This would mean moving a good chunk of data to the 3rd drive, until that "unusable for duplication" space is gone. (most likely until the two original drives have half as much free space as the new drive, but this depends on capacity of the drives, if there are just 2 drives before, etc).Thu, 11 Jun 2026 05:48:35 +0000Thanks again Shane, what you're saying here makes sense. My total pool free space is now a little less than 900 GB. So I will try to add at least another 8 TB drive to the pool if I can find a bargain price somewhere. The prices of hard drives are so crazy high these days unfortunately. Thanks again .... Cheers.Tue, 09 Jun 2026 17:59:06 +0000I don't actually know the exact algorithm it uses; with three drives and the goal of maximising free space on multiple drives to fit as many duplicated (x2) files as possible I'd expect it should (attempt to) end up with one drive full and the other two with a roughly equal amount of free space. For example if you have drives A____ B____ and filled them with x2 duplicated files 1 2 3 4 then you'd end up with A1234 B1234. If you then added drive C____ the balancer could try to arrange them something like A1234 B12__ C34__ so it'd then have the most room for additional x2 duplicated files. Something I could play around with to test if I had more minutes of free time lately.Tue, 09 Jun 2026 12:56:19 +0000Huh. Fair, that'd be weird. Any chance it could have gotten a start on scanning the sectors before it had to pause for whatever it's waiting for and you saw its (lack of) progress? Or is the screenshot from like "thirty seconds after being plugged in for the first time" and it couldn't possibly have made that much progress even if it started scanning straight away?Tue, 09 Jun 2026 12:31:53 +0000Thanks for that explanation Shane. So the balancer will try to redistribute all the files amongst the 3 drives evenly to gain equal amount of free space on each of the 3 drives, and this would include X2 replication? So the X2 replication data on each of the 3 drives would end up on one or the other 2 drives?Mon, 08 Jun 2026 22:42:30 +0000Understood, but why is it starting 'halfway' the drive with a scan? Shouldn't it start, well, at the start?Mon, 08 Jun 2026 15:59:36 +0000Mon, 08 Jun 2026 12:23:27 +0000Thx for the answers. I've been playing around with it, and I still noticed a few things. Root cause is probably between chair and keyboard, but I still have to ask 🙂 Q4. My old drive was a Toshiba P300 Lemon, my replacement drive is a WD Red Pro 8 TB. At the same time I messed around a little with drive names, cable / controller combos, ports on the mainboard, etc. so I might have called this upon myself... What I saw was this: the new drive (Disk 6 aka J) has a few issues: - smart data is only read when I disable smart checksum (done that) - when the drive does a sector scan, the associated image is a bit weird (see attached). Is that a graphical glitch, or is it not scanning properly?Sun, 07 Jun 2026 18:12:45 +0000I suppose I can't rule out a haunted port, but I'd still place my monopoly money on door number two (drive belatedly self-corrected). Wondering, if you clear the blocks and rescan it does Scanner still find the same damage?Sun, 07 Jun 2026 02:39:22 +0000Hi Daxar. If you add a third drive but keep the duplication at x2, which drives any given file ends up on will depend on how you have the balancers set. The default set of balancers includes the Duplication Space Optimizer; its job is to optimize the pool to make the most use of your free spacefor duplicating files, so it will want to move some of the existing files to the third drive to free up space for more duplicated files.Sun, 07 Jun 2026 02:21:06 +0000I'm still experimenting a bit with Drivescanner and Drivepool, and I do have some flaky drives in my stack. (I'm perfectly aware they are flaky, but I decided it would offer a good test case that way 🙂 I have my drive scanning parameters set to a much higher frequency than usual, just to keep track of things.) One of my drives is a barely used Toshiba drive, which I accidentally bought, not realizing it was an SMR. It did its job in another PC for a blue monday, just serving some games, but it was molassus slow when doing some serious writing so I took it out and put it on the shelf for a year or so. Note that it is sold under different names, and that (according to DriveScanner) it doesn't even support TRIM (and that's reasonably bad for an SMR drive, I guess). Anyway, it's a shitty drive. But here's the question: today it was kicked out of the pool after DriveScanner marked a section of about 10% in the middle as unreadable (red blocks). However, the Smart parameters were not updated (no increase in read errors) and when checking the drive with HDD Sentinel Pro, that software doesn't report those sectors as unreadable. Note 1: none of the other drives has suffered from this thus far. Note 2: I'm running five drives on the mainboard SATA, six drives on a PCIe SATA card (I know, I know). I'm planning to throw out that drive anyway (and put an 8 TB Red Pro in there instead tomorrow, as well as replace the power supply with a fresher, larger unit) but I was wondering what could be the cause. - A controller (port) that failed and then came back spontaneously? - A crappy drive that decided to do some internal clean up, confusing DriveScanner? - Something else? Any suggestions? Anybody else using that same drive in a pool? (It's a lemon, but hey, somebody else might have made the same mistake.)Fri, 05 Jun 2026 22:38:42 +0000Hi All, I just have a quick question. I have two 8 TB drives in my pool with X2 replication /protection set. All has been working well for a long time. I'm now starting to run out of pool capacity. So if I add a third drive to the pool, let's say another 8 TB drive, how will the X2 replication be handled with three 8TB drives? Thanks...Fri, 05 Jun 2026 02:39:18 +0000I'd rather see a warning in the software about the problem than having the issue hidden like this.Thu, 04 Jun 2026 08:02:39 +0000I have one of the supermicro chassis that supports 36 bays (with 2x SAS2 expander boards), and have populated almost all of them. (there are a couple of slots that are dead, RIP, but 34 is still great). And I use an LSI 9211-8i card (well a ibm serveraid card). I've never had an issue with this setup, and it's been very snappy. (well, some weird issues with firmware and driver versions for the LSI card, and some catastrophes with ReFS, just don't use ReFS) Additionally, i've had a number of customers with even more than that (and at least one person with 100 drives and a PB of data, IIRC). And StableBit DrivePool doesn't care about the number of drives. And it's designed to be very light weight, so that it works well on low end hardware, and higher end hardware. ZFS has issues with a large number of disks because of the scaled need of memory. The more disks (the more capacity), the more memory it needs. And ZFS really should be ran ONLY with ECC memory (you can run it without, but ... you shouldn't). Hardware raid has the issue that the larger the array is, the more likely you'll have a disk failure. And too many failures means that you lose the entire array. And large enough, you heading into the territory where a distributed file system (eg, over the network) may be a better option. We do have a number of users that use snapRAID with the pool, though this isn't supported by us (there are a number of areas that don't play well, like having to completely rebuild after recovery).Tue, 02 Jun 2026 00:10:55 +0000If you're experiencing BSODs, please always head to https://stablebit.com/Contact Crashes are always critical issuesMon, 01 Jun 2026 23:41:03 +0000Also, you can ignore a setting in StableBit Scanner. Either if the values get worse, it will reflag them, or to permanently ignore them. Depending on the exact values, you may not want to do that. However, IIRC, seek error rate is one that will change based on various factors. So it can improve, and go away. Also, some manufacturers are ... overly aggressive in what is bad.Mon, 01 Jun 2026 23:39:11 +0000Unfortunately, exFAT isn't supported by StableBit DrivePool, and the drive needs to be formatted as NTFS. You'd need to clear off all of the data on the drive in question, and reformat it as NTFS. Once you've done so, it should immediately show up in the pool. Also, mixed file systems aren't permitted by default. Differences in support can/would cause issues without essentially created a new file system type to handle that.Mon, 01 Jun 2026 23:36:14 +0000Hello. I had a pool of 5 drives, but one of the drives was starting to show degraded performance so it was copied to a new drive. It's supposed to be NTFS but the new drive was accidentally formatted to use exFAT. I can't add the 5th poolpart back into the pool. The application pretends the drive doesn't exist which is really frustrating as rebuilding a pool takes a long time (2TB WD Red's) I would like to know where the problem lies. Is it the exFAT itself or the odd mixture of file systems? (4 drives NTFS, one exFAT)Mon, 01 Jun 2026 08:13:23 +0000Basically SMART errors can be divided into "it may fix itself" and "it won't fix itself". Neither is necessarily "replace it ASAP" but it's more probable with the latter. Seek error rate is with respect to how well the drive is moving the head(s) to the correct position and can change over time due to various factors (vibration, temperature, wear, etc). It is not usually by itself a sign of a failing drive (e.g. a consistently high seek error rate can indicate a defect that can't be compensated for but isn't ultimately preventing the drive from reading and writing data, just slowing it down). Drives can self-correct to an extent; if a SMART error pops up and then disappears shortly after and doesn't return, the drive's own logic has most likely taken care of it. E.g. in the case of seek errors, the drive may adjust parameters of the head movements to compensate. Scanner polls SMART frequently by default and thus it can often catch these temporary errors before a drive can finish self-correcting the issue. These temporary errors can also be due to circumstances beyond a drive's control (e.g. occasionally running hot due to high load or insufficient cooling, or something in the chassis is loose and causing vibrations) so it's still useful to know about. P.S. DrivePool's Scanner balancer plug-in has two tiers of whether to automatically evacuate, warnings (basically SMART has reported something to complain about) and damage (SMART is reporting there's something the drive can't fix or Scanner's own scans are finding damage).Sat, 30 May 2026 03:11:58 +0000Trying to get my head around this one. Had a drive show SMART failure signs in Scanner. Added a new disk to the pool, removed the failing drive and low and behold, after the data was moved over SMART isnt showing signs of failure. Had Scanner perform a full scan on the drive overnight and it came back without any issues. I am always worried when it comes to SMART failures. I couldnt find a reliable Toshiba based diagnostic tool for my drive, but I am both nervous to add this drive back into the pool but also curious about this particular SMART error. I read through forums and everyone seems to have a different opinion on the error.Fri, 29 May 2026 19:55:06 +0000+1. On Win 10, multiple CoveFS failures over the last day or so. Updating the most recent release to see if it helps. Edit: updated to 2.3.13.1687 and no crashes yet.Sun, 24 May 2026 03:04:37 +0000Thank you sir. I will proceed as planned. I'd much rather have one big drive than many small ones. And I know from past experience that Drivepool handles failed drives far far better than anything else out there.Mon, 18 May 2026 12:15:55 +0000