I am new to Drivepool, after terrible repeat failures with MS storage spaces. I lost 20yrs of my Plex collection and I am slowly rebuilding

I have 6 drives in my pool with main content on a drive within the pool.

I have 3TB of data on 40TB total space.

I have enabled 4x duplication as I have plenty of space, but per the manual I don't see where I can protect against multiple HD failures.

In addition on the drive pool, it only says 352B are duplicated? Shouldn't it show 3TBx4 ?

-A-

If I have StableBit Scanner installed on two machines on the same LAN

• Machine A has internet access

• Machine B does not have internet access

can StableBit Cloud still monitor the status of Machine B’s drives by routing through Machine A (which does have internet and is running StableBit Scanner)?

The documentation says:

• "Easily connect to any other copy of the StableBit Scanner running on your LAN.
• "Use the StableBit Cloud to manage the app from the web."

Just trying to confirm if that setup allows Stablebit Cloud monitoring of Stablebit Scanner installations on LAN only devices or if each machine needs direct outbound access to the internet.

During the 2-3 days that scanning occurs, I have system stability issues, and I think that by forcing my schedule to be less intense all at once every month, I can reduce/eliminate that stability issue.

Is there a way to force a scan, even if one is not due yet, to reset the timer on that drive? Or, just to reset the timer on a drive without a scan?

Documentation only indicates gray, green, red, blue and purple. No yellow. 

Scanner reports all good but DP does not recognize the drive.

Ideas?

Thanks

@Christopher (Drashna)

My situation:

• I'm using the latest Betas of Scanner and DrivePool on Windows Server 2012 Essentials.
• I have two data disks which I've added to a single pool.
• In the Windows power options I have set the hard drive standby time to 30 minutes.

Here are my questions:

When I right click a drive in the drive list there is an option called "Put into Standby". If I click this then I hear the drive spindown and the text in the Power column (you need to add this column by right-clicking headings) changes to "Standby or Active". This text will not change back to "Active" until I restart the service, regardless of whether the drive has spun up again. Is this a bug? Should this text reflect the standby status of the drive?

If I select a drive and click "Disk control" at the bottom of the screen I find a couple of settings that mention standby, in particular "Standby timer", which has a semi-selected (grey) checkbox. How do these settings relate to the Windows power settings? Do I need to alter them?

My end goal is to have my drives go into standby after 30 minutes idle time.

EDIT: Nevermind It appears when other things are using the pool - plex scanner is now showing up.  I guess drivepools own operations just wont/dont show activity.

I have a new enclosure that is toasting my drives and the manufacture wants me to send them "system logs for my drives".  I sent back a clarification to see what data they need - but I'm not aware of any other "system logs" for hard drives and/or where to pull them from? I presume they're looking for historical log data on the temperatures since that's my issue.

Any advice?

I'd expect 100% if an attribute is "perfect" (on a new drive, for example) but all of my drives seem to be showing 78.4% at most.

Thanks in advance.

When performing tests with as ssd I noticed that the pool shows Bad and is not aligned to 4k Is this normal? 

I'm a long time DrivePool & Scanner user and love the pair of apps which I use in my home lab.  Just wanted to ask a quick question, please.  I'm wrapping up designing a Grafana dashboard for my lab PCs which gets its data from InnoDB which in turn is populated by both telegraf and open hardware monitor. Unfortunately, I've been unable to find a good source for performance of individual disks - just basics for logical ones which obviously doesn't help with a pool.

Just wanted to post and ask where exactly Scanner pulls its disk stats from - especially "Performance", "Drive Activity %,", & "Temp".  If you can't share, I understand, but assume it's specific WMI paths.

Thanks 

All you need to do is the following and then any disk (not USB) you plugin in thereafter will be available for RDM:

1. In the ESXi Console window, highlight your server
2. Go to the Configuration tab
3. Under Software, click Advanced Settings
4. Click RdmFilter
5. Uncheck the box for RdmFilter.HbaIsShared
6. Click OK

Used the Advanced Settings for StableBit Scanner to enable "UnsafeDirectIo" to get the SMART data from the virtual controller:

http://wiki.covecube.com/StableBit_Scanner_Advanced_Settings

And make sure that "UnsafeDirectIo" is set to "True", and reboot.

*Note: UnsafeDirectIo is "unsafe" for a reason. It is possible that it can cause issues or glitches, or in extremely rare conditions it can cause BSODs. In a large majority of cases, these issues don't occur, but it is a possibility. So definitely "at your own risk".

Original Post:

Hi Guys,

I have a Dell Precision T3500 Workstation, that are running VMware ESXi 5.1.0. On this host i have created 2 virtual machines, both are Windows 2012 server standard. One of these are running Stablebit Scanner v. 2.4.0.2928.

My problem is, that it does not show SMART status, temperatures or anything for any of my drives. This i all the data i get (se picture). Is there something i need to install on my ESXi host, or is this just not possible on my setup, because i use VMware?

This i what i have on the host server:


 

Thank you in advance..
 

Thanks,

Terry

My question is, what exactly is DrivePool doing during the removal process?  I would like to just yank it out and be on my way but I will be patient as there has to be a reason for the countdown.

Thanks,

Terry

Here are the tricky parts:

• The disk's firmware can spin a drive down at any time without the OS's knowledge. But this is typically disabled on new drives. This behavior can be modified under Disk Control in the StableBit Scanner.
• In order to get the actual power state of the drive we can query it directly, instead of asking Windows. The problem here is that, to Windows, this appears as disk access and it will prevent the OS from ever spinning down the drive.

What the StableBit Scanner does by default is it always asks the OS and it never queries the drive directly. This ensures that the OS will spin the drive down correctly. even though we're querying it for the power state. But the issue here is that just because the OS thinks that the drive is active doesn't mean that it's actually spun up. If the disk's firmware has spun down the drive, the OS has no way to know that. The StableBit Scanner deals with this by reporting in the UI that the drive is Standby or Active. Since we can't attempt to query the drive directly without your explicit permission (this will upset Windows' power management), this is the best answer we can give you.

The Query power mode directly from disk option, which is found in Disk Settings, is there to work around this shortcoming. When enabled, the StableBit Scanner will attempt to query the power mode directly from the disk. Keep in mind that this can fail if it can't establish Direct I/O to the disk, in which case we fall beck to relying on the OS.

The way it works is like this:

• Query the OS.
  • If the disk has spun down then this must be the case. The disk is in Standby.
  • If the disk is Active (spun up) then we can't trust the OS because the disk firmware could have spun it down.
    • If the user has not explicitly allowed us to query the power mode from the disk, we must assume Standby or Active.
    • If the user has allowed us to query the power mode from the disk, query the power mode.
      • If the query succeeds, set the mode to Active or to Standby (not both, because we know the power state for sure).
      • If the query fails, fall back to the OS and set the mode to Standby or Active.

So when should you enable Query power mode directly from disk?

When you don't want to use the OS's power management features to spin the disk down. Why would you do this?

Pros:

• You can control the spin down on a per disk basis.
• You get exact disk power states being reported in the StableBit Scanner with no ambiguity.
• Avoid disk spin up issues when querying SMART (I will explain below).

Cons:

• Requires Direct I/O to the disk.
• To the OS (and to any other program that queries the OS) the disk will appear to be always spun up.
• When the OS spins down a disk it flushes the file system cache prior to spinning it down. This ensures that the disk is not spun up very quickly after that because it needs to write some additional data to it from the cache. When the firmware spins a disk down, this does not happen and there is a chance that the disk will be spun up very quickly after that to perform another write. From my experience, this is not common in practice.

What about S.M.A.R.T. queries?

In the StableBit Scanner, by default, SMART is queried from WMI first. If Direct I/O is not available then all the SMART data has to come from WMI. Typically this would not spin up a disk.

If Direct I/O is possible to the disk then at least some additional SMART data will come from Direct I/O (and if WMI doesn't have the SMART data then all of the SMART data comes from Direct I/O). One potential problem here is that Windows considers any communication with the disk, disk activity. So if you're communicating with the disk to retrieve SMART every couple of minutes then Windows will not spin the disk down.

You can avoid this problem in 2 ways:

1. Don't let Windows control your disk spin down and set up a Standby timer in Disk Control (this has the pros and cons as outlined above).
2. Set Throttle queries in Settings -> Scanner Settings -> SMART -> Throttle queries. Set the throttle minutes to something higher than the Windows disk spin down time (which can be examined in Power Options under the Windows Control Panel).

The option Only query during the work window or if scanning controls SMART queries and has no effect on power queries. Again, by default power queries do not spin up a disk unless you've manually enabled Query power mode directly from disk (in which case you are effectively saying that you don't want the OS to ever spin down a disk).

Stable Release: 2.5.1.3062

Public Beta Release: 2.5.2.3146

• SMART data from RAID Arrays. Because most controllers hide the contents of the RAID array, we're not able to access information about them from inside the OS. There are ways to access the data about the drives, but this usually requires implementing 3rd party code, or by accessing data through the controller's management software (such as HighPoint's Web Management software). 
  We are looking into implementing this feature in the future, but there is no ETA.
• SMART Data from Storage Spaces array. Because of the low level implementation of Storage Spaces, the disks in the array are hidden from access normally.  This makes getting information about the disk (including SMART data) significantly more difficult. 
  We are looking into implementing this feature in the future, but there is no ETA.
• Repairing Damaged Sectors. Right now, we only identify and flag damage (unreadable) sectors on disks. Repair is up to the disk or the user to manually repair these issues. 
• Temperature or Max Temperature shows a 0C, Disk capacity is mis-reported, or  Drive Reports significantly number of unreadable sectors (Especially newer USB drives) This is a known issue with the way that the drive is reporting disk information, up to and including sector sizes.  This has been resolved in the latest internal beta build (2.5.2.3121).
• Dynamic Disks are not reported properly. Due to the added complexity of how dynamic disk operate, they were not being shown properly in the disk lists. This has been resolved in the latest public beta build (2.5.2.3100)
• Disk List issues with a lot of disks. Fixed in internal beta build (2.5.2.3107 and up)
• Pushover notifications fail. This is due to an API change.  Fixed in latest internal betas (2.5.2.3122)
• File system repair fails This is a known issue, and has been fixed in the Public beta (2.5.2.3103)
• File system comes back as unhealthy, consistently. 
  • ?If you are running Windows 8 or up, this may be an issue with the command  you use. Please run "chkdsk x: /f" to verify. Adding the "/scan" command actually misses a number of issues as it skips a number of checks. The main one is MFT corruption.   
    Stablebit Scanner is not misreporting info, but CHKDSK isn't checking everything. 
  • If there is no corruption (verified by CHKDSK) and you're seeing this come back constantly (and it disappears on a recheck), there is a known issue where the data comes back incorrectly.  It's on the "to do list" to fix.
• Disk list is empty over Remote Desktop Connection. This is an issue with the 3rd party controls that we use for StableBit Scanner.  This is been fixed in the Public Beta version (2.5.2.3103).
• Non-NTFS file system (ReFS) Support. This is a newer file system, and not currently supported.  While surface scans will occur, we have no way to identify files or recover them.  This means that we need to reverse engineer the file system and build a custom ReFS parser (much like we did for NTFS).  The same would need to be done for exFAT and other file systems. However, we will probably only target NTFS and ReFS, as these are the primary file systems in use.
• No WSSX (Windows Server Essentials) installer exists. Starting with 2.5.2.3132, we have stopped producing the WSSX (WHS/WSE) installer.  Now, the EXE installer will install both the stand alone UI and the dashboard tab, so the EXE should be used for all installations.  
  • This allows for more unified changes, and installation.  And it allows for both the dashboard and stand alone UI to be used. 

This list is by no means comprehensive, and it's contents may change as these issues are investigated. 

Unfortunately, the Hyper-V disk passthrough driver does not pass along SMART data from the "host" drive to the VM. That means that there is no way to get Scanner to display this data in the Virtual Machines.

However, you can run two copies:

One on the Host, and one in the Virtual Machine. (yes, not ideal, but you do get a discount on the price)

On the Host version, disable the disk scans.

To do this, right click on one of the disks that are going to be (or already are) passed through. Then click on the "Disk Settings" option.

On this window, check the "never scan surface automatically" and "never scan file system automatically".

Once that's done, you don't need to do anything on the Guest VMs, as they just won't get SMART data.

I'd recommend setting up email notifications so that you know when you're getting SMART errors.

Original Post

Hi there,

I just downloaded Scanner for my virtualized WHS 2011 setup, which runs within Hyper-V Server 2012.  Each of my data drives are passed through to WHS.  However, Scanner says it can't read SMART data from any of the drives.

My understanding was that Hyper-V did pass through SMART data to the guest OS.  Is there some trick to enabling this?

Thanks!