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Hi xelu01. DrivePool is great for pooling a bunch of mixed size drives; I wouldn't use windows storage spaces for that (not that I'm a fan of wss in general; have not had good experiences). As for duplication it's a matter of how comfortable/secure you feel. One thing to keep in mind with backups is that if you only have one backup, then if/when your primary or your backup is lost you don't have any backups until you get things going again. Truenas's raidz1 means your primary can survive one disk failure, but backups are also meant to cover for primary deletions (accidental or otherwise) so I'd be inclined to have duplication turned on, at least for anything I was truly worried about (you can also set duplication on/off for individual folders). YMMV. Regarding the backups themselves, if you're planning to back up your nas as one big file then do note that DrivePool can't create a file that's larger than the largest free space of its individual volumes (or in the case of duplication, the two largest free spaces) since unlike raidz1 the data is not striped (q.v. this thread on using raid vs pool vs both). E.g. if you had a pool with 20TB free in total but the largest free space of any given volume in it was 5TB then you couldn't copy a file larger than 5TB to the pool.

That's ok to do, won't cause any harm.

I also got a little brave/creative/foolish and had the thought that maybe I could kick off the duplication process on P manually via command line since the GUI wouldn't come up and it wasn't duplicating on it's own from the nightly job. So I did a dpcmd check-pool-fileparts P:\ 1 which completed successfully. When I checked F in clouddrive, the usage has increased and there's 1TB+ queued. So it looks like it's duplicating. That's one good thing so far!

Applied some more Google-Fu and found this command GWMI -namespace root\cimv2 -class win32_volume | FL -property DriveLetter, DeviceID which gave me different GUIDs than from diskpart. I was able to match the volume from the logs to the GUIDs provided by that command. I think I have corrected the permissions from https://community.covecube.com/index.php?/topic/5810-ntfs-permissions-and-drivepool/ and will try a balancing pass. Thanks again,

The detach was successful. I had to do a reboot between the detach and the re-attach. However when I re-attached F, the configuration screen came up, I selected another physical drive on which to put the cache. That was some time ago and it has not yet appeared in the GUI. I believe it's adding it, but maybe very slowly, as the Clouddrive app is using about 40% of the CPU. The other detached clouddrives (formerly M & K) are visible in the GUI but have lost their drive letters. Also the Drivepool GUI will not come up, though I have access to all the lettered drives via windows explorer and command prompt. I guess I'll give it overnight and hope that F: gets re-attached and that is the cause of the Drivepool GUI not responding.

I'd suggest opening a support ticket with StableBit.

For anyone that finds this later. The system is now balancing for free space on each drive. At this point the only thing I can assume was that because one drive was over 90% full it just completely broke balancing with the Drive Space Equalizer plugin, and that failure cascaded and broke balancing for all plugins. I had the Prevent Drive Overfill set to not go over 90%, but I'm wondering if any plugin will actually bring a drive under 90% usage (if that's what it's set too) once it's already gone over. All the text seems to imply it will just stop it going over 90%, nothing about recovering from such a situation. I disabled all plugins except the disk usage limiter and told it not to put any unduplicated data on DRIVE2. That ran successfully and got DRIVE2 under 90%, and after that and enabling the other plugins it started working exactly as I'd expected it to do so for the last year.

regarding power: to use a PSU without a motherboard An "ATX Jumpstarter" AKA an ATX connector that connects Pin 14 to ground. you can also tie this to a power switch but it must be a latching type (most cases have push button style power buttons) if you want a little future expandability (and the ability to use less and longer cables) you can replace the SAS breakout brackets with a SAS expander. my personal pick would be the AEC-82885T (although that uses Mini-SAS HD connectors, 8643+8644). this would allow you to use SATA disks using longer cables (SATA cables use a lower signaling voltage) and allow you to connect just one SAS cable to each JBOD. (yes, you are connecting 8 disks using one 4 lane 6Gb or 12Gb link, but it's barely noticeable for spinning drives)

There should be absolutely no issue with doing so. Neither product does anything that takes exclusive control over anything, so it should be safe to run both products concurrently. What are you trying to monitor specifically, here? If you don't mind me asking.