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Well, there may be some scenario where drive letters are required. But with 16 HDDs in my pool, I am more than happy to assign names to the HDDs and not have to bother with drive letters. In theory, DrivePool is able to pool many more than 26 HDDs, so you would reach a point where you would run out of drive letters anyway. If you need to assign a drive letter to a DrivePool HDD that has a name only, you can easily do that in Disk Management and it will not affect DrivePool at all. Again, DrivePool does not read the drive letter at all. It only uses the hidden PoolPart directory for identification. As mentioned, you may have to restart your computer if you decide to reassign drive letters to your DrivePool HDDs, not for DrivePool itself, but sometimes other Windows program will not recognize the newly named drive without a restart. IIRC, Disk Management will warn you about that when you change/add/remove a drive letter.

I just removed the letters on all 8 pool drives and nothing exploded! Same for SB scanner, business as usual (except for now blank drive letters You now have me interested in leaving them unlettered, but there must be a scenario/usage case where lettered pool drives are desirable. EDIT: Should a need arise, I could always revert to letters, but I'll leave them out for now and see how it goes. Thanks @gtaus

Yeah, old habits... When I removed the drive letters and just used drive names, life with DrivePool became easier with my 16 HDDs. It works better for me.

This sounds like good news to me I think when I started using drivepool, individual drives were "letter-less" (file explorer would only show pool drives, and non-pooled OS drive also, obviously).. For a specific reason I fail to remember (lets call it old habits), I switched to lettering and never looked back once. Thanks !

FWIW, I just removed all drive letters from my DrivePool HDDs. DrivePool does not need a drive letter to recognize a HDD in the pool. It uses the hidden PoolPart directory. Removing drive letters on the HDDs makes a less cluttered display in Windows 10 File Explorer as it will only show HDDs with drive letters. That works great for me as I currently have 16 HDDs in my DrivePool. Those HDDs are dedicated to DrivePool and nothing else. So I don't need any drive letters assigned to them. Of course, when you remove the drive letters, Windows 10 File Explorer can longer "see" the drive normally. You would have to go back into Disk Management and reassign a drive letter. I track all my pool HDDs by name, such as DP01, DP02, DP03, etc.... which also corresponds to the physical location on my rack. I also put the drive name sticker on the physical drive/case for easy identification. The HDDs in my pool do not have drive letters assigned to them, as I stated. The DrivePool UI lists the names all in alphabetic order, which is very nice. However, if for some reason I want to reassign a drive letter to a particular drive, I just use Disk Management and look up the HDD by name. That is much easier then trying to track all the S/N of the HDDs. I am not using Scanner, so I am not sure if that program requires drive letters to work. Is there some reason you need/want to keep any drive letters assigned to your pool HDDs? I found DrivePool was easier to work with when I removed all those drive letters from my pool HDDs. Just my thoughts to your initial question on how to not drive yourself crazy with numerous drives in DrivePool.

Hi gtaus, I can see that your account is following this thread, so hopefully you'll get notified about this response. Maybe check that https://community.covecube.com/index.php?/notifications/options/ is set to your liking?

Checking, it seems the ST6000DM003 is a SMR drive. I don't recommend putting it in any pool where you want decent rewrite performance, but if you're only wanting good read performance it's fine.

... Would that 6TB USB HDD happen to be a Seagate Backup Plus Hub by any chance? Because I bought one a ways back (P/N 1XAAP2-501) and it behaves exactly the same way you've described. The drive inside might actually be okay, just with a lemon enclosure. Since yours is out of warranty and you're planning to ditch it, consider instead shucking it and using the HDD as an internal drive (run the Seagate long test on it again of course). BTW just FYI, Seagate has used SMR drives in its Backup Plus Hubs and I don't recommend using SMR drives in a pool, so also check the part number of the drive itself to see if it is one, with (if you don't want to open it up to check) a utility like Crystal Disk Info or similar.

I think a 2nd Pool for non-critical data using old hardware is an excellent idea.

After posting, I found an issue I had missed: the disk was marked as Read Only in disk management. After running DISKPART from cmd I managed to remove the read-only tag using the command attributes disk clear readonly and it appears to be OK now.