bejhan

I have a pool of 8 drives, half of which are SMR. As you may know, large SMR writes are painful. Therefore, I attempted to make use of the SSD Optimizer balancer to prioritize real-time writes to my CMR drives and fill the SMR drives in the background. However, now I'm in a situation where a third (1.7/4.7 TB) of my free space is not available for duplication. My CMR drives make up the larger portion of my pool (28/50 TB) so I thought my plan would work without any issues. I followed some of the suggestions on the pinned "SSD Optimizer problem" thread but the problem remains. I've rebalanced several times without anything significant changing. Hoping someone can advise me on how to make that space available for duplication. Thanks in advance.

Actually, many attributes show this value.

After a bit of research, I've discovered that even though the maximum value of an attribute is 255, manufacturers choose a maximum value that suits them (usually a nice round number). In WD's case, they have chosen 200 (200 / 255 = 78.4%). I have an HGST drive that seems to be using 100 instead which results in 39.2%.

What is the significance of 78.4% in the S.M.A.R.T. details? Even the documentation has this exact value. 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.

I've been having this same issue since I moved my Google Drive folder to a pooled drive. Every time I restart my computer (or the application), Backup and Sync behaves as if all of the files are different and "uploads" them. Fortunately, it seems that Google Drive is smart enough to detect that the files haven't actually changed as I do not see any activity on the web UI. This is annoying though as the process takes quite a while and there is conflicts for files that I actually changed. As a result, I decided to move my Google Drive folder to a standalone drive (along with my Plex Media Server folder).

Thanks for the responses. I've just migrated from a hardware RAID setup to a software solution so I really do appreciate the flexibility of DrivePool. I looked into Storage Spaces as well but really did not want to lock myself into anything again, considering the whole reason I switched to a software solution was to get away from that sort of rigidity. As you say, this little drawback is a small price to pay for that flexibility and I can understand how this feature would be difficult to implement considering the various use cases that are made possible by this flexibility, just thought I'd ask if any such thing is possible. I'm sure I'll get used to mentally halving the numbers I see over time .

Thanks for the response. I was considering removing and re-adding the drive just to get rid of the external label but, like you, I decided it's not worth the effort if it's just a label with no actual consequences.

I previously had a drive in an external enclosure and have just moved it inside of the case. DrivePool is still marking this drive as external. Is there any consequence to this?

I've just started using DrivePool and have set up a pool of 3 drives and enabled pool-level duplication. Is it possible to have the pool drive only reflect half of the free space and half of the total space when looking at it from Windows? I find the total space and total free space to be misleading since every file actually takes up double its size so I effectively only have half that amount to work with.