Rob Platt

So far so good. Looks like my issues boiled down to reparse files and/or something wrong with DropBox (which I've since found is no longer really supported in DrivePool). Thanks for the help @Shane

Update - I upgraded to Beta, no changes. I looked for more reparse files, found them and deleted them. Perhaps a subtle difference. Hard to say. Wish I knew why they were being created. However, while I was waiting for the DrivePool to unfreeze, I started working directly on my disks - which, themselves were super responsive. Remember when I said I renamed a folder and it froze? It happened to be my Dropbox folder (Dropbox wasn't even installed at this point, this was left-over from the previous OS), which I was going to redownload anyway. I went through each disk to to delete the folder. Once the folder was deleted I noticed that DrivePool was back to behaving normally. So far, it's been perfectly fine since my last post. I'll update this thread after I've done some more testing.

I'm on a release build, but I noticed it's quite out of date compared to the beta's that have been released. Are there any I should consider updating to? That's one thing I haven't tried. Also, just tried renaming a folder which has caused Explorer to hang and any further enumeration of my DrivePool drive to hang.

Right now I'm running a fresh install of windows 10. The only third party software I run is PrimoCache and it hasn't made any differences whether that was installed or not. I turned the built in A/V off. Initially it was running fine as long as the drives with the reparse files were not in. Once I had that mess cleaned up, it was still running fine until DrivePool started scanning/measuring. Then it would fall on it's face again. It seemed like every time I confirmed my disks were all fine, and said "this is it, I can finally blanace", DrivePool would die - which would cause the OS to stop responding (as anytime my virtual Disk was being enumerated there would be significant lag). Last night when I posted my update, it would take nearly 2-3 minutes to query the DrivePool drive, then another 2-3 to try to continue querying it further. So for he hell of it, I told UltaDefrag to go ahead and do a full disk optimization on all of my HDD's, then I went to bed. I woke up today to a balanced pool and a fully responsive DrivePool. I'm still only about 50% through the UltraDefrag. I'm able to run Plex, browse my drive, browse my Media share from my Unraid box. Everything "appears" to be back to normal. I've never seen this behavior from DrivePool before. I'm not confidant this is resolved. It would be interesting to see what the Troubleshooter logs say once someone has a chance to review them. Edit: Scanner Burst Test still isn't working yet. Says it's running successfully but there's no I/O rate.

Update... No Joy. Rebooted, pool drive is still just barely responsive. DrivePool service has been "starting" for 13 minutes so far. Waiting on any feedback from the first Troublershooter run. Any other ideas?

Status update: I'm down to the last few disks out of my 14. It's probably going to take half the day to finish this optimization. I have see no performance changes. Running the burst test in Scanner, on any of my disks, shows 0 B/s. Once the MFT optimization is complete I'll reboot. Last night I ran Troubleshooter. However I realized that file system logging wasn't enabled. So I enabled that last night - but haven't re-ran Troubleshooter yet. DrivePool has been saying "Checking...." since last night.

Totally forgot about that. Running now against all physical drives. Might take the night. I'll report back when it's complete. Thanks for the reminder.

So after trying to tackle this on my own. I'm at a loss. My pool is still causing huge latency and read failures. The service log is showing Event ItemChanged took too long. I'm on version 2.2.5.1237. I just ran the Troubleshooter. The data was submitted successfully. Plex's meta-data is longer in the pool drive. I'm at a loss as to what could possibly be going on at this point. Win 10x64 Home, fresh install. AMD Ryzan 7 1700x, 64GB ram, C: is on an nvme. Re-ran chkdsk on all drives from the command prompt. All completed quickly and without error. Switching to my drivepool drive and typing dir will cause the command window to hang. (edit: eventually the directory listing did pop up. took a couple of minutes)

After further research I may have my own answer to this. I think it was Plex's fault. I had read that Plex uses hardlinks, so while I wasn't accessing it via my main DrivePool drive, I was accessing it directly from one disk (yes it was still inside the PoolPart folder). I was letting the balancers run to copy the meta data to other disks. Perhaps my work-around really didn't solve anything. It did seem make the Plex WebUI work better. My guess is that is the reason for the high amount of reparse points. I've since moved my Plex meta-data off onto a single SSD. Maybe I can leave the Database folder in DrivePool for the added redundancy. The meta-data can always be rebuilt. If this sounds correct then maybe this will help someone else down the road.

About a month ago my Win10 system started freezing. I found that if I ejected some of my 14 drive pool disks, the system would unfreeze and behave normally. Same with bootup. Disks in, boot up would stall when it got to the desktop. Remove some drives and it would resume fine. I checked SMART, ran chkdsk, swapped STATA cables, replace my SATA port multiplier cards (2) with a LSI SCSI card, formatted and reinstalled windows. Every time I thought I was making progress I would end right back to the crawling/freezing (sometimes BSOD) system. I even replaced 2 drives that I thought were culprits as they seemed to always be ones I would have to remove. The problem never really went away. Until last night, I think. I found that on about 4 of my drives, including the two I had swapped out, my reparse\.covefs folder had 300k+ files in it, all created about a month ago on 2/5. These disks were causing the OS to stall, especially when DrivePool started measuring. I put each offending disk in a USB enclosure, dropped into the command line, and ran del *.* in that folder. It took hours to clear out. However as the file count dropped below 100k, the system started running smoother. Eventually I cleared the folder each disk and (knock on wood), I think it worked. As of this morning DrivePool is measuring my pool, hopefully for the last time for awhile. When I get home we'll see if I'm back in business. I even think the drives I pulled out might still be good. Any ideas as to what is going on?

Shane, Once again, thank you for taking the time to explain all of this. In the above, is there a typo? How can drivepool offer to delete an older version if the timestamps are the same? If a file resides on three disks, and two of those files have a timestamp of 1/1/2020 and the third one has a timestamp of 1/1/2021 - drive pool will offer to delete BOTH older versions?? There's no concept of 2 of them are more correct than the third?

Shane, thank you for your detailed response. It makes sense that this is the expected behavior. However, it would be hugely beneficial if there was an improved way of handling this. While DrivePool is "not backup", I love the concept of a self-healing, and adaptable "Raid/JBOD" configuration. Follow-up question since I forgot to include it. What if I had 3x duplication (In this case my Photos are 3x). What would happen to the 1 drive that was "repaired" by chkdsk? Would DrivePool sense that 2/3 of the files are good and fix the third? I clearly hear you when you suggest ejecting that disk. I can always manually restore certain files. I'm just curious about how it would be handled on its own.

I've ran DrivePool for years and have had little to no problems with the software itself. I have duplication turned on for most of my important media (ie photos/videos) In the past, I've had drive corruption that required running chkdsk. I had a case where chkdsk "repaired" the drive which resulted in many of my files ending up 0kb. These files were originally duplicated, so I thought no problem, DrivePool will repair the duplication and the 0kb files will be replaced with the originals. Only, I don't think that's what happened. I ended up losing some files. Fast forward to now. I had a drive that ended up with corruption. I pulled the drive and ran chkdsk on it. Drive is now repaired, but I found 0kb files. I checked my DrivePool and the same file does exist with data. The question is, how do I proceed? Do I return the drive to the array and let DrivePool correct it? Do I delete the 0kb files first? If we were talking 10-20 files I would just back them up and go over the results and replace the missing/bad files. However I have many thousands of files. Trying to track which ones need to be fixed would be a project in of itself. Hoping DrivePool knows how to handle this. I'm on version 2.2.2.933 Thank you!