Tardas-Zib

Hi,
Is there any way to setup bitflock to auto scan the disks and update on a schedule ?

Has anybody got any experience on setting google drive up to work with drivepool on whs 2011?

Google drive has just lowered their prices and you can get 100GB for $2.

It makes a folder called google drive here C:\Users\Administrator\Google Drive

you can alter the path and the name in the advanced settings.

I tried to change it to G:\ServerFolders\Pictures so that all my pictures are backed up but it errors with 'please select a folder on an NTFS drive that is not mounted over a network.'

any ideas?

 

thanks

P
 

So I'm finally about to move up to Windows 8, and I was initially considering storage spaces....but it seems to have far too many caveats to trust my data to it.  So after a little googling, I stumbled upon drivepool. I used to use WHS back in the day, loved drive extender...but that's no longer a thing, and my needs have changed considerably since then. My current setup:
 
Main PC
120GB SSD - Main OS/Apps drive
240GB SSD - Gaming performance drive
2TB WD Green - Gaming/misc archive drive
64GB SSD - Caches the 2TB drive using intel smart response, so reads and writes are super quick despite the mechanical HDD backing it.
 
Synology NAS
2TB WD Green - Primary storage drive
1TB WD Green - Backup drive (manual sync from NAS 2TB drive and the main PC over network)
 
 
Ideally, what I'd like to do, is move all the drives into the PC and drop the NAS.  The 120GB drive would remain the OS drive, all the HDDs would merge into a single storage pool, and the 240GB SSD would serve as a cache. Maybe there's still a place for the 64GB, I dunno?Ideally I'd be able to pick and choose which folders would be mirrored onto the SSD for full performance but backed by a HDD (a few select games), which folders would be mirrored between HDDs for data protection, and which folders wouldn't be duplicated at all to save space.
 
So how realistic is this?  I see that drivepool has an option to use a fast drive as a "landing pad", to increase write speeds...but I'm more concerned with having a "launch pad" for specific games to run at full SSD speed.  I know you can choose on a folder by folder basis which drives are mirrored, but can you choose amongst which drives they'll be mirrored TO?  And will the read speeds off the SSD be hindered at all by drivepool and the backing HDD? Furthermore, any chance a SSD can be made to function as a cache, similar to fusion drive?  Where only the most frequently or recently read files are automatically mirrored or moved onto the SSD?
 
Beyond that, if I give the drivepool trial a try, how difficult will it be to revert to regular ol single drives? 

, I believe I've isolated my issue of server lockups being caused by the Scanner software. The situation I have is a two week old new Server 2012 Essential build, that is migrating from a 35 TB WHS v1 box. During the course of setup I installed both the drive pool software (love it btw) and the scanner software. Every hour to two hours the machine would drop all shares, RDS would become unresponsive, and the box became unreachable over the network by both tracert's and pings. Subsequent removal of the scanner software eliminated the issue that I just described which occurred a half dozen times prior to removal. After migrating the vast majority of the data, I reinstalled the scanner software last night - I was hoping it was being caused by software updates by our MSFT friends, however once again within two hours the machine became unresponsive. Is there any recommendations, debugging that I can do to determine what aspect of the program is causing this behavior? Thanks!
 
-Tim

Hey,
iam running Scanner on my Microserver N36L with Windoes Server 2012 Essentials.
 
In Windows Power Managment the drives are configured to spin down after 30 min.
This seems to work so far.
 
But, without any usage of the server the drives are "active" every now an then when ich check via Remotedesktop.
 
Now iam not sure if this has been the case even before i installed Scanner, and i just did not know.
Or is Scanner waking up my drives?
 
I have set "Throttle Queries" to 60min and enabled "Do not query when spun down".
 
Any more advice how to check what is waking up my drives?
Is maybe the Remotedesktop login waking up those drives?

I've attached a screenshot.  I have 8 drives in the pool, but the pool is only reporting 5.
 
Am I doing something wrong or is this a bug?

Ok, question for the experts, more like advice, how are you accessing data on your server with your mobile device, for me, it's an Iphone.  I've been looking at some apps, cloud storage, but I really don't want to use the cloud,  So there's an iphone app called Filebrowser which will let me access my files like SMB shares, which is half of my goal,  I would also like to be able to upload my photos, when I'm out and about, and delete from the phone to save space (or if I lose the phone) and skydrive seems to work for that, found another app called Tonido Desktop which may do both, haven't installed it yet.  If the the app worked for streaming , thatwould be great but not necesary,  so instead of reinventing the wheel, figured I see what you all may be doing.
 
http://www.tonido.com/tonidodesktop/
http://www.stratospherix.com/
 
 
 

Anyone here tried this, http://www.quantum.com/products/disk-basedbackup/dxiv1000/index.aspx, could it be used with Drivepool?

I have recently setup a machine running Windows 7 x64. The OS is completely encrypted with TrueCrypt. Because DrivePool doesn't play well with TrueCrypt mounted volumes, I'm using DiskCryptor to encrypt all the remaining drives. DiskCryptor decrypts the drives in-place. So a drive mapped to K: that was seen as raw/unformatted magically turns into a NTFS drive once I've mounted the drive using DiskCryptor. This two prong solution works great with Both StableBit Scanner and DrivePool. The only caveat is that I changed both StableBit services to manual so I am able to start then AFTER I mount the DiskCryptor drives. Because I wanted your Stablebit Scanner software to scan all the drives I've only rebooted the machine a few times. The machine was scanning the drives just fine yesterday. When I checked on the machine today the account had locked. Thats pretty standard so I unlocked the account and the StableBit Scanner software had the prompt about:
You license needs to be transferred to this computer (You should probably be a Your)
and a button stating "Start license transfer..."
 
I had seen this once before on the StableBit Scanner and had gone through the steps without thinking. This time I also went through the steps on the StableBit Scanner without too much thought. Upon completion the StableBit Scanner looked to be working normally and all the drives had finished scanning probably last night. I hadn't messed with the DrivePool software on this boot since I was waiting for the Scanner to finish it scans. I started the DrivePool service and opened the DrivePool UI and was given the same prompt:
You license needs to be transferred to this computer
and a button stating "Start license transfer..."
 
I'm not sure what part of the hardware you link your licensing to, but I haven't physically changed any parts in this machine since I setup the software this past weekend.
 
I have another machine with DiskCryptor and DrivePool and haven't seen this repeating occurrence at all. My goal with this machine is to set I up and forget about it. I won't have the convenience of logging into it on any sort of regular basis.
 
So, are these prompts happening because I've used TrueCrypt to encrypt the OS drive?
 
The ultimate question, is your software going to continue to work as intended while it thinks I need to transfer the license? Or is all functionality going to cease until the issue is addressed. If the functionality ceases until the issue is addressed, then your software will not work for the unmanaged scenario I have in place.

This is good information. The issue with webfilter concerns me........I am going to wait a bit for you to fully test out the webfilter, since that is the main reason for me to put together a Sophos box. I have been reading on the forums about the need for more RAM, and also there have been some issues with Atom processors when a lot of features are being used.
 
It seems that a lot of people report real good performance with a core i3, although I don't know how much it would cost to put something together with that.
 
I will have a pretty heavy duty firewall and web filter in Sophos, with a very large blacklist/whitelist, so I need more research before I get that unit from Newegg. I need to know it will work well.
 
I see you've been chatting with someone over at HSS forum, he is talking about lag times. Others have talked about extended ping times with the web filter enabled. So far I haven't found food answers for this. Some have suggested a setting that pulls the web filter database to the local machine instead of going out to the Sophos server with each request. Maybe you'll figure it out!
 
I'm really thinking of going with untangle in the meantime because I have a friend who uses it full-time. Once I'm familiar with this type of setup then can migrate to the more powerful Sophos.
 
Unless you can convince me it will work [emoji56]. I have a high latency rural dsl connection, so this issue with the web filter making it anyway slower is a big deal for me....
 
Keep me posted, I really appreciate it!

I installed a new drive in my WHS 2011 box.  As a result, my WHS Shares disappeared.  The new drive hijacked the Drive Pool's Drive letter.  Originally Drive Pool was the G drive, now it is the J drive.  When I log onto the server and open win explorer, all of the files for the pooled shares are present. 
 
How do I fix the problem, and keep it from reoccurring?  Should I name the Drive Pool drive deeper in the alphabet?  Thanks for help.
 

I posted this over at we got served, and well I haven't received any responses, so I figured I'd post here with a catchy title. I completed one of the 25 essential home server projects V2  during the snow days,  Monitoring your Remote Web Access, and well, I'm not sure how to interrupt the results.  I'm getting hits from all over the world, but I can't tell if they are just hitting the front page or hacking their way in.
 
Christopher, was this your write up?  Interesting by the way, but now i'm paranoid.  Is there a way to tell if I'm getting hacked?  
 
http://forum.wegotserved.com/index.php/topic/29408-monitor-rwa-traffic/?p=145521
 
 
 

I've been thinking about how I can better communicate what is in store for each of our products, there are 3 now and another one in the works. Starting today I'll be setting up topics in each forum that I'll be updating on a regular basis. Each post will maintain what the future holds for each product.
 
I try to keep a lot of the development driven by user feedback, but most of that feedback doesn't happen in the public forum (but usually in tech support tickets). I'd just like to take this opportunity to highlight the direction that each product is heading in, a kind of roadmap.
 
I'll be setting up those posts today so look for them popping up soon in each respective forum.

I have my DrivePool set up for duplication x2.  Just for clarification does that mean each file is then duplicated twice (i.e. three copies of the file)?  If I only want one other copy of the file do I set duplication to x1?
 
Additionally, if I've already set duplication to x2 (and it's the two additional copies as questioned above) and THEN I changed duplication to x1 - what happens?  Does Drivepool delete the third copy?
 
Thanks.

I've recently setup a new server using a SuperMicro X10SAE workstation motherboard. It has a Xeon E3-1225 v3 Haswell Chip with graphics.
I have the OS in a mirror RAID so I've had to turn the onboard SATA controller from AHCI to RAID.
 
I ran DirectIoTest-1_0_5016_597.exe to get the following on SATA drives connected to the Intel RAID controller:
 
With Unsafe Direct I/O unchecked
 
StableBit Scanner - WMI
SMART Status: Yes SMART Attributes: Yes SMART Thresholds: Yes SMART Error Log: No Power Mode: No StableBit Scanner - Direct I/O
Methods: AtaPassThrough,Smartloctl Identify: Yes SDD: Yes SMART Status: Yes SMART Attributes: Yes SMART Thresholds: Yes SMART Error Log: Yes Power Mode: No With Unsafe Direct I/O checked
 
StableBit Scanner - WMI
SMART Status: Yes SMART Attributes: Yes SMART Thresholds: Yes SMART Error Log: No Power Mode: No StableBit Scanner - Direct I/O
Methods: ScsiMiniportClassDriver,Smartloctl,AtaPassThrough,ScsiPassthrough,ScsiPassthrough48 Identify: Yes SDD: Yes SMART Status: Yes SMART Attributes: Yes SMART Thresholds: Yes SMART Error Log: Yes Power Mode: Yes  
Everything is working great except for the fact it will NOT scan the attached drives concurrently.
I have 6 drives connected to the SATA RAID controller. One mirror pair and 4x 4TB ST4000VN000.
When one of these drives is being scanned the others' status is just "Waiting to Scan"
 
I've gone ahead and downloaded the Scanner.Service.exe.config from a previous recommended post and that made no difference. Since then I've made the following changes, but to no avail. I've rebooted after the change and It seems to make no difference.
 
<setting name="DirectIOOverride" serializeAs="String">                 <value>True</value>             </setting> <setting name="Scanner_ScanWithDirectIo" serializeAs="String">                 <value>True</value>             </setting> <setting name="Scanner_DirectIoScanMaximumConcurrent" serializeAs="String">                 <value>6</value>             </setting> <userSettings>         <CoveNativeSafe.My.MySettings>             <setting name="UnsafeDirectIo" serializeAs="String">                 <value>True</value>             </setting>         </CoveNativeSafe.My.MySettings>     </userSettings>  
 
Windows shows the disks attached to the Intel RAID controller as ATA ST4000VN000-1H41 SCSI Disk Device.How can I get the scanner software to concurrently scan my drives when attached to what it thinks is a SCSI controller?

The Pool is indicating a missing drive, when Windows disk managment and Scanner say's it's not.  I know the pool is supposed to update itself when a drive comes back on line, but it doens't apear to be working, and I don't see anyway to manualy get the pool logic to recheck.  I have to restart the server to get it to see the drive again.
 
I also noticed that there was no error msg sent even though I have it setup to send on any error.
 
 
PS: I tried to attach pics of the error, but I recieved 'You have exceeded your allotted disk space for attachments' error
 

I recently moved our main network storage server to Windows Server 2012 R2 Standard with the Server Essentials role added.
 
I then went ahead and created a pool of 4 500GB 10k drives, and used the Dashborad manager to move the shares to the new drive pool.
 
I had noticed that my Quotas were not longer enabled for the shares. So i went into the File Server Resource manager and tried to reapply the quotes. But no dice.
 
The error that comes up says "The selected path is not on a NTFS volume. Only NTFS volumes are supported".
 
What gives with this? Am i not going to be able to use Quotas? This is a deal breaker for me, as users on our network get carried away with not cleaning anything up. And would soon full it up, and effect overall performance.
 
 

So I have Duplication set with X2 for the files in a specific directory.
 
If I add more files to that directory, will it automatically duplicate these new files?  And if so, does it only happen at a set time or will it happen as soon as the new files are copied?
 
I added some and I havent seen the duplication start yet, so that is why I was asking.

Hi
Been thinking of upgradeing from wh2011 to essentials 2012 does anybody know where to get a cheap copy or have a spare copy they want to sell have looked on the net even eBay and all I can find it for is around £300
 
Thx
Lee

I'm clearly not doing something correct.  Under Configuration>Settings>Gateway, I've added myhomeserver.homeserver.com RWA address,  New Remote Connection>connection name, I've called  it "Server name", PC name I've used both the my LAN IP and "server name", User name>I used my admin account, and admin Password.  now under user name is has domain\user,  I was only entering my user name, what would be my domain for WHS 2011?
 
I'm having a brain fart.

In part because it's a way to generate more interaction on the forum here, and because it's come up a few times...
 
A couple of pieces of software I highly recommend (well, aside from DrivePool and Scanner, that is):
 
Subsonic:
It's media streaming software. It has a "standalone" version and "WAR" version that you can install on your server (or desktop) so you can stream your music and video to the web. Or even to your mobile device. It works great with DrivePool, as well. It does require a yearly subscription for the video, and the app support, but it's dirt cheap.
Personally, I use a fork of it called "Madsonic", as it's much more actively developed (more than one update a year).  ESET:
I use this on all of my computers. I've been a long time supporter of the company and love their product. In fact, I have it installed  on my server (Server 2012 Essentials), though I am using the "ESET File Server" edition. It's cheap, and has all the features that you'd want for a file server. Otherwise, NOD32 works great on all desktop Windows versions, as well as Windows Home Server. 
Their licensing is also "version independent", so you can look for a cheap copy of an older version, and update to the newest version out. It is a good, cheap way to get multiple PCs protected. And it also uses Windows PE to create an offline scanner. Raxco Perfect DIsk:
While it may be debatable if defragmentation is needed... I've seen it greatly improve performance. Especially on WHSv1.  It's even SSD aware, and has it's own method for optimizing SSDs.  And personally, I find that the "Performance Aggressive" SMART Placement option does seem to help with performance.

oK, It's been almost two months, what's this other product mentioned in the OCT 17 Road Map post?  I'm holding off on doing a few things waiting for the announcement of this new product, the suspense is killing me. Ok not quite killing me, but I'm curious to say the least. 
 

I am trying to get a better understanding of the hard drive spindown/standby options in Scanner.
 
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.

Hi all
 
I have started to get a warning against the pool organisation.  When I click the warning I get a Duplication Warning - There were problems checking, duplicating or cleaning up one or more files on the pool
 
I have attached the list
 
ANY ideas please?
DupError.bmp

When both products were in beta, I picked Drive Bender and have been using it since.  However, recently, I'm getting a lot of dropped drives which is greatly frustrating.  The idea of running Stablebit Scanner along side Drive Pool has me considering the switch.
 
However, I have 20 drives totaling 60TB in storage with everything duplicated (a hidden duplicate on various drives) so manually recombining stuff is going to be a pain.
 
That being said, can someone familiar with both programs answer these questions for me:
 
1. If a drive drops, is there a manual/automatic tool that will identify which primary files were located on the dropped drive and then find the duplicates remaining in the pool and mark them primary then duplicate them?
2. Is there a caching mechanism?  What type of read/write should I expect if a file is being copied twice in parallel? All my drives are green 5400rpm drives yet on tests, I'm still getting around 60megs read/100megs write in my current config.
3. If Stablebit scanner finds errors on a drive - what does it do?  Some of my reading says it pulls the drive automatically - but then would it initiate (the answer the question 1?)
4. In the same vein, is there a tool to check the integrity of the duplication?  Can I scan for every file in a duplicated directory to confirm that it has a duplicate somewhere else in the pool?
 
Thanks.
 
 
Edit:
 
Larsp has posted an "unofficial" guide on how to migrate the Drive Bender pool to StableBit DrivePool, include a script to handle reorganizing the duplication into a format that StableBit DrivePool will properly handle.
http://community.covecube.com/index.php?/topic/511-migrate-from-drive-bender-to-drive-pool/?p=4554
 
-Christopher, aka Drashna