Tardas-Zib

Well I finished installing new drive and new DrivePool installation.
 
What I did was copied all the data from the server to a new hdd that was big enough (2TB) through the network. I then removed the two drives that were already in the server (1.5tb & 1tb) cleaning them up and wiping them. I put the new drive (2tb) with all my data back into the server along with one of my other drives (1tb) that was empty and freshly formatted. The other drive (1.5tb) will go in tomorrow once it is finished with its Surface Re-initialization Write operation.
 
So, I have this at the moment.
A: Pool (A:ServerFolders)
C: SSD for OS (NOT part of the Pool)
D: 2TB = 75% Full (Pooled Drive)
E: 1TB = 100% Empty (Pooled Drive)
 
I then installed DP, I selected both those drives as part of the Pool. Everything great so far. I then noticed that the Pool (A:) instantly showed 1.55 TB free space (should be almost 2.73tb and empty) but when I went inside nothing is there, no folders. So, I then used the Dashboard (WHS2011) to re-create missing ServerFolders into the A: Pool. After the new folders were re-created I then simply "CUT/PASTE" the data from the large 2TB into the newly created A:ServerFolder/xx. About 7 folders in all. All the folders that had small amounts of data say 20gb here and there went smoothly and quickly but the large folders 1.2TB says it will take 12 hours to move the data. Is this correct? It only took me an hour tops (if that) to transfer over the network this 1.3TB, but it now needs 12 hours? Isn't the data pretty much on the same drive anyway? Since auto balancing will not take place for another three hours (2AM) am I going to be safe or will DP think I am running out of space? I think it says I have 2.57 TB of total space but only 1.55 free.
 
I also accidentally hit the Balancing button (hey it said it was not optimized) before the cut/paste operation finished (just now as I type this). So not only is Explorer trying to cut/paste 1.2TB of data which it claims will take 12 hours, DrivePool is also trying to balance everything, lol. Will it take 12 hours to balance also? I assume as the data moves from D: to the Pool A: it will continuously balance? Normally when you cut and paste it is a fast operation.
 
I am going to leave it to work all night but I thought I would ask here before I slip into bed if I did everything alright. I'm sure I am OK but if I did something bad please let me know. Thanks
 
Rod
 
EDIT: Ok maybe its Ok. In the time it took to write this post it went down to 7 hours estimation. Stupid windows explorer lol

I'm new to DrivePool, purchased it last week to go on my new HP Microserver N54L running WS2012E, separate SSD for boot, 8GB of RAM,
 
I had yet to really use the DrivePool (composed of a 4TB and 3 1TB drives), only putting a few folders in it.  Yesterday I added my existing 4TB drive to a pool with 3 other 1TB drives and a 4TB drive that had a few ServerFolders on them.  Then I tried to move the first shared ServerFolder in the Dashboard to the DrivePool.  It was my Movies share, about 1TB of movies.
 
After about 7% done my RDP session was hung.  Only the boot drive light was running, no longer the other hard drives.  I power cycled the system and it came back up.  Sadly, my Movies folder was empty on the G: drive, the old letter of the drive now in the pool and the S: drive, the DrivePool volume.  All of my Movies gone. 
 
I copied my Movies folder from a backup on a USB 3.0 disk directly to the DrivePool and watched it for 2 hours to see if it would lock up and it didn't.
 
Today I tried moving a 30GB shared ServerFolder using the Dashboard into the DrivePool and the computer froze again.  I let it sit for about 25 minutes frozen and it ended up rebooting by itself.  No data loss this time, but no files were even copied to the DrivePool either, even though it had stopped at about 20%.
 
Moving ServerFolders is also slow through the DashBoard.  Seems to be faster if I just manually move a folder.
 
I let the server sit all day without any storage activity  and it didn't lockup until I started moving a shared folder into the DrivePool this evening after work.
 
I was also able to remove 2 of the 1TB drives from the DrivePool without an issue.
 
Anyone seen anything like this before?  Any suggestions?  All of my drives are checked out by Stablebit Scanner, no bad sectors, no problems.  Server was running for about 8 days with no lockups before yesterday.

I have recentlig migrated from MS Storage Space to Drive Pool. One day may Storage Space went offline, and the only way I could get it back online, was to add an USB2 drive as part of the Storage Space. Not really an optimal situation. 
 
I do feel a lot more secure with Drive Pool than I did with Storage Pool. If the computer fails I can extract the files from the disk. With Storage Space it was lost.
 
But after accidental deleting a file on the shared network, I came to realize that Drive Pool does not support "Volume Shadow Copy". I have now enabled shadow copying on all the disks in the pool, but to undete I have to do it on the server and try to find the disk the file was on. I think it would be quite easy to implement a "recycle bin" on CoveFS. Instead of deleting the file, just move it to /recycle and have a retention policy to clean it up? The same functionality could be used to create file versioning. 
 
The optimal would be a direct integration with windows "restore previous versions" but I think the above should be easier to implement.

I got an email alert this morning at 09:30. I only picked it up at 16:00.
 
The email said:
StableBit Scanner S.M.A.R.T. Failure on 'HAPC' One or more disks are expected to fail within 24 hours:
Corsair Force 3 SSD So, I looked at the PC and it is telling me that all is OK (see below)

 
Not sure what is going on here - do I need to worry?

I'm running drivepool on Windows 2012 R2.  I noticed slower than usual performance on a share stored on the drivepool.  I' utilized LAN speed test to test out some of my suspicions.  I consistently get 800+Mbps/~100MBps on a share that is on the raw hard drive that is part of a drivepool.  However when I do the same test on a folder in the drivepool (actually on the virtual drivepool drive), performance consistently lags down to 600Mbps/~70MBps.  I've enabled all the Diskpool I/O performance options (network, etc...)  Looking at the performance monitor on Drivepool UI, it shows its reading the file at what should be quicker performance, e.g. 150+MB/s.  Any input?  I've attached pictures showing performance tests, etc...

should I have free space and status showing anything
 
or should they be blank
 
 
see to have got myself in a panic over this :-)
 
running latest beta of drivepool and scanner

Hello, I was going to get a second copy of drive pool and when I click the buy link, the next page is giving a certificate error.  Just an FYI. 

Hi,
 
Firstly I am sorry if this has been asked before but I can only find "Variances" of my question, my data is important to me so I am looking for assurance before I take the leap!
 
I currently  have WHS2011 and 20TB pooled (About 16TB Duplicated) but am upgrading my server as I have outgrown my N36L sadly 
 
I am planning to build the new server with WHS2011 and install Drivepool, to copy that amount of data (I have done it before) will take an age and would like to instead just place all the drivepool disks into the new server, can anyone please let me know what pitfalls I may encounter and the correct procedure to do this?
 
Many Thanks for your time/hard work & Happy New Year!

Hi All!
 
Looking for a little guidance. 
 
I currently have a WHS 2011 machine that's being used more significantly than I thought (good thing, right?) I'm in the planning and ordering phase of  upgrading to a Server 2012 Essentials machine with a lot more grunt. And, of course, migrating the two programs that have saved my data quite a few times (DrivePool and Scanner.)
 
In doing so, I'm considering upgrading to DrivePool 2.x from DrivePool 1.3.7572. What's the best way to go about it? OS upgrade, install DP 1.3.x, let it rebuild the pool/duplication, then upgrade? Do it all at once (Upgrade to SBS12E, install DP 2.x, slap the drives in and cross fingers)? Ignore it, and keep letting the wife complain about lag time on the old server? 
 
Is there a prescribed way? Even if it's to un-duplicate the data, add, and re-duplicate, whatever seems to work best I'm in for....
 
Thanks for your help in advance, and have a great New Year!
 
-Andy

Hello guys/gals, and HAPPY NEW YEAR... almost!
 
Ok, let me just dive right in here. I have a WHS2011 Home Server that has been working flawlessly for this family of six for several years now. I recently decided to add another 2TB drive to the system but also decided that I want to Pool these drives instead of having three separate drives. Here's the current config below.
 
3ghz Intel Quad-Core
4GB Ram
Mobo w/ 4 Sata II Ports
 
Port 1 = SSD for OS
Port 2 = 1TB (Full) (Samsung F3 7200 RPM)
Port 3 = 1.5TB (Half Full) (WD Green WD15EADS 5400 RPM)
Port 4 = 2TB (RAW)(New Drive) (WD Green WD20EADS 5400 RPM)
 
I want to format the new 2TB GPT + NTFS and move all the ServerFolders off the other two drives and onto the 2TB, and then wipe them clean with Hard Drive Sentinel to re-initialize the surface area. They are both heavily used and I want to make sure they are still 100% healthy. Once I finish that I will have the below situation for a new DrivePool install.
 
Port 1 = SSD for OS (C:)
Port 2 = 1TB (RAW) (D:)
Port 3 = 1.5TB (RAW) (E:)
Port 4 = 2TB (Full w/GPT+NTFS)(New Drive) (F:)
 
Ok, here's what I want to know.
 
1. Will DrivePool do the formatting of the other two RAW drives, or should I initialize them myself on Windows 8.1 and format them NTFS?
2. If DrivePool does the initialization will they become GPT or MBR drives? I read somewhere that WHS2011 does not support GPT. Is this true and does DrivePool make this a non issue? Or do I need to patch my system somehow and/or initialize using MBR?
3. I use Bittorrent Sync on all devices, from all 5 computers in the house to all two of my Android devices. That way anything I do on my computers or Android devices are instantly Synced to my WHS without any further input from me. The Sync folder for Bittorrrent on the Home Server is placed within the ServerFolders, that way I have instant access to files that change on my Android on any computer in the house, and from any media player in the House. However, this Sync folder is a physical location on the 1.5TB drive (E:). Will DrivePool work for a Syncing app such as Bittorrent Sync? Can I preserve this setup and still have automatic Syncing to the Pool?
4. The new 2TB drive is an Advanced Format Drive using 4K (I believe), but the other two drives are older 2009 models and not using Advanced Format (I think). Does this pose a problem?
5. Should I install DrivePool before or after the re-initialization of my older drives? Should I have it installed before I place the drives back into the system?
6. If the WHS Dashboard does not support Partitions larger than 2TB, how is DrivePool getting around this limit or will I see multiple Partitions in the Dashboard? This last question really has me confused because in the end all I want is one ServerFolder with 4.5TB of storage space available to all client accounts on the Network.
 
I am almost ready to turn the Server off and get going on this so any help for this new user would be fantastic. I can't wait to get started using DrivePool. Thanks
 
Regards
Rod
 

Hi,

When will the new functions of v2 be ported to the whs2011 version v1 or when will v2 be fully integrated to whs2011.

I ask because i looked at upgrading  from whs2011 to essentials but it seems very over complicated and my 36TB server runs perfect so why rock the boot however some of the new functions of drivepool would be useful but i like the full dashboard integration v1 provides.

Lee
 

Hi, I am evaluating the drivepool an I've encountered a weird problem. I have a pool consistion of three disks - 1TB, and two 2TB. The pool is 5TB with about 2.5TB free space. There are several folders with duplication to 2 or 3 drives. When I want to write to the duplicated folder, the system tells me that there is not enough space in the pool even though the system shows 2.5TB free space. So I opened the server disks and I see that one of the 2TB disks is full - so possibly the drivepools writes the unduplicated data to only that disk. The balancing setting should be default, I do not see any reason why the diskppol should act like this as this is unwanted behaviour. Well so I tried to do re-balancing. I've set the balancing options to "balance immediately". Then in the dashboard when there is the horizontal bar which says "file distribution not optimal" I've executed "re-balance" from the dropdown menu. I've done it already yesterday, but the only result was that it showed "building bucket lists" for some time and after some time it stopped with no visible result. What could be wrong? Is there any application log where can be noted any error? In the windows log there is no error...

I have DrivePool 2.0 installed on a Windows 8 computer which I am using as a media server.
I have shared the drive with my Homegroup.  From the other computers I can read the files, but cannot update them.
I can update them on the host computer.  I am mystified as to why I cannot update from other computers.
I let the trial period runout.  Then I purchased drivepool and activated it.  Since I activated, drivepool, I have not been able to get full access from the other computers.  Is it possible the activation hasn't kicked in leaving the files in read-only status?  Any help is appreciated.
 
Thanks,
Rich

As part of a fever dream of upgrading my server hardware, I'm entertaining the notion of installing WHS2011 and Drivepool as a VM on ESXi or Hyper-V.
 
I'm concerned, however, that Drivepool won't be able to (properly) see the physical hard drives and manage them correctly.
 
Does anyone have experience with doing this, and could you let me know if running Drivepool in a VM will work well with the physical disks?  Thanks!

I got a new 3TB drive to use as a backup drive that's standing alone outside the pool as my setup with WSE2012 won't work when the client backup folder is in the pool for some reason.  My client backup folder was on a 2TB usb drive and worked there flawlessly until I ran out of space.  I now have a new Seagate 3TB internal to take it's place.  I copied over all of the data on the old 2TB drive to the new 3TB drive and changed the registry setting, as provided by Drasha from my earlier thread, to point the server at the new location.  The clients are backing up nicely and have had no problems seeing and using the new drive.  My problem is that the client computer backup folder shows as missing in the dashboard.  I am unsure what to do here, and thought I'd stop and ask before doing anything stupid (first time for everything) How can I painlessly fix this? I had no problem like this when I copied all to a pool folder and made the registry change (and back again when it wouldn't work in the pool) don't know why it's showing as missing now.  Backups seem to be working ok now, I just worry about having to restore with WSE2012 thinking there is a missing folder.  By the way, each clients backup history pops right up fine, no problem there.  New weird bug to track down for the new year. All help is greatly appreciated.
 
Dave

I have DrivePool installed on two PCs.  A WHS2011, and a Windows 7 pc.  The WHS2011 copy is working fine but when I reboot the Win7 PC DP creates another pool with one of the existing drives.
The Win7 pc has 4 drives + CD.  The boot drive is SSD and is not in any DP configuration.  Drive D (3TB), E(2TB) and F (3TB) are in pool as drive G.  Drives D & E also have some non-pooled data; Drive F is entirely dedicated to the pool.
 
When the pc boots up, DP says that drive D is missing, but what really happens is that DP creates a pool for Drive H and uses drive D for that - thus drive D is missing for pool G.  Pool drive H has one empty folder in it: My Pictures.  Interesting note is that the 'PoolPart.*' folder for the newly created pool H has the old timestamp on it and the old 'PoolPart.*' folder has the current timestamp.
 
To correct the problem, I go into DP and remove drive D from the second pool (H) and then DP finds D available for the original pool (G).  I don't reboot that often and would not swear that it happens every time, but I believe that it does.  No data is lost, as far as I have observed.
 
Just in case it means anything - drive H is normally mapped to a share on the WHS2011 pc, but not the pool created by DP there.
 
H E L P ! !
---
Ted
 
 

Hello,
 
First off I want to say thanks to this great community for any help that can be given. I've been using Drive pool since the early beta period and have never had any issues until now.
 
I have a WHS2011 with 7 hard drives. My single 250 OS drive was starting to fail, so I made a 2 x 500gb mirrored RAID 1 array, and cloned the OS over to it, and removed the original 250gb failing disk. WHS booted up and everything seemed just fine until I tried to access a server folder from another computer and got a "This device is not ready" error. 
 
When I went on the server to investigate, the backup folder was missing so I allowed WHS to recreate it. The drives are still in the pool, however it looks like all the folders are not included in the pool any longer. It also looks like the pool may have been corrupted, because the free space is shown as unknown.
 
Does anyone have any ideas what may have happened, as well as what the best way to fix this might be?  Is there something I'm overlooking that I missed as a step?
 
I've attached screen shots of all the pages of Drive Pool. Let me know if any other information might be needed.
 
 
Thank you in advance!
 
Chris

This is a best practices question.
Is there a resource or performance penalty for using different duplication settings at a folder level?
Would it be better to use multiple pools and set the duplication level for the entire pool?
(I realize that in some cases multiple pools is not a good options because of the requirement to dedicate the disks to each pool. In my case, all folders except "videos" have a higher duplication level and separation of pools would be acceptable.)
 

Today we've had a BitFlock disruption. BitFlock.com was down for about 6 hours becasue of a domain name issues. All access is now restored and you should not experience any further issues accessing bitflock.com. The problem was at Google.

What I'd like to be able to do is create a single pool for all my media using multiple drives (that will be extended over time by adding additional drives).  I would like to to be able to copy any file added to these drives to a hot-swap drive as well, that can be removed when full for offsite storage.
 
Will DrivePool handle this OOB? Right now I'm considering using the plug-in that allows me to fill one drive at a time, and then just copying the contents of that drive to the hot-swap when it fills ... but that seems less elegant than it should.
 
Any assistance would be appreciated.
 
 

Hi all. Any help would be appreciated.
 
I'm not exactly sure what's going on with my fairly new Seagate ST2000DM001 2TB drives. SMART data indicates that these (2) drives may failure because of high Load Cycle Counts. The drives have been in service for 284 days and are showing Load Cycle Counts in excess of 300,000. I also have installed 1.5 and 3.0 Seagate drives that have been in service for 300 days, and show less than 900 Load Cycle Counts.
 
Drive info was submitted to Bitfrock.
 
Should I be concerned or do you think the SMART algorithm is messed up?
 
--vram
 
 
HP N40L, 4GB, 120 SSD, 11.5 TB hdd
WHS 2011, Stablebit Scanner and Drivepool, LightsOut

WHS2011 running on a HP Proliant Microserver with 2 x 4TB hard disks and a separate boot drive. Latest version of DrivePool.
 
 
I bought DrivePool as a way to automatically mirror my 4TB hard disk to a 2nd 4TB hard disk. The drive pool functionality was a secondary benefit (as I plan to add further disks to the pool).
 
For the past 2 weeks I've been trying to get the mirroring working properly. My understanding is that there a hidden folder on each physical drive, marked PoolPart.*. These folders, combined, contain the DrivePool (which manifests itself as a virtual hard disk).
 
But try as I might, I can't get the duplication functionality to work properly. I copy all my data directly into the virtual DrivePool hard disk and wait. I then check the PoolPart.* folders - on the first hard disk, everything is there. But the 2nd hard disk is missing most of the data. I've tried fiddling with the balancing settings, remeasuring, etc but I can't get the data to be 100% duplicated across both physical hard disks.
 
Have I purchased the wrong software for my needs? All I want is perfect file mirroring across two physical disks... when I copy a file to the DrivePool, it should be duplicated across both physical disks without any intervention.
 
Can anyone help? (sorry for the n00b'y'ness - I've genuinely tried everything!)

I've just bought and installed one of them, but no SMART statistics.
 
I only get non-manufacturer specific output (none in fact) from  Stablebit Scanner.
 
I have enabled UnsafeDirectIo in the config file, but no change.
 
Is the disk supported?
If not, will it be supported?
 
thanks in advance
 
Per

This may be a silly question.  But where in the UI can I find out what version of Drive Pool I am running?
 
David

Hi,
 
I had to replace a smaller disk from my pool with a bigger one.
 
What I have to do?
 
Add the new one to the pool and remove the old smaller disk?
Drivepool do then automatically the movement of the data from the small disk to the pool?
Is it really so easy?
 
best regards
Christian