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Nissan_SR20_Man

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  1. HGST has been a solid performer for me. The drive is under warranty so it's going back. FYI hgst does not offer advanced replacements like WD. You have to mail it, once received they release one. No way to use a credit card to get it faster...pretty crappy. The scanner behavior seems wrong, despite your description. If your notes in the scanner smart data claims failure could be in less than 24 hours, it seems counter intuitive to not flag it as damaged. It's your software not mine, but in my mind one damaged sector is too many... and countless research backs that up. After one it could last minutes or years, totally a crap shoot. Despite my issue and criticism, your products rock, are better then anyone's, and your suite of products keep my data safe, drives pooled and the wife happy when she wants to stream media...all while I don't stress out. Rock on and keep up the great work!
  2. All, I have an HGST HDN724040ALE640 that has reallocated sectors but does not show as damaged in the status column while scanner is open, it says smart warning? Once i click the ignore smart warning it shows it as healthy? SMART status shows... 1975 reallocated sectors - highlighted red 4522 reallocation events - highlighted yellow 296 pending sector - highlighted yellow BUT not damaged? I have 15 disk monitored and I know others have been detected with damaged sectors and scanner did it's job. I was totally caught off guard by this behavior and the drive is very new. Good thing I'm a geek that checks the smart values once a week... Scanner version 2.5.1.3062
  3. Sorry to be a pest... I tend to break things and find problems... Basically the problem is bitflock is not displaying SAS adpater SMART when using unsafe IO in scanner to get such data from SAS adapters when using SATA drives with adapter. Scanner displays all, bitflock does not For what it is worth... bitflock comes in handy when i want to drop in and check up on the hdd's... it also is a very nice interface for use. Not sure how many take advantage of this feature when using scanner... Scanner + bitflock has caught and notified myself of failing drives and has saved myself a ton of grief in the process.
  4. I currently have a LSI SAS adapter with 8 SATA3 drives attached. I can enable smart features in scanner and they work fine. My problem is bitflock sees no info from scanner/HDD's regarding smart and temp. Basically enabling unsafeIO in scanner does not carry over to bitflock. All other 8 SATA drives connected to MB are fine in bitflock, only SAS adapter Is it possible to get SAS unsafeIO SMART data from scanner/HDD to bitflock nest?
  5. I wonder how many others using antivirus with real time scanning this could impact? all scanners are not equal, however by default all scanners would read the pool folders + the pool drive. If you need any more avast test let me know. It appears to have resolved all of my problems. Yes, despite covefs.sys being the consumption of the cpu, avast was simply working it to death. Thanks again for all of the help and pointers, you only saved me about $1000 for a server refresh. Well worth the money i paid buying the drivepool+scanner.
  6. Just wanted to pass along the info... initial results are astonishing to say the least. Avast appears to be the guilty party. All antivirus real-time scanners should take note and should have exceptions "in theory" to eliminate the duplicated scanning or simply just the performance hit. See info below. 1. In latest version Avast free 2. open avast console, navigate to antivirus tab on left, click it 3. inside the antivirus tab, scroll windows down to "EXCLUSIONS" 4. users need to open, copy and paste every physical drive hidden pool part folder path and paste them ALL in the exclusion list. For every physical drive, there must be an exact pool folder path. Easiest way is to open each in windows explorer and copy/paste from the address bar, just click the bar and it changes to the path. 5. DO NOT enter the pool drive letter folders, only the pool part. For users concerned about disabling antivirus features, you can test this easily by generating a small file in notepad and saving it. If your stuff works in real time, it should not even let you save it. See image below of myself saving a file to the pool. I also tested with the C: (system drive) and have identical results. Test it yourself, just Google it. Test notepad file being caught by avast after changing avast settings above Drivepool performance afterwards... 417MB/s total drive activity (previous was 180-200) - 209MB drivepool write to single un-duplicated folder. I have copied my uTorrent temporary, inbound, torrent folders back to pool and restarted the program. It is not causing any raise in cpu usage at all now. I see pool speeds never before seen. Plex media server 1080p transcoding speed as noted in the plex media server debug logs has jumped 8-9 times higher than previous values. Speed of 1.0 = real time transcoding, i used to see 1-2.0 when avast was not bypassed. Now 9-10 speed noted during utorrent traffic, plex scanner and media center master traffic consuming some CPU while transcoding. I have never seen any drivepool activity this high, let alone the entire system throughput on my LSI card. Since i have all pool drives on the 8 SATA 3 inputs of the card, I think it is pretty darn good despite my MB being SATA 2, DDR2 on a V2.0 PCIE slot. I actually deleted the avast scanning exceptions then added again just to confirm. Night / day difference. I will take a 800% CPU transcode performance increase for 5 minutes of tweaking avast settings. And i wanted to drop big bucks for my CPU/MB... my 2008 AMD 940 is going no where since this discovery. I am speechless. I still want to do more probing with avast to verify my finds and to ensure real antivirus scanning. In theory if the virtual pool drive letter is scanned, it should be passed through to the physical drive and still be covered by antivirus protection??? despite adding the poolpart folder to be ignored???
  7. Interesting about Avast. I have been using drivepool + avast for some time. I just now noticed the cpu issue, obviously possibly related to an update. Seeing how i have never noticed this before, i am either crazy, or avast got updated. I will try and move the folders back in the pool and test. I have found this on the web..."To clarify, include the DrivePool virtual drive but exclude the poolpart folders on the physical drives (if a physical drive is exclusively used by drivepool, you can simply exclude the entire physical drive)." This comment is about disabling file system scanning for the actual poolpart folders but include the virtual drive. I found this very interesting as there is a documented link between scanning the poolpart folders. Not sure if it helps. I only disabled the virtual drive folder, never the poolpart folders. For reference, i plan to baseline with folders outside, place them inside and disable file scanning as mentioned above, then after removal of avast in order to be objective across the board. It should be really interesting. Despite my frustration, this issue has taught myself a bunch. As an engineer, diving into the weeds to find such problems is somehow satisfying, despite pulling my hair out... If it was easy, everybody would be doing it...
  8. So by forwarding the I/O, it is a small hit for the forward, but is tiny? So, is this statement correct...If using crazy R/W's internal to the pool itself from 3 windows programs, the work overhead is small and logical R/W, not actual "true" R/W to physical disk? The reason for asking is due to the highest cpu process during these time is the system "NT Kernel". At 75-80% and the actual transcode process at 20-25%. And covefs.sys is using 8 threads, consuming 70-75% of the system NT Kernel process. It seems like I am burning up cpu for a read from a pool folder to a different pool folder write, neither of which is duplicated. With folders out of the pool, all is better. I simply do not get it. There are crazy reads / writes at the same time. It is like 50 and 50 for each program, so a big number to/from the pool itself. Transcoding from a pool folder as a source to a pool folder as transcoded files is noticebly higher by a large factor vs source from pool and written to a non-pool folder on the same physical drive. It is like i bottleneck somehow. It is not measuring while this is high cpu noticed. I need to quit typing and get logs and data.
  9. Drashna, No network boost, as all media is local to machine. Please read below as it is getting interesting on my end... 1. Plex App data + Plex Transcode temp data + Utorrent both are writing to the pool 2. I have started thinking about this as all of the above result in crazy read/write activity on the pool 3. I started offloading these program's directories off the pool to conventional HDD folders, essentially unloading the covefs.sys driver from the kernel, with amazing results. 4. Utorrent was first. After moving this off of the pool, i saw a small noticeable difference. Once again, good old process explorer+resource monitor (WIN7) to determine cpu loading while transcoding movies. I ran multiple test with same movies with external clients to have similar loads on the pc 5. Plex transcode temp directory (location where transcodes go) was next. This was a massive improvement due to how plex adds so many write threads. 6. Plex app data is in process (30GB) to be moved next 7. Moral of the story, with the pool holding media, and previously being read and written back during transcoding it was killing your covefs.sys due to being thread limited to 8 i believe. Any ideas of data to back this up? 8. Currently i have seen a 15X reduction in CPU usage by offloading the first two items. I hope to see a bit more after the last. But i still feel that drivepool should be able to cope. It is silly of me to have everything R and W to/from the pool 9. Yes i have anti virus and i have added ignore rules to essentially rule it out. it is avast for reference 10. from my viewpoint, i am essentially shoving an elephant or R/W data through the covefs,sys driver and holding off the cpu. it loads up the queue and the cpu is very busy. millisecond times are through the roof previously, now are essentially zero. I went from 100% CPU at 100% of the time to 8% all the time and small 100% peaks lasting 1-2 seconds.
  10. All, QUESTION... 1. Why is my drivepool (covefs.sys) chewing up my CPU?? BACKGROUND... 1. When copying large files, i can achieve 150+ MB/s R/W transfer speed easily. Transferring a large *.MKV results in almost no PC CPU usage, at pretty fast transfers. This is the ideal situation! 2. When doing other mundane task covefs.sys inside system.exe (nt kernel) is using 8 threads (normal) at very moderate to high cpu utilization. 3. Very high cpu usage is noted during plex transcodes, plex folder metadata refresh/updates, etc... i understand transcoding is CPU intensive, i get that. My issue is covefs.sys is using more cpu than plex transcoding process itself which is totally wrong. PC SYSTEM... 1. AMD 940 Phenom II, 3.0GHz - stock clock/no overclock 2. Asus M3A32-MVP Deluxe MB 3. IBM M1115 (LSI (9240-8i) SAS2/SATA3 raid card. Configured for pass through, no card raid. All drivepool drives are controlled from this card 4. 12.7TB pool, using 8 drives. 3 different model types, SATA 2 and 3 mixed 5. WIN 7 Ultimate X64 - 100% VIRGIN INSTALL TODAY CHANGED NOTHING!!! Only have Plex + Drivepool installed on a fresh bare metal install from MS DVD. I recently decided to wipe clean, start fresh just to prove it was not me or my software 6. PC is media server. It runs high performance power 100% of the time. Runs Plex + Media Center Master + Utorrent 24/7. That is it. It is main repository for house + serves media to remote plex clients. I use no power save crap, no cool & quiet, no sleep, no anything. I need raw power, not power saving. 7. I have disabled indexing in the pool drive WIN7 properties window, no change 8. I have disabled indexing + search services from WIN7 thinking i was getting bamboozled my MS, no change NOTES... 1. I know the hardware is old, give me a break please. I can stream 4 1080p transcodes at the same time without drivepool and barely break a sweat. With drivepool i can do 1, maybe 2. 2. It appears for some reason (my thought process) that during heavy transfer the Raid card kicks in and takes the info directly from source to destination. During slower, multiple reads it uses covefs.sys and offloads the work the PC CPU??? is this possible??? 3. Due to all pool drives residing on my PCIE Raid card, could the motherboard be gagging on the throughput on the PCIE bus or northbridge/southbridge controllers? 4. It appears to me that during low speed, multiple read/writes accessing lots of small files, it uses 10x more cpu than transferring large GB files. It is literally night vs day difference between little files and big 5. I have confirmed everything mentioned above numerous times over two weeks and have used process explorer to pinpoint the covefs.sys usage. The CPU usage is even across all 8 threads. 6. If this cannot be resolved, i have two options... Dump drivepool and go to Server 2012E OR Spend $700 for new MB/CPU/RAM to possibly prove this is not resolved. Both of these possible resolutions cost me more money and heartache migrating to MS storage spaces. Any help, guidance or opinions would be great. I am frustrated due to never noticing this until lately and it is grinding my gears and burning up my CPU. The PC is becoming useless during these times and is killing my performance elsewhere in the system. Overall I can only transcode at roughly 30-40% due to covefs.sys using the other 50-60%
  11. The M1115 is identical to a M1015 regarding chipset. It can be cross flashed to LSI 9211-8i same as M1015. Yes the Sata3 is pretty nice. I have a couple of cheap Highpoint Sata3 2 port HBAs. The IBM M1115 blows the highpoint adapter away regarding performance when using 2 or more drives. I have a pair of OCZ Vertex 4 Sata3 SSD for the OS. The performance is unbelievable, all while using stock IBM firmware... I will post up a new post in this forum, just need some time to document and post. Using it in a Norco 4020 20 bay server with drivepool and scanner. I installed covecube's software for a demo, and fell in love with the simplicity and performance, then purchased both. Never bothered to try the other guy's software.
  12. All is good once I actually completed the procedure the correct way. It would have helped if I read the wiki closely instead of glazing over the whole rename file section... my bad. Thank you. I will re-post a compatibility post now that it works. For reference it is a IBM M1115 8 port SAS/SATA controller on stock IBM firmware, no raid. Ebay auction for $65 USD brand new.
  13. All, Background I have a operational drivepool install using a new M1115 IBM SAS Adapter using Windows 7 X64. The M1115 is same as M1015. I have the stock, IBM firmware as sent from seller and operates fine. It passes the drives through as "JBOD/unconfigured" and all is good, no raid in operation. Problem SMART data is not read into Stablebit Scanner by default due to "unsafe IO" settings. I found post on here about setting the config file to use unsafe IO due to the SAT protocol. I still cannot see any data in scanner even with the config file altered. I have used the DirectIOTest program on here to determine capabilities. The SCSIPassthrough48 setting offers the most information from the disk and looks like it should work using the unsafe IO settings. Scanner still does not see the temp or other smart data. Questions 1. How do i make SMART work? In order to retrieve temps and health attribute data. 2. Do I need to flash firmware to LSI equivalent? I am still IBM OEM firmware. IR or IT Mode makes sense as this is all i need and the raid offers additional layers and a slight performance hit. Actions Tried 1. Tried the unsafe IO config file mod 2. Tested with the DirectIOTest program and it works, for the SCSIpassthrough48 3. Reboot PC, stop start service, no change in scanner after allowing 1-2 minutes for a SMART refresh
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