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SkOrPn

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  1. I'm not sure what the RAM limit is on this old board but I only have 4gb. I was going to get more but damn RAM has increased in $ so much that I can't get myself to buy more old school DDR2. I have used fsutil in the past I believe but not sure. What about throwing in a LSI HBA? Isn't the new HBA's from them have something like 1 million iops rating and something like 500 MB/s speeds on each port?
  2. I'm a huge Asus fan, probably on my 30th Asus mobo. Back between the mid 1990's to about 2010 I was rebuilding the PC two to three times a year and sometimes more. About the time AMD 64 came around I was building a new system every other month practically and very few times did I venture away from Asus. Yeah I had a few Gigabytes, DFI LanParty's, and several others (I even had TWO ABIT BP6's overclocked at one time), but for the most part I am an Asus guy. This mobo I'm on now is my second Rampage III Extreme and its been super rock stable for me. I write my own BIOS's for it just so I can keep it up to date. I only have a i7-930 but it runs happily at 4ghz so even today still see no reason to upgrade. Not until Haswell-E anyway. OH, I just had an idea, I will probably not do anything to my server for now and just use this Asus mobo I have now. It has 9 SATA ports directly on the PCB and a 10th on the rear I/O panel. I cant imagine 8 ports not being enough for this family. Sure speeds will be limited but one day there will be SSD's that are affordable and still work on SATA II. And if not at least I have four PCIe 2.0 x16 slots I can utilize with a LSI card
  3. OMG, pardon the abbreviations but WTF? LMAO 22 ports on a single board. Where's the extreme drooling emoticon when you need it? And I thought my Asus Rampage looked good with 10 ports, lol, but wow 22. Yeah, I was looking at cards yesterday, but my server is using an old BFG board (out of biz company) based on NVIDIA's 650i Ultra. I would prefer to spend the $ and get something with an ICH10R and an Intel chipset, which is probably the most stable option for this Intel Quad. An ICH10R would get me at least 6 ports, 1 used by the OS drive leaving me with 5 ports for 5 2TB drives. And I can continue to use the memory and Intel cpu I already have. This old BFG board does feel quite stable and its been keeping the Q6600 at 3ghz for several years now and not once complaining about it. However, to put it bluntly, the storage controller and PCIe slots suck so I'd rather do away with this board. What Id really like to do is put 22 Samsung 840 Pros (1TB Models) on the ASROCK Board, haha. Everything on my main rig is raided with super fast Samsung 840 Pro SSD's, so having a bunch of SSD's in the Server would allow the transfer speeds to match what my Machine feeds it. But I will wake up now...
  4. I just today became aware of having to use plug-ins and how the Balancers tab works. I added the third drive and after a few hours nothing was happening with it and that is when I dug deeper and found the plug-ins page. Quick question and guidance needed please. 1. Is there any known guides to using DP efficiently for Home Server users? Recommended settings for different types of users? 2. How do I determine if % or Free space is best for a particular situation? I mean % seems better to me but free space is default. Why is free space set as default? 3. What if I have a drive that is not 100% healthy? I have a drive that is 79% Healthy with 100% performance. SMART reports that there is 21 bad sectors that were moved and the remaining surface is perfect and full performance. However, the others are all 100% Healthy. Should I continue using that drive in an equal way or should I set it up to use the other two equally and leave that not so healthy drive for just in case I run out of space on the other two? I currently have the Balancer keeping all three drives balanced by %. I love this software I must say. Its making me want to search for another motherboard with more sata ports, lol... So I can throw more drives at this thing :-)
  5. Ok that is where I went wrong then. However upon checking the server this morning all is well. Strange I thought DP balances the data evenly across drives? If one drive is 931gb and the other 1.8tb doesn't that mean the larger drive should have approximately twice the data? DP put only 130gb on the 1TB and 1.1tb on the larger drive. I'm kinda confused now. Other than that all is well and seems very stable. Thanks EDIT: Never mind me I guess It's balancing the free space not the used space which makes perfect sense to me. There is exactly 800 GB of free space on both drives. Lol Rod
  6. 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
  7. I do have one more tiny question, one of my drives is the original Samsung F3, one of the worlds most stable and reliable hard drives. Is there a way to instruct DP to use it for the more important folders/files? I recently experienced a catastrophe when I tried to install WHS2011 fresh on this SSD, and I did not remove the F3 nor the 1.5tb, and for what ever reason, even after instructing WHS to use the SSD it just without my permission used the 1.5tb drive (with 17 years of data since the mid 1990's) for the OS (Yes I knew better but was being lazy and the installer clearly showed me it was going to use the SSD, so I trusted it). I was gutted to say the least when I realized the 1.5tb was formatted and the OS installed onto it. Anyway, I recovered much of those files since I had an external backup drive, but lost 17 years of software licenses, resumes, pictures etc. Only what was the most important to me was lost of course. Anyway, I feel my F3 drive is by far my most reliable and I was wondering if I could use it for the most important of files, and say the WD Greens for media only? Maybe balancing data between the two greens, but leaving the F3 for stuff like resumes, pictures, software, my TechNet and MSDN keys etc, etc. Is this possible? Ok, just to let you know I think I have finished all the data I could find on the site about DrivePool. I want to say thanks again, and I hope you enjoy your New Years Holiday. Regards Rod
  8. Thanks again, Someone over at WeGotServed told me you guys are very supportive and helpful when it comes to asking questions, thank you for that. I can't believe I am bothering you this time of year, but a geek will always be a geek no matter what day it is, lol. Anyway, I used to run a VERY large Forum for Microsoft back from 2003 to 2010 and was one of the first to beta test Windows XP 64-Bit Edition for 64-Bit Extended Systems (before it was called 64-bit Edition). I was the same way with my forum users, always as helpful as I could be. Ok, here are a few more questions and clarifications. I have been reading the user manual from start to finish and discovered much of what I need to know already. But it does not hurt to make sure you know as much as possible when dealing with your precious data. 1. The command in Diskpart would actually be the "clean all" command as the "clean" command only deletes data allowing for what appears like a empty partition ready for use. However, the Clean All command actually removes everything, i.e "Secure Erase" (a.k.a zeroed out for you geeks). I am using the award winning Hard Drive Sentinel which is MUCH more thorough than the Clean All command by it using a special algorithm that really fixes all kinds of problems with drives. It took 11.5 hours to "Clean All" of my 1.5TB drive and when it was done it reported a 100% Healthy drive ready for another 1000 days of service. Example: In 2012 my WD15EADS (WD Green 1.5tb) developed 2 damaged and 2 bad blocks (not much at all) and its health was reported by S.M.A.R.T as 83% (not good) with 100% Performance (excellent). Not to good a result and definitely worrisome, however after using the Surface Re-initialization Feature of Hard Disk Sentinel, this drive has been flawless ever since. Most consumers would just replace a drive once something like that happened but the drive acts and runs like new still to this day. Anyway, I wonder if DrivePool will work along side HDSentinel Software? Surprised I didn't ask that earlier. I have 5 licenses for that and have been using it for the HDD monitoring function. 2. I just wanted to use GPT because of its greater resilience to corruption. I do not believe there will be a performance hit of any kind using GPT, so I see no reason not to use it regardless of disk size. Not sure if the BIOS of this old computer supports GPT, but I will find out. 3. Wow, drive A: huh? What a great idea, you guys are smart. I like smart people... lol Haha, Chris this OS has been rock solid and I never expected it to run as fast as it does on old hardware. Even with only an old Core 2 Quad Q6600 at 3ghz, and 4gb of Ram it feels extremely fast even through RDP sessions. I love SSD's. Maybe one of these days I will retire my C300's and put one of them into the Server. They are also 128gb. Currently though it has a 60gb Vertex 2 that was just laying around in one of my computer desk drawers, lol... It has been rock solid in the Server. Anyway, thanks again Chris. Rod
  9. Wow, thank you very much for that informative reply. Ok, here is what I am now wondering. 1. Yes, I am completely wiping (Destructive Wipe) back to like-new status, RAW, Unformatted and Uninitialized. 2. What if I want all drives to be GPT? Can I do this myself? Or is there a reason why DrivePool would use MBR? And if I do Initialize as GPT and format as NTFS, will DP keep it like that or will it do something to them regardless? 3. Yeah, I was thinking all I would have to do is use BTSync and move the Sync folder into the newly created Pool drive, assuming DrivePool assigns a drive letter. 4. Thanks for clarifying that. 5. Ok, I will install it after I put the drives back into the machine. That way DP does not see any changes to the system. 6. Ok, this explains it clearly, so now I understand the 2TB limit is only for backups, but the OS as a whole can use partitions larger without problems. However, this begs me to ask another question. Where does the Pool file reside anyway, if say I wanted to back it up? My OS drive is a measly 60gb SSD, so I hope there isn't any problems with that as I do not want any data to migrate itself onto the OS drive. Does DrivePool's file actually store itself on one of the Pooled drives, or all of them simultaneously? I will go look for further technical reading on DrivePool because I want to understand it as much as I can. Thanks again drashna, very satisfied you were so informative, that REALLY made everything clearer for me. I hope your New Year is a Joyous one bud. Regards Rod
  10. 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
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