Umfriend

I must be missing something obvious. The two 7TB drives, those are G:\ and L:\, no? I am tempted to say you simply have an actual 14TB HDD in your machine You see, with me (and AFAIK others), DP Pools show up in disk management as 2TB HDDs, regardless of their actual size. If in disk management you right click -> Properties -> Hardware, in the list you then get to see, do you see Covecube Virtual Disk as one of the names? If you write a file to F:\, does that file appear on G:\ and\or L:\ somewhere within the hidden poolpart.* folders on G/L? Do they have hidden Poolpart.* folders?

Wait, you tried to format the F:\? The Pool? And that worked?? Just uninstall DP then.

@OrozarBE: No, I don't think you can use the ordered placement pluging to direct duplicates that way. Hierarchical Pools will allow you to do that though. @OP: This is weird, and I wouldn't know how to help with this for sure. I *think* it is caused by the fact that the external drive is larger than all the rest of the Pool. To be sure, you can only store 3.6TB of duplicated data (net basis, 7.2 total) and 0.9TB of that external drive will not be used for duplicated files. I suspect that is where the issue lies. DP will try to maximise storage capacity but will never be able to use that part. If you could attach another drive to the Pool, even if just a 1TB HDD, then I suspect it will resolve.

Yes, DP not need/use the drive letters of the underlying disks.

When you click on F in drivepool, where exactly do you click? Not sure how you are going about here but without somde detailed info on what DP looks like there is no way I can think of to help. I would consider though to (and assuming there is NO data on the actual HDDs): 1. uninstall DrivePool, reboot 2. Format the actual HDDs, reboot 3. install DP 4. Add the two HDDs to a Pool according to the instructions.

Could be any of those things, without more information it is impossible to tell though. Just a heads up: Is the external drive connected through USB? AFAIK, USB-attached HDDs are not advised by Christopher and IIRC there are a few threads/posts here from people who got the Pool messed up due to USB-attached HDDs. The issue is, I think, that USB connections may drop sometimes.

Well, you got it. I would also physically disconnect the pool drives before installing the os, just to be sure you don't mess up during OS installation.

If DP does not show any drives being pooled, then perhaps you do not have a pool at all? Could you show screenshots Explorer just to show which drives Windows sees and DP?

Seems fine with me. As I understand it, you want to have files that belong together to be saved to a single HDD if possible, no? In that case, this works. Once the HDD is 90% full it will continue writing new files to the other HDD so you may have a bit of a break there but after that new files will be written there. You might want to consider using duplication. Now, if HDD 1 fails, you loose everything (unless you have a backup solution which is always highly advisable). With duplication, you have at least a bit of protection.

Most likely no. What you can do though is: 1. Add the drive to the PC 2. Add the drive to the Pool. De drive is now part of the Pool but the files on it are not yet accesible through the Pool (DP only access the drive through the poolpart.xxx folder) 3. So now you have two poolpart.xxx folders, one is the copy of the faulty drive, the other is the location that DP considers part of the Pool 4. Stop the DP service 5. MOVE the contents of the old/copy poolpart.xxx folder. You do this not through the virtual DP drive but directly on the drive itself (so if the drive is H:\ and the Pool is P:\ then you do this with Explorer on H:\) 6. Start the DP service DP will now remeasure and all should be fine. Personally, if I was sure the copy/old poolpart.* folder was empty I would delete it.

I really don't think this will be an issue. Happy you got it working.

In my experience, balancing is way slower than regular HDD performance. But a week for 4.6TB is a bit much. The balancing process is a background process with lower priority but I assume you are not working on that thing 24/7 (and it is not a heavily used server or somesuch). How large is the Pool? Personally, I have had situations where a simple shut down/restart did wonders.

So I don't use the Ssd optimiser. But from the text, it actually says it has the option to fill the pooled disks in am order. Must be some switch/option in the setting of that balancer.

I'm just a user, not a developer of this application. I don't know. But it may be something like if you make a copy then during removal you actually have an extra instance and that may not be considered, I don't know, appropriate?

Which balancers are active with you? Perhaps you have the Ordered File Placement balancer active?

So will you retain the 6TB in the Pool or keep them separately? I don't think DP supports that by default. Assuming you have no duplication and want to take them out (they would not record any changes/updates then though), what I can imagine you could do though is: 1. Stop the DP service. 2. On each of the 6TB drives, MOVE the data out of the hidden poolpart.* folder to a place outside of it (e.g. contents of D:\Poolpart.*\ to D:\OldPool\). So you access the drives themselves, not *through* the Pool. 3. Start DP service. Note that DP will show an empty Pool now although the free space is still very small. 4. Add the 12TB HDD 5. Stop DP service 6. Copy all data from both 6TB drives to the hidden poolpart.* folder on the 12TB drive 7. Start DP service (let it do its measuring I think) 8. Remove the 6TB drives. This should be a quick operation. It will not delete the data in the D:\OldPool\ folder. But I do wonder whether you would want a Pool of just one 12 TB drive. It may well be that your setup is somewhat more complicated so the scenario above might have to be adjusted. Maybe there is an easier way but I can;t think of any.

So DrivePool with duplication provides some protection to drives going bad. If you have x2 duplication, then any 1 HDD may fail at a given time. DP will typically recover from this (especially if you have Scanner as well) assuming there is enough space available on the other HDDs. However, DrivePool does this by storing two full duplicates/instances of a file. So if you have 30TB of data, you would need 60TB of storage space. No experience with DAS or Storage Spaces. However, I know that Christopher (I think still) advises against USB connected HDDs as part of a Pool and I wonder whether the same applies with TB3. Can not compare speeds but DP typically gives you the performance of a regular HDD (or SSD if you used those).

I use SATA disks and I did try a (the?) registry hack but so far without success.

I got a 1015 in IT mode. If you find out how to get disks to spin down, let me know please. I did at some stage edit the registry but that did not do anything for me.

I can't imagine a HDD not being fast enough to stream some media. I thi k that is what you need to look at. And no, DP does not use SSD as read cache (and I don't see how that would help TBH).

I don't know. My experience with Thunderbolt is underwhelming, especially w.r.t. stability of USB and network (in this case a laptop connected to a Thunderbolt docking station) but that may be just me. TBH, it just does not seem like such a good idea to me. Installing WSE2016 on consumer hardware may pose issues (although I got it running easily on such hardware) and it seems relatively expensive to me as you would have the enclosure close to the NUC anyway. I realise it is an attractive form factor but only if it can stand alone. I would reconsider. There are many options for cases so it comes to what you need/want relating to real estate basically. Just my 2 cents.

Just be aware that USB connections fail sometimes. I believe USB enclosures are not recommended and I think you'll find cases here where the use of these caused serious issues for some. AFAIK, eSATA would be preferable.

You could wipe but I'd advise to wait. There may be ppl here who have suggestion on how to recover. Sry but I do not..

The downside is, I think, that DP by default fills (archive) drives that have most space free first. In your case, as the SSD is 1TB, DP would write to the spinners with 2TB free first. You can adjust this with some balancers and if you know which files you want to be prioritised to be stored on the (archive) SSD then you could use File Placement Rules.

I don't use the SSD Optimizer, I am not sure. I think you can't do this through a setting. What might work though is if you repartition the SSDs, use one partition for storage and the other for cache. There are some caveats to this as well though