Umfriend

So I am running Scanner 2.5.4.3216 on my lappy for a trial (Just want to check some older HDDs). It runs Windows 10 and has an NVMe Samsung SSD 950 Pro. Scanner tells me "The NVMe health check is not accesible." - But shouldn't it? Ran Direct I/O (1.0.6764.36111, which was flagged as potentially unsafe by AVG BTW). I have checks with Identify and SSD but all other stuff is red crosses...

But if you don;t need hotswap at all and stick to 8 HDDs, isn't there a case to fit those that would cost less than three of those Rosewills?

I'm going out on a limb here but I assume that you would not often transfer files of such sizes. If it is rare indeed then you migth consider saving them directly to a PoolPart folder on the HDD of choice and let DP then handle re-allocation / balancing / duplication? Might save a few bucks on large cache SSDs.

Actually, modern processors draw little when idle so the trade-off between low idle draw and peak performance is way way better than it used to be. And then there is the option of undervolting (which I use for my server running an i7-3770 for years now). If you are a tinkerer then I would recommend to get a 5.25" to 2.5" adapter as well. Very easy to swap out one boot SSD for the other. Also, there is this one: https://www.icydock.com/goods.php?id=242. It fits five 3.5"in 3 5.25 inch slots but you need the 5.25" slots not to have those gliders for sets of three. I have the tray-variant (stupid mistake) and it works well allthough with 5 HDDs in that space, they tend to run warm IMHO. 4 may be better. And I was thinking about 5/6 drives. 8 limits your options but then the Ablecon might be good or, and this is a local favorite here, some LSI SAS controller, like the IBM1015 (I have it but designate as a Dell PERC H310). In any case, this https://www.alternate.nl/ASRock/Z370-Extreme4-socket-1151-moederbord/html/product/1384798?lk=17219 runs 8 HDDs and I think you can use one M.2 slot without surrendering SATA ports. It should run with https://ark.intel.com/products/129948/Intel-Core-i7-8700T-Processor-12M-Cache-up-to-4_00-GHz 35W TDP and with undervolting you'd be way below that. Of course, both the MB and the CPU are way more expensive then you'd actually need

I see. With 80 vs 2000, I guess I understand although, really, ditch the 80 I don't know snapraid. Does it do parity filebased or blockbased, i.e., all HDDs entirely? But with 500 and 2000, why bother? If you use the Pool enough, the 500 will get used. Anyway, you know you situation best, was just wondering.

I'm wondering, why would you want that?

I ran my WHS2011 (which is basically a SOHO server version of W7) on a Celeron G530, two cores, two threads. It did client backups, file sharing, streaming, a downloading client we'll not discuss and for a short while even ran a small Minecraft server (max 5 users). Yes, 1080p transcoding could be a bit of an issue sometimes. And of course, it did run DP. As far as DP is concerned, it basically needs nothing, the J4105 seems about as powerful (powerless?) as the G530 accoridng to PassMark but has double the cores so it should be more than fine. The N5005 as well. Only thing can say is that if you are going to run 5/6 drives, you might as well pick a MB that supports 6 or 8 SATA devices. The case will have to be a decent size anyway, no?

Ah yes, that figures. And this may not be a bug but a feature indeed.

What do you mean with a child pool? Are you using hierarchical pools here? I wonder whether, when you write files to this pool E, DP complains about not being able to comply with the duplicaiton settings _or_ that one duplicate ends up at the spinner and the other remains on the SSD. At one time I had a Pool of HDDs partitioned in 2TB volumes (for WHS2011 Server Backup purposes) and some duplicates ended up at the same physical HDD. This was acknowledged to be a bug or at least undesirable behaviour but Drashna/Alex were not able to reproduce.

Actually, all I want is what WHS2011 does but then with continued support and security updates and support for way more memory. In any case, I was planning to go WSE2016 at some stage but that will be WSE2019. I was just trying to warn you that WS2016 support will end, I think end of 2022 (2027 extended support, no clue what that means) and that going WSE2019 might save you a learning curve. Having said that, and missing knowledge & experience with WSE 2012/2016, it may be that WSE 2019 actually misses the dashboard (if that is what is the Essentials Experience role): https://cloudblogs.microsoft.com/windowsserver/2018/09/05/windows-server-2019-essentials-update/ So basically, I don't know what I am talking about...

I would hope, and am pretty sure, this won't work. DP checks, in case of duplication, whether files are placed on different *physical* devices. @OP: I recently bought a, I think,. LSI 9220-8i, flashed to IT-mode (the P20...07 version). The label was Dell PERC H310, it should be the same as the IBM1015. I am not sure, as far as I understand it, the 9xxx number also relates to the kind of bios it is flashed with. In any case, it works like a charm. One thing though, these controllers run HOT and it is advisable to mount a fan on top of it (just use a 40mm fan and mount by screws running into the upstanding bars or somesuch of the heatsink.

For me, the client backups are what makes Windows Server worthwhile. File sharing, running a certain downloading client (that we'll not discuss) and media server etc. are nice extras (although that can be done on a W10 machine as well of course). I am currently at WHS 2011 and intend to go WSE 2019 (which as it turns out will be a SKU, but WS Standard won't offer the Essentials role anymore). It'll be a steep learning curve for me as well, which is a shame. But that is the one reason I am waiting a bit still and go WSE2019: It'll be longer before I have to go through that experience again. My main issue is that with WHS v1 (and 2011 somewhat) there were online resources aimed at, well, SOHO. With WSE2016 en higher that is far less the case. If you find one, pls let me know.

Not sure, I think you do need balancing for the SDDs to empty out to the HDDs.

I'm not actually sure but could you check what happens if you check the Not more often than every and put it at, say, an hour or so? Also, which balancers are active with which priority?

I actually deleted an attachment and whil eit did disappear from the post, it did not disappear from the library

Hi, so my quotum (a whopping 2MB! :D) is full but I can not find a way to delete some of them. Help?

Reset everything to defautl settings, re-balance and then provide screenprints of DP showing the HDDs. Hmm, can't attach as I reached the limit and cannot delete old attachments.. Anyway, we want to see how many HDDs, capacity, usage and where the small triangles are. It is located under Disks in the UI on the right side.

Still, it is weird. With default settings, DP would write to HDDs that have most absolute space free. For example, if you have a Pool of 1x4TB and 2x2TB HDDs then the 4TB would be used solely for the first 2TB of data. So I don't understand how this could have happened.

I would consider an uninstall, reboot, re-install, reboot. It seems to me the UI is loading but there is an issue with displaying it. What you could try though is setting the display resolution to a lower res and back to a higher res.

I don't know but, assuming the data on it is present and recoverable elsewhere, I would yank it out of my system, open it, scratch the surfaces of the disks and throw it away. IMHO, chances are that HDD is toast, as in really toast. You might want to try and read SMART through scanner to see what it comes up with (perhaps attaching through an external dock well after boot). How large and how old is it anyway?

I could not have put it better.

Yes, so say you have 2 HDDs and 1 cloud thing. What you could do is: 1. Create Pool O with 2xHDD, x2 dup 2. Create Pool P with the cloud thing as one drive and Pool O as the other, x2 dup Anything you write to Pool O will be duplicated locally Anythin you write to Pool Q will be duplicated, so one copy on O and one on the cloud thing, but... As Pool O is x2 dup itself, it will write to both HDDs, so x3 dup really.

I don't know, really. The few times I have had HDDs experience unreadable sectors, especially in the first sectors, those HDDs would often hang Scanner and even the PC, sometimes the PC would even refuse to boot. What I have done in the past is insert some of those HDDs in an external USB dock. Unreadable but recognizable and initializable. Then scan again and see what it comes up with. Personally, I would not mind giving a HDD a second chance as long as the SMART atributes don't continue to deteriorate but Christopher is a lot more, uhm, hostile(?) to suspect HDDs and given the dramas (and time and frustration lost) that do occur he may be right.

If Ubuntu reads NTFS then the data will be readable but... the DP software runs on WIndows only so you''ll lose the pooling/duplicaiton etc. functionality.

So I am not entirely sure but I think it works like this: 1. Scanner gets a SMART warning and tells DP to evacuate the relevant HDD 2. Files are evacuated to another HDD. 3. Now some files may be unreadable on the relevant HDD. I *think* you first need to remove the HDD from the Pool and then have the Pool remeasured. Should DP find some files that are to be duplicated x times are no longer duplicated x times, it will re-duplicate. But it may be a bot more automated even.