Umfriend
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Posts posted by Umfriend
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Joe, I got the 2T-part of Pool bit, hence the "ignore missing disk msgs" part.
I now actually think that might well be the best way to go. I am assuming that DP will let you write to the Pool even while a disk is missing.
My other suggestion was less well though through as deleting from the 500GB drive might cause balancing to transfer yet other files to it. That can be stopped but it just introduces more steps and risk factors IMO. So I would in that scenario:
1. Remove 500 GB drive from computer
2. Remove 500 GB drive from Pool (now the files are realy lost, DP accepts they no longer exist).
3. Change 500 GB drive for new 2TB disk and add to Pool
4. Restore files for Server, individual files, select 500GB drive, all files/floders within the poolpart folder and restore to other location being the Pool
I am assuming that you use the WHS 2011 standard server backup function and that it can in fact write to the Pool (AFAIK, it can not backup the Pool, only the underlying actual drives).
If any of this goes wrong, you can always (I think):
- Change the new 2TB back for 500 GB Drive; or,
- Borrow an external enclosure to copy from the 500 GB drive to the Pool.
Luckilly, there are people here who actually know about these things
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Perhaps when v1 starts running, it picks up the poolpart directories but has an initial setting of non-duplication so that it deletes one copy of those? I'm on v2.x now but I can not remember being able to set duplication in v1.x other than on a per serverfolder basis, IIRC.
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Let me get this straight, you propose:
- 4 Hds in the Pool, no duplication whatsoever.
- Removing a 2TB filled drive from computer (not the Pool), ignoring missing disk msgs from DP
- Insert new 2TB drive, move all 500GB data to 2 TB drive, remove 500GB from Pool and then from computer
- Reinsert old 2TB drive and hope DP recognises it and all will be fine?
I don't know why it would not work but there are people here who can help you with this.
If you do backup, might you consider simply deleting contents on 500GB drive, remove/replace and restore to new 2TB drive? Or temporarily use the medium that you use to backup to?
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Hahaha, I will _never_ (oops, shouldn't use that word) use folder placement. I understand the backup issue though, in fact, that is _why_ I only have two 2TB drives in my Pool: I get the stability of RAID 1 and can still backup everything using WHS backupsoftware by backing up one of the two drives. A 3 drive-pool would no longer allow me to do that, unless I were to use folder placement. I'll simply not let it grow any larger, LOL.
I believe WS2012E already allows larger server backups but this all is a bridge I'll cross when I find it.
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Nevertheless, I would think that any OCD person would like to get a clear signal if and when, e.g.,
- Drives 1 & 4 are (or the smaller of the is) are full and files are spilling over onto other drives.
- Drive 1 or 4 is failing and/or is removed which would violate the folder placement directive etc.
But yeah, I'm getting the point of folder placement now.
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I'm not denying that, just had not thought of that one entirely/at all.
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Power consumption, point 1 of Shane, is certainly one I had not realised. The OCD argument of course wholly is sufficient, I just do not happen to be OCD re file placement: I hear ya!
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It only occurs every so many days, few weeks even. I'll await the next stable release (never do betas).
Many thanks.
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Hi,
In the Event Viewer that I look at on occasion, DP 2.x comes up sometimes stating that an Error report file has been saved somewhere (actually, two files at the same time). I don't actually observe any issues with DP. Should I worry and what should I do with the file? I can't actually seem to read/open it.
Kind rgds,
Umf
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Indeed, I do not know your situation, I don't know why it would be suboptimal to have tracks off a single album scattered and it's certainly not for me to say whether it'd be a good feature for you or in general or not. I just hope it won't harm stability and won't cause issues due to administrative errors.
Sorry for being critical, I would only hope that if my comments are not complete nonsense, they might at least contribute to a better product.
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Well, the way I see it, a Pool is an abstraction layer over physical HDs (or actually, the poolpart folders on the related HDs) that represents or behaves like another HD. That DP does all kinds of stuff within (like duplication on different physical HDs, read-striping, allocation algorythms etc) is great but it is indifferent to the "kind of file" or "name of folder" etc. Folder Placement would, I think. break some sort of clean distinction between the physical HDs and the abstraction layer and I would fear that administration might become complicated (both for a user as for DP itself) and potentially contradictory.
I would really wonder what the net advantage would be over, for instance, defining various Pools. So, IF you forced a folder "Videos" to only store on HD 2, and HD 2 becomes full, what shoudl DP do? Spill over any excess to another HD? Then you've failed to meet the objective of having all "Videos" on HD2. Move other data from HD2 to other HDs to make room for "Videos"? Meanwhile meeting read-striping/performance and duplication optimisation/constraints? And what if HD2 is really full with only "Videos"? Perhaps you'd _want_ a "Disk Full" message, which a seperate Pool would actually get you....
It's just fishy to me. In part perhaps because my Pool is very small, I use a 2-disk, 2x duplication so I essentially have a very easy, smart and recoverable RAID-1 minus all the hassle of RAID. Folder Placement would be silly in my case. Anyway, do what you want
.Edit: maybe someday I'll get me a real testing box. "Removing" a drive just seemed to take ages in my set-up. Perhaps I messed up because I essentially wanted to remove + de-duplicate as I was going to a 1-drive setup temporarily. Adding a drive appeared to take ages as well, perhaps as balancing and re-duplication is not a noce combination. Might be specific for a 2-disk 2x-duplication setup. Found that actually clearing the Pool (moving folders off-Pool), killing Pool, changing 1 HD, format + re-create Pool, moving back to Pool for me worked way way faster.
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But you might want to have a look at http://community.covecube.com/index.php?/topic/208-stablebit-drivepool-controlling-folder-placement/
. It appears they anticipate to do exactly what you want!
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The only concern I would have is how DP would deal with removal of drives. Say you have a pool of 4 drives, 2x duplication and videos go to drive 3 and 4. Removing drive 3 would then result in, uhm, what?
I think this is why my experience with DP 2.x on removing/adding is somewhat dissapointing. I have a 2x2TB pool, 2x duplication. Had to remove 1. I'm sure I did not use Best Practice but it is unclear to me what the best way is to deal with this. So I am sort of an idiot with weird self-induced problems but I can see something similar becoming an issue with folder placement restrictions / directives.
It does appear, to me, somewhat contradictory to the fundamental notion of a Pool (or _my_ notion of a Pool) and I would not use it and would fear for user-induced data loss. Setting up seperate Pools seems a way more consisten way to go.
Anyway, do what you want. I got DP&S and I'm very happy with what I got!
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I know nothing about JBOD / raid / rocketraid. But I would guess that for DP to work well, your system should recognise the individual HDs. Can you mount them and then create a Pool on those drives?
One question though, if you're going to use DP (and duplication), would you not rather have those drives not in a JBOD setup as well? I get the impression that two setups with halfway the same purpose are combined, that can't be good I think.
My advice would be to break down the JBOD (and I am assuming that F and G indeed show as 10.88TB drives as per Dougs' question), and go DP all the way.
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My guess would be that DP sees the JBOD as ONE disk?
Edit: When you created the Pool, did you add four objects/disk, or one (being the JBOD)?
Small tip for when this is solved: first create a Pool with duplication, then transfer to the Pool. (So not, first to Pool, then duplicate). In my experience, DP does the job but it is way way slower than simple duplicating when it writes to the Pool.
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I think I understand but if _you_ see one huge drive, so does the OS and DP is (I think) meant to distribute files or load over disks evenly. Not sure if DP allows for explicit folder positioning but even if it does (or will in the future) I would think it would only be worth while for specific situations (that I can't think of right now).
Let me ask you another question: If you see one big logical drive, why would you care how files are distributed over the four disks? If you move the shared folders (via the dashboard) to the Pool (the huge virtual disk that is know by some letter) than all shares should work perfectly for any client, regardless on which physical disk they are located.
If you do have the space available, I would recommend duplication. That way, if one of the drives fail, you do not actually need to restore...
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OK, I may misunderstand the question but here goes.
First off, _if_ you create a pool of four drives, _why_ would you _not_ want files in certain "Folders" to be distributed over the four drives? Put otherwise, _what_ is it that you want to pool the drives for? It seems to me that what you want to accomplish is, basically, having four seperate physical and logical drives.
I am not familiar with Drive Bender but I assume that DB will (like Drive Pool) assign a drive letter to a logical drive, the logical drive being the Pool. You should (and would with DP) see all files in the shared folder _provided_ that the mapping of the share points to the actual Pool (and not a similarly named folder on one of the drives), that is, the logical drive created by DB / DP that represents the Pool (and therefore all four drives).
But the basic question is, what is it that you want the pool to do for you?
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So I am trying to get some HDs to spin down through Scanner.
- Windows never puts HDDs to sleep
- Scanner Disk Settings -> Query power mode directly from disk is set
- Scanner Disk control -> Standby timer is grey, which I understand is because it is something that can not be read from the HDD
- Scanner Disk control -> Advanced Power Management is set
- Scanner Disk control -> Whatever I do, it automatically reverts to Maximum performance (no standby).
Why? What should I do? It is an ST2000DM001 (but applies to the ST2000VN000 as well). Perhaps they smply do not support it?
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OK, but in a 2-disk pool with duplication, there is not much to move, is there? In my experiance (with DP 1.x) it would actually leave the files on the removed disk, unhide the poolpart folder but not add new files/changed files to the disk-to-remove as only the other is part of the pool.
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OK, the removing thing I am not so worried about. It's primarily the adding.
I'm not sure real-time duplication has any influence here, that only applies, as I understand it, to new files written to the pool. That is what I would accomplish in my scenario. In the graceful way, DP would do duplicate in the background and, as some have written, that may take a long long time (might well be due to other issues of course).Duplication will occur when you add the new drive to the pool, if you have real-time duplication enabled.
I do not understand this. I thought removing a file always left ALL files that were on the disk intact (which in my case with a 2-drive duplicated should not be hard). Or is this relevant for, say, a 3-disk 2x duplication setup where one disk is removed?However, it may leave files in the "PoolPart" folder (which will be exposed once it's removed from the pool). You may want to copy these manually, just in case.[ -
Hi all,
I have DP2, full duplication of just two 2TB drives. I need to replace one of them (rising sector allocation error count).
I could just:
1. Remove on of the drives from the pool (how would DP deal with duplication if one of the two is removed?)
2. Remove the drive from the server
3. Add new drive to the server
4. Add new drive to the pool.
However, I get the feeling that removing takes some time for DP to process and adding a new one may take a very long time (in background, whatever checks it does etc).
So, I am wondering whether it would not be quicker to:
1. Copy all data from pool to a third non-pooled drive (already present in system)
2. Delete all files from pool
3. Perform steps 1 to 4 above
4. Copy all data from third non-pooled drive to pool
5. Delete all (copied) files from third non-pooled drive.
The _only_ disadvantage I can see is that I would be deleting shared folders and I am not sure whether those would be reinstated (although, I could of course just delete the contents of those 12 folders).
Total size of unduplicated data is about 600GB.
Any advice?
Kind rgds,
Umf
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That is what I thought, thanks for confirming. I'll monitor. Luckilly all is duplicated on another drive as well.
One follow-up Q: If I choose to ignore the alert, will it re-emerge if the sector count changes?
Many thanks again Drashna.
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Hi all,
Scanner is showing 2504 Reallocated Sectors Count on one of my drives. The message became apparent to me three days ago. The number of affected sectors has not rissen. Should I be concerned (alread)?
Kind rgds,
Umf
Will this work?
in General
Posted
So, my first suggestion won't work as DP will not let you write to the Pool with a missing disk (which makes sense IMO). But the second revised will/should work if I understand correctly. Just never delete anything (which I suggested in my first post, SHAME ON ME!). Drashna's amendment using another system, I think, has even less risk.
Someday I'll have a real test / mess around system to try things like these. For now, yours serves as that ;-)
Oh, and _if_ you've got the means to install enough capacity to enable duplication (which in your case would require 4x4TB drives it seems to me) than I would like to echo Drashna's suggestion. I'm learning a lot from him (and I'll replace my sys HD with an SSD someday).