bytemaster

So it doesn't look good then. Well thanks anyway. Does the 2722 support PM Enclosures? I can't find much solid evidence. Highpoint talk of point-to-point support of 8 drives. A couple of vendor sites state "supports 20 drives" which I assume is a cut and pasted from some other spec. If the 2722 did support PM then I would have thought you would be looking at a potential 40 drives (8 * 5). I bought the RR644Ls as I picked them up from Amazon Warehouse for £38 each ($57) which is cheap for eSata ports and I have a load of enclosured drives. Oh well I guess I will have to use the Highpoint WebGui for Smart monitoring, it will at least alert on temperature. Scanner can do the surface checking. Sad as I have had good experience with Scanner, it is reassuring to get emailed when a drive is running hot.

Building a new server, primarily for media serving, and having some problems getting Scanner to read S.M.A.R.T data Current configuration: Asrock Z97 board with Pentium G3258 (at stock speed) running Win 7 Pro 2 x Highpoint RocketRaid 644L Controllers (I know these are the problem!) 2 x External 4-bay Enclosures 4 x Samsung 500GB in one enclosure - Attached to 1st RR card 1 x Seagate 8TB in the other - Attached to 2nd RR card Latest Highpoint Driver Latest Highpoint Bios The RR cards don't play nicely together if you install more than one, and the advice from Highpoint is to disable INT13 and Reallocate EBDA using the bios updater. An alternative, if you just want to use the controllers in pass-through, without using the raid bios is to use the command load.exe /e 0=0 rrxxx.xxx (were rrxxx.xxx is the rom name), again using the bios updater. I have done this, one further benefit is that it removes the boot delay. This may be a useful tip for others as it took quite some Googling to find, and is not visible at Highpoint. So at this point the controllers appear to be working fine, but no smart data in Scanner. Enable Unsafe IO - No change I then loaded the Highpoint WebGui, you have to select which controller you wish to address. If I select the 2nd Card then Direct I/O Test in Unsafe Direct I/O will give the three green ticks and a list of SMART Attributes, it cannot read SMART for the discs attached to the other controller. Restarting the Scanner service allows the Scanner GUI to show SMART data. However it shows a warning for Temperature at 33C, with a defined limit of 54C (Airflow Temperature is also shown at 33C) If I then select the 1st Card in the Highpoint GUI, Direct I/O can read SMART for the drives on that card, but no longer reads SMART from the other card. After restarting the Scanner service no SMART data is available via either controller. As an experiment, which I expected to fail, I opened a second Highpoint Gui window and set each window to a different controller. To my suprise Direct I/O test was now able to read SMART through both controllers. However Scanner only reads Smart from the 2nd card. One further observation is that the four 500GB Samsungs have all seen some service so you would expect some variance in SMART data between them, the Highpoint WebGui reports identical values for all four drives, with the exception of temperature. Hoever the Direct I/O test does show differences in SMART data across the drives, suggesting that it is correctly reading the data. So, in summary, with a Highpoint WebGui page open for each card Direct I/O Test can read the SMART Data for all attached drives (Using Unsafe I/O), but Scanner can only read the data via one controller. The Direct I/O test also seems to read the data more acurately than the Highpoint WebGui. I have now exhausted my humble skills and must appeal to the Gurus, can you suggest any way forward please? Sorry for the long essay, but I think the more I say, the less you need to ask. Cheers Nigel

Christopher, Thank you so very much for the prompt reply. The support from Stablebit/Covecube is always excellent, I just wish I could evangelise about your products and service. Regrettably I know noone else who needs them. I will give it a try. Thanks

Hi, I have seen several references on the web regarding the use of Server Core edition, as installed by Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2012 R2, Can Scanner and DrivePool be installed (and function) on this "lo-fat" version of Server 2012. My reason for asking is that Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2012 R2 is available for an Unlimited Evaluation period, which is a price I like. Thanks

I have considered the situation that with a large library I would not know what I had lost in the event of disk failure. What I have done is mount all pool drives as folders under a common folder "/mount". I then catalogue this folder using a program called VVV (Virtual Volumes View). I used to use Kathy for cataloguing but VVV allows a csv export of the entire catalogue. This way I have a record of the location of every file within the pool. My only problem is remebering to keep the VVV catalogue updated

As far as I know, you can do just that. I think that you are advised to stop the Drivepool service before, then restart the service when you have finished. Also you would presumably want to disable the Balancers. However this is just my understanding, as a new user. I suggest you wait for a definitive statement from Alex or Christopher, I am sure one of them will appear before long.

Thank you. As a silver surfer it is nice to know that I am not going senile. You guys offer amazing support. Nigel

Assuming the case of say 8 disks, D1 through D8 where OFP has D1 as highest priority to D8 with lowest priority. If I understand correctly if the MUSIC folder was set to use File Placement Balancer on D1 and D2 then MUSIC would go first to D1 until full and then to D2. However other files would also be placed on D1 by the OFP unless excluded, by other FP rules. Which is not what was hoped for. However if the MUSIC folder was "assigned" to say D7 and D8 then the OFP wouldn't start to place non-MUSIC files on D7 and D8 until the pool was nearly full. So the question then is, would the OFP operate in this circumstance, when you are attempting to place files partway along the priority chain, rather than starting at the beginning. Thanks - Nigel

Christopher, Thank you for the prompt answer. I will keep watching the beta releases.

Apologies in advance if this has already been addressed. When using Folder placement, is it possible to specify the order in which the nominated drives are filled, or are files within the folder distributed across the nominated drives. To clarify (I hope). If I have a folder Music which I wish to keep as consolidated as possible, can I specify store all "Music" files on Drive 1 until Drive 1 is filled (to say 90%), and then store any further "Music" files on Drive 2. It doesn't seem clear if that is what happens or if "Music" files are simply distributed across all of the drives allowed for that folder rule. Thanks - Nigel