otispresley

@aron, this article covers how to get SMART data in Stablebit Scanner running in a Windows VM with RDM disks on an ESXi host. The following is the KB article from VMware about how to query SMART data from your drives from the ESXi host CLI: http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=2040405 You will also need to make sure that passing of SMART data is supported on your particular controller. Here is an example from my host: ~ # esxcli storage core device smart get -d naa.5e83a97f147d02bc Parameter Value Threshold Worst ---------------------------- ----- --------- ----- Health Status OK N/A N/A Media Wearout Indicator 0 0 0 Write Error Count N/A N/A N/A Read Error Count 117 50 100 Power-on Hours 100 0 100 Power Cycle Count 100 0 100 Reallocated Sector Count 100 3 100 Raw Read Error Rate 117 50 100 Drive Temperature 30 0 30 Driver Rated Max Temperature N/A N/A N/A Write Sectors TOT Count N/A N/A N/A Read Sectors TOT Count N/A N/A N/A Initial Bad Block Count N/A N/A N/A

No, DrivePool cannot store files larger than the individual hard drives. You would need a RAID setup with parity to protect against a drive failure for that. If you are also backing up data from your existing pool, then I would suggest excluding it from the backup and using duplication to store copies of the files on different hard drives within the pool. Then you would only have to worry about backing up non-pooled data. You will need the storage space one way or another, so having the space in the pool where you can use it is better in my opinion.

On my system, it takes roughly 10 minutes for the dashboard to connect to Scanner once the service is started. Did yours ever connect?

Hello scar45, I have the same Norco 4220 case and the LSI 9201-16i SAS card because I do not need RAID. For drive connectivity, I use these mini-SAS cables with an ASUS KCMA-D8 motherboard with a PIKE2008 installed on it. Both of these use the same LSI controller and both are managed in the same BIOS utility. This provides all the SATA ports I need and a few extra. I have been using this server for 2-3 years with 0 problems. I had to RMA a couple memory modules once is about it. Instead of installing WHS 2011 directly on it, I installed ESXi to an SSD inside the case, used the PIKE RAID capabilities to create an SSH RAID for VM storage, installed WHS 2011 as a VM, and did a Raw Device Mapping of the hard drives so WHS would have direct access to them. You can also pass the entire LSI controller through to the VM or add all the disks as datastores and create virtual disks in the VM for DrivePool. This allows me to use server resources for other virtual machines as well.

The graceful way is to click Remove on the drive in DrivePool and select the Duplicate later option. This will leave duplicated files on the disk. The removal should be fast since all your files are duplicated. Duplication will occur when you add the new drive to the pool, if you have real-time duplication enabled. The risk here is that you will only have 1 copy of your files in the pool until the new disk is installed and the duplication process has completed, but you will also still have your duplicated copies on the disk you removed if you should need them.

This is normal, because DrivePool 2.x is not an actual add-in but just has dashboard integration. You can also pull up the same DrivePool UI outside the dashboard.

I can also attest that this works well with ESXi 5.5 with RDM disks as well. The negative to RDM is that you have to keep track of each disk physical location in ESXi and in the VM. Also, adding or removing disks adds the steps for adding/removing from the VM. You can also pass through the entire storage controller to the VM which will remove this extra step.

No, I am not saying this is a common problem at all. It is just something I have been dealing with. I think it works great for most everyone, and I still love it even with the small quirks I have dealt with! It has saved me from losing data on numerous occasions. I think everyone has different software and configurations on their systems, and there are a lot of factors to consider. You should probably check out the Troubleshooting page and submit a case with logs attached.

Sometimes I run into issues adding new disks to the pool and it is actually Scanner that is causing them. I am not sure if you have Scanner installed too or not. Pretty much every time I add a disk, I have to restart the Scanner service. I am running Scanner 2.5.0.2968 BETA with DrivePool 2.0.0.420 which doesn't hang the dashboard like happened with previous versions of Scanner, but it will crash the dashboard every time I try to access DIsk Settings for any disk; I can access Disk Details fine though, and sometimes DrivePool will show the wrong serial number for newly added disks. It shows some disks twice in the UI, doesn;t show the temperature for the newly added disks, and doesn't show that it is scanning them until after I restart the Scanner service.

Thanks for the response. This was not a new pool. I was just replacing drives in my existing pool...only have 1 pool. I had already removed the defective disks from the pool before issuing the command. Here are the steps to reproduce (I am running WS2012E in a VMware ESXi 5.5 VM with disks passed through to the VM via RDM, DrivePool 2.0.0.420, and Scanner 2.5.0.2968 BETA): Type mountvol /N in an elevated command prompt on the server Add a disk to the chassis Add it to the VM Find it in the non-pooled disks section in the DrivePool UI and click Add (At this point, the disk appears to add successfully but just disappears completely from the DrivePool UI with no error message or feedback) Open Computer Management or Server Manager and go to the Disk Management utility Locate the partition with no name and no drive letter and look at its properties and observe on the General tab that both the Used space and Free space report sizes of 0 (I do not have drive letters on any of the disks in my pool; All other disk properties have values for Used space and Free space in their properties) After you delete the partition and then add it back, the disk appears in the DrivePool UI as a non-pooled disk, and you can click Add again and see it show up in the pool It looks like I will have to open DIsk Management every time I add a drive no matter what, so I would rather just deal with the drive letters. If this behavior is normal when you have automatic mounting disabled with DrivePool, then I hope this helps others to better decide which way is best for them. I was hoping to be able to just click Add from the DrivePool UI. This is why I miss the disk add option from 1.x for "Add as a hidden drive". Maybe this should be a pool-wide option in the DrivePool settings in 2.x, along with the capability to change the volume label.

@drashna, I am not sure if you have had problems adding disks to the pool after doing "mountvol /N" or not, but I issued this command and then DrivePool does not add them correctly. I ended up having to delete and then add the partition on the disk both times I tried it because it reported as a healthy partition but the properties showed 0 bytes used and 0 bytes free; the disk was also nowhere to be found under the DrivePool tab until after the repartition. After that, they both added to the pool properly.

Hi and welcome to DrivePool! There is another Stablebit product, called Scanner, that monitors disk health via SMART data and scans. This software has some integration with DrivePool and can be configured to send you email notifications when you have issues with a disk. If it is a serious issue, it will automatically remove the data from the disk if there is enough space on the pool to do so. For Advanced Settings, refer to the Wiki linked on the main page of the forums. You can also remove drive letters from Computer Management >> Disk Management with no ill effects. There will always be some data in Other, but there are sometimes files that show up in there that shouldn't. Restarting the DrivePool service, or the server itself, usually fixes this for me. This normally occurs after I have removed a disk from the pool. Removing a disk from the pool is very easy and straight-forward and can be performed at any time. You just click the Remove link next to it and then select any of the two options displayed. You can have it skip removal of unreadable files (good for a damaged disk), and you can have it duplicate later, which leaves any duplicated files on the disk for faster removal. You will also want to check out the balancer Plug-Ins in DrivePool. These allow you to control how data is distributed across the disks in your pool. As @drashna has mentioned a few times in the forums, you can use things like File Placement Limiter to control which disks can have duplicated or unduplicated data stored on them. This is useful when a disk might have encountered minor issues that result in SMART warnings and you want to move all unduplicated data from the disk. I hope this helps!

You can try going to Help >> Safe Mode Settings in the dashboard and see if DrivePool is there and is disabled. If so, you can enable it from there.

Try using a different text editor when you edit the file. Sometimes they can insert strange line feeds and such that will cause the configuration to fail to load.

Please refer to this post to get SMART data with RDM hard drives in ESXi. I do this on my installation since ESXi 5.0, and no additional license is needed: http://community.covecube.com/index.php?/topic/131-how-to-get-smart-data-passed-on-from-esxi-51-host/

Have you also tried the WSS Troubleshooter tool that is also linked from that page to reset NTFS permissions?

This is strange. I installed WS2012E on 8/14 and have been backing up 2 computers successfully the whole time with the Client Computer Backups folder in the pool and duplicated. When I moved the pool from WHS2011, I did have to reset permissions, and I ended up ditching all the previous backups and starting fresh on WS2012E by doing a repair on the backup database, which deleted all the old backups. They both started out as Windows 7 computers and I have since upgraded both to Windows 8. I have had strange issues since I started using WHS-like products since WHSv1, but WSE seems to be working better for me so far. I hope you can get it worked out.

Were all those files in a folder configured with duplication? Did you select the option to Duplicate Later when you removed the drive? If so, then it leaves duplicated files on the disk for faster drive removal. After the drive removal, it runs a duplication process to re-duplicate all file copies that were on the disk you removed.

You can try setting BitLocker_PoolPartUnlockDetect for DrivePool 2.x in Advanced Settings to True and see if that to work. There is also CoveFs_ReportAsNtfs for applications that need to see it as NTFS. Here are the Advanced Settings instructions for DrivePool 1.x and for DrivePool 2.x.

This information is contained in the User Manual, although there is a typo in it. The highlighted part in the text below from the Upgrading section of the 2.x User Manual should be 1.x instead:

The answer to that is here in the User Manual.

Hey gwtony, DrivePool knows the difference between different physical disks no matter how many partitions are on therm. When files are duplicated, they are duplicated across physical disks only. Also, you can format your 3TB drive as GPT instead of MBR and use the whole disk in a single partition.

Maybe that data, along with this post, should be used to make another How-To sticky for SMART data in Hyper-V.

To do a Bust Test in Scanner, you just right-click on a disk and you will see the option in the context menu. Once you have tested and verified the read/write speeds of all your drives outside the pool, you can try some simple DrivePool settings changes to determine where the problem might be. Under your Pool Options, you can make sure that Network I/O boost, as drashna suggested, is turned on under Performance and you can temporarily turn off Real-time duplication and turn off Balancing to see if anything changes.

Yep, looks good! Thanks! I used to use the first iteration of Hyper-V but not with DrivePool or Scanner. I remember that you had to set a disk to Offline in Disk Management before you could pass it through to a VM, but I am not sure if that is still the case in Hyper-V 2012.