James

I have my client backups folder in my DrivePool drive - it all seems to work ok. (I realise that doesn't solve your problem, but it does mean it's possible!)

I'm using a Samsung HN-M500MBB 2.5" drive (as the system disk) and my Recalibration Retries is also constantly increasing. It's currently on 529! The drive is showing no other signs of failure and spent a long time in my HTPC as the TV recording storage disk.

That all makes sense - thanks for answering my extra questions. I shall be purchasing my license in the near future!

Still interested to know the answers to the questions above, but thought I would update to say that I now have "Standby" statuses in my Power column. I had to use the SMART throttling. I set "Throttle queries" to 25 minutes and the Windows hard disk standby time to 20 minutes. I also have the "Do not query if the disk has spun down" option checked.

What a fantastically detailed reply. Thank you! A couple of follow-up questions: 1. When the standby timer checkbox is semi-selected (grey), what does that mean? 2. Would you recommend that I use Windows to put the disks in standby, or the disk firmware functionality?

I am trying to get a better understanding of the hard drive spindown/standby options in Scanner. My situation: I'm using the latest Betas of Scanner and DrivePool on Windows Server 2012 Essentials. I have two data disks which I've added to a single pool. In the Windows power options I have set the hard drive standby time to 30 minutes. Here are my questions: When I right click a drive in the drive list there is an option called "Put into Standby". If I click this then I hear the drive spindown and the text in the Power column (you need to add this column by right-clicking headings) changes to "Standby or Active". This text will not change back to "Active" until I restart the service, regardless of whether the drive has spun up again. Is this a bug? Should this text reflect the standby status of the drive? If I select a drive and click "Disk control" at the bottom of the screen I find a couple of settings that mention standby, in particular "Standby timer", which has a semi-selected (grey) checkbox. How do these settings relate to the Windows power settings? Do I need to alter them? My end goal is to have my drives go into standby after 30 minutes idle time.