4Frame

Hey Wayne, It doesn't work that way unfortunately. When you create a new pool, drivepool creates (hidden) folders on the two hard drives (called PoolPart.xxx). The files that are already on the two hard drives will not show up on N. The easiest way I would get your files on N would be to move the files from your E and F drives to the new N drive. Some people also take the files from each drive that are outside the PoolPart folder and just drag them into that folder. Hope that helps you a bit!

I haven't had any experience with torrenting directly to my pool, but that was a conscious decision on my part. My main pool consists of 4 disks that are only accessed for storing/retrieving VERY rarely, and they are set to go to sleep after 30 minutes. Obviously for me, I wouldn't want something like constant torrent activity keeping the drives awake (downloading, seeding, etc). So I came up with a cool way to transfer torrents only after they've been completed. You may be asking "Why doesn't he just use the store downloading files here and completed files here option in utorrent", that wouldn't work for my setup since the completed location would be the pool, thus keeping the hard drives spun up from seeding. uTorrent stores completed downloads to my C drive (the C drive is always on anyway). Then, an app called SyncBackPro detects the completed torrent files and copies to my pool. Afterwards, I use another app to delete the original torrent from my C drive after 2 weeks (allows for seeding to almost always finish after downloading, cause I like to seed). The 2nd app is called Belvedere, which is an app that detects file changes and can perform an action when an event is triggered. So basically, I told Belvedere to delete files/folders that are older than 2 weeks. Works great for me, especially with huge multiGB downloads! Keeps my 4 pooled disks sleeping, until the torrent is complete, and then it does its thing in the background without me having to touch a thing. I do realize this might not help you or might be a complex setup, but I figured i'd throw in my two cents! Strange that some people have issues with direct pool torrenting though, I'll have to test that one day.

I highly recommend SyncBackPro from 2Brightsparks for syncing. It has an awesome feature which can trigger a sync automatically when it detects a file has been changed on the source, instantly syncing to the destination afterwards. So you don't even have to schedule anything. It's always on and always synced But you DID mention free, so... that might not work for you. Here's their site if you're interested though: http://www.2brightsparks.com/

So apparently the issue has fixed itself. By adding a few more gigs of files to the pool, it balanced itself automatically. "File Distribution Not Optimal" was the message I kept getting before, so perhaps it really wasn't optimal due to the size of my original folder (14.5GB) and 3 hard drives (1TB,1TB,2TB) .....? Maybe it wasn't able to optimally distribute them because the placement would always be off because of calculations. I have no clue. But needless to say I am now a happy camper. ----------------------------------

I don't think I am. Can you give a quick example of what that may be? Recycle bin has been emptied. I shut down the drivepool service, showed all hidden files, went to each of the 3 drives and removed the .covefs folders. I then restarted the service, tried re-balancing, and still nothing...

done, enabled file system logging, hit the re-balance button, it didn't rebalance. and then I zipped the new logs and submitted.

Can file/folder security permissions ever block drivepool from moving things from disk to disk? Anyway, I will just wait for the team to check the log files and hopefully there's something going on that's fixable.

I did try clicking the arrow, many times. it gives a "Re-balance" option. When I click that, it seems like it starts. It indicates "Balancing" and after 15 seconds or so, it goes back to "File distribution not optimal" with the green bar incomplete (like the screenshot)

For this specific pool, it has only 1 folder that is duplicated. The rest of the pool is empty right now (only has the one folder I mentioned). Balancing is completely default, except I uncheck "Not more often than every:" on all my pools. Nothing else gets touched. I have 3 pools total, and the other two are working great. http://puu.sh/cdAil/7413c1fca6.png <- Screenshot of Folder Duplication window Note: the owncloud folder isn't the actual program/databaseSQL folder. Only the storage of uploaded files from users are here. Btw this pool was fine until a few days ago when I added a new hard drive and removed the old one. Then the "File distribution not optimal" message began showing. So I thought deleting all volumes (using disk management. I also diskpart'ed and cleaned all 3 disks) and creating the pool from scratch again would fix it. I then copied the owncloud folder back to the pool, and this is where I'm at right now.

Okay, I will do this now. I'm suspecting I have a corrupted disk service. Maybe VDS. I've been having strange file problems for a while now on this install (haven't reinstalled since earlier this year and i've done LOTS of changes to services, app installls/uninstalls, shares, disabling VSS and re-enabling, uninstalling windows features and reinstalling, etc etc) I feel maybe a fresh install would fix all of this. Another issue (could be related) that i've been having is when I open resource monitor, it will show the wrong drive letter for all activity on the "Disk" tab. For ex. I have a single disk (regular disk, unpooled) with the J:\ drive letter Everything in resource monitor for my pooled drives (E, F, G) is always something like J:6\poolpart J:9\poolpart J:4\poolpart and J:\ is totally unrelated to my pooled drives. even for C:\ drive activity it would show something like J:2\prorgram files\program_here\file.dll I'm going to upload the logs to the link you provided above right now.

Edit: The message has since changed from "Duplication Inconsistant" to "File Distribution not optimal" Am I just paranoid that the duplication isn't optimal, and that if I add some more data, it will "soon" be optimal? I'm just so confused...

I had a read through the manual and searched the forums but still didn't get the answer I needed. If I have a pool that consists of 2 physical disks, and I enable 2x duplication, that means files are being duplicated twice (one in 1st drive, 1 in 2nd). Which would mean 2x would protect against 1 drive failure. I'm assuming it isn't possible to set 3x duplication for only 2 disks. Can 3x duplication be set for 3 disks? The reason I ask is because, I have a pool of 3 disks that has 2x duplication. When done that way, there are no errors and "Pool Organization" has a solid green bar all across. On this same pool, if I increase the duplication to 3x. It beings duplicating, and after duplicating it starts balancing. The balancing will stop pretty quickly and the green bar will decrease in length with a lighter color and say "Duplication Inconsistant". I've re-measured, tried rebalancing, but nothing fixes. Am I doing something wrong? Or is 3x duplication on 3 drives just not possible? Maybe I'm not understanding the true concept of duplication yet. Edit: I also tried "Reset all settings" before changing the duplication level to 3x. This screenshot is after a full reset, and changing the to 3x.

Great info. In my case I'm using MySQL in phpmyadmin but I'd like to use Windows Server Backup to perform scheduled backups of the entire application directory which obviously includes the SQL database in there. That shouldn't be a problem I'm guessing?

Thanks Christopher, and that brings up a good question for me. How does one go about backing up an SQL databse (automatically)? I know it might be different for all databases, but this one is on owncloud, which is kind of an all-in-one solution. I've found that copying the entire program installation directory (when the database isnt running) copies everything and when run on another drive the database is up and running flawlessly.

Hey guys, was wondering if this is "safe" to do? I want the reliability of duplication (just in case a drive dies) on two or more drives for hosting an owncloud database, but I'd like to make sure drivepool wouldn't do anything quirky with having something like an sql database being written to the pool 24/7. I do notice that Drivepool in itself does take a bit of CPU overhead when doing some tasks. Is this something Drivepool could handle/worth it in the long run?

Sorry to bump this thread again but I do have a question regarding a pooled drive being ignored. My main pool consists of 4 Disks with 2x duplication. When I first set up the pool, all data was being balanced equally among the disks. Now after one of the 2TB drives died, I had to remove it from the pool (obviously couldnt do a safe remove since drive was totally dead). 2 days later I added a brand new 2TB drive back into the pool. It's still empty and the balancing graph isn't changing. They used to look more "equalized" before.

That really sucks, and hope you're able to recover your lost data. I, too, lost a drive the other day (WD2002FYPS, Mfg Date: 14 May 2012) and it sucked. It died with no imminent SMART warnings at all. But I suspect it died because of the high load cycle count (which still baffles me, as this is an enterprise-grade drive). I use Drivepool in combination with SyncBack pro to mirror/backup the entire pool to an external disk. On SyncBack I set up versioning so that if files are missing/deleted on the next source->destination check, they will get placed into a versioning directory. At the very least, if a drive died on my pool, the next Sync on SyncBack will show me what files I lost, if any, and I could recover them.

Hi Benoire, In Scanner, you could try right clicking on a drive, going to "Disk Control" and scrolling to the bottom where you will see "Standby timer" and try setting standby times there. This worked for my setup using 'unsafeDirectIO', but depending on the card itself it still might not pass the command through to the disks.

Hey guys, so I was thinking about this being a possible feature in a future release for the developers. Would come in handy for headless servers/servers with hot-swap enclosures, etc Basically, you could tell Drivepool to automatically add a newly installed drive to a pool when you plug in a drive. If you have only 1 pool, it would automatically add it to that pool. If you have more than 1 pool, it could be chosen like this for example: If a new disk is installed, automatically add it to the following pool [ ] Pool 1 [X] Pool 2 [ ] Pool 3

I totally forgot that I do have an SSD on another system that's being scanned just fine by Scanner so you were right. After some testing I found out it's my Marvell controller that's hosting the SSD on my main desktop which seems to be problematic. After switching to the Intel controller everything's fine, thank goodness!

A strange thing happened today when Scanner was attempting to do its scanning of the drives on my desktop system today. A little bit of backstory: I have an SSD as a boot drive and a WD10EZRX as 2nd internal drive, along with an external enclosure via eSATA housing 3 other random old hard drives. I never enabled file or surface scanning of my SSD because I felt this was a general wear for the SSD when it didn't really need it, and I felt SMART queries were good enough. Edit: This desktop is running Windows 7 Ultimate x64 Well, today, I figured "Hey, let me let Scanner do its thing and I'll re-enable File and Surface scanning for the SSD. Shouldn't be too bad." I've never had an issue beforehand on this PC, ever. So Scanner begins scanning, and I'm just casually browsing the web when I decide to open a program. All of a sudden, no program is launching when I click on them via the start menu. After a few seconds, hovering the mouse over the start menu caused it to show the spinning "loading" circle. Right clicking on the taskbar to try and open task manager yielded the same result. Now the taskbar has a spinning "loading" circle anywhere on it. I then tried to do a CTRL+ALT+DEL. Screen turned black, with spinning circle, nothing. I looked at hard disk activity LED on my case and it was in fact, completely active (constant light). This definitely never happened until I enabled file and surface scanning on the SSD. I managed to restart into windows fast enough before Scanner did its automatic scan again, and disabled scanning on the SSD. This literally scared the heck out of me. I'm not sure if the developers would like a log file of anything (if so, please let me know where to find them), but I figured I would bring this up to everyone's attention. Perhaps be careful with SSD's for scanning?

Thanks Chris. You are helping me achieve my goal of a perfect storage setup day by day. BTW, saw an episode of home server show on youtube and you were on it. Awesome job on that! : )

I narrowed everything down to Scanner. Drivepool is perfect on its own, doesnt query any of my hard drives. Since I have a RocketRaid 642L using the UnsafeDirectIO option, it seems scanner can't tell when the drives are on standby so it will mark the drives as "Active" and constantly query disks and keep them awake. I could set SMART query throttling to a time limit, but the max is 1440 minutes (24 hours) and that's still not what I want to do. I do have the work window set but this will wake up the drives at 3AM and keep them on untill 6AM because of the constant smart queries. I think the main issue here is my RAID card... I need a raid card that supports DirectIO even though I wouldnt be using the raid functionality, it would be nice just to have the raid option if i ever needed it. If not, plain jane sata card would do. I want the true versatility of Scanner to shine through, which is, if a disk is sleeping, let it sleep unless i wake it up. if the disk wakes up, you can query SMART data until the disk goes back to sleep.

Would you still recommend this card for use?

Ok so I think I might know what's going on. The drives are going to sleep, and I just watched both drives go to sleep right now. I launched Scanner when the drives fell asleep and checked the "Power" tab, and of course it's reading the drives as still "Active", which means, in 30 mins, it will query the drives anyway which will power them up. I am using the UnsafeDirectIO to be able to query smart info from them, so I'm wondering if that's the issue. Although, if my memory serves me correctly, I could almost swear Stablebit Scanner was able to query my drive's power state perfectly fine before. Will continue testing!