crankycowboy

It seems like there isn't a lot of activity on this forum anymore like there was when I initially started using these products. I'm wondering if I should consider another route with so few users utilizing this software anymore. I really would appreciate some input if someone had some suggestions.

Hello! I'm moving my server to a new rack and PC. I know that you can just unregister drivepool, install Drivepool on the new PC and just move all the disks, and it will read the existing pool etc. However, I have a situation where I need to be able to view settings/files on the existing server and sort of go back and forth. I think it will require me to remove a disk from my current pool, move the disk and add it to a new pool on the new PC, and then copy data over, and continue to do this until all data is moved from the "old" pool to the new. What is the best way to go about things this way?

So, I'm a long time user of both drivepool and scanner. I love them....and any issues I have had in the past have been worked through by this wonderful community. I'm turning to you guys again for input. I use drivepool on my home media server. Recently, I had a power supply issue on my main desktop pc that resulted in burning up my SSD and my data drives. I didn't have any backups or anything in place so I lost a lot of data. I figured why not just add a pool with two data drives and have them mirror each other. Unfortunately , I had this thought after I had already reinstalled everything and got my pc running (which had now been several months). So here's the problem. I have my ssd (c drive) and my data drive (d drive). I have "moved" my "my documents", "users", "app data", and all those files to be stored on my "d" drive. I also have most of my programs installed to the d drive. Well I can add this d drive to my pool; however, all the data is outside of the pool. Can I just "copy" all the data to the pool folder, change the drive letter to a different letter (or no letter at all) and rename the pool to the original d drive...and have all the system files and other folders work as needed? I won't be able to do this while the PC is running I suspect because some of the files will be "in use". Any suggestions on how to proceed would be of great help. Thanks!

Thanks again Umfriend. I'm running a duplication consistency scan via the command line exe you referred me to. I will report back after that is done. Just some additional info: the "unduplicated" files seem to be growing. They are up to 277 GB now (see attached picture). I'm really perplexed as to what is going on here.

Well my main ssd drive that hosts all the system files isn't part of my pool. These "new" unduplicated files just showed up on my new drive only. Would there be additional hidden system files within the pool? Is there a way to see what files are in the "unduplicated" portion?

Jaga, sorry, I should have mentioned all the steps I had tried. Yes, I gave that a shot as well. It went through everything but came back the same. Thanks for the input though!

What I did on mine to work around this issue: Most of my drives in my pool, I don't assign drive letters as I don't want a million drives showing up in windows. However, on one of the drives, I created a drive letter. I added it to the pool etc. After everything was added, measured, balanced etc....I went into the "root" of the drive and created the database folder that Plex looks to. This is "outside" of the pool; therefore it isn't affected. Of course this data can't be duplicated via drivepool, but I'm not really worried about the metadata etc for plex. I've had it setup this way for a couple years now and it works great after having the same issues detailed above. Hope this helps someone else.

**Disclaimer** I did actually search before asking this, but didn't find a concrete answer. I had a drive showing bad sectors. I removed the drive from the pool and RMA'd the drive. When the new drive arrived, I added it to the pool, re-measured and re-balanced. Everything went smooth and seems to be fine. I have duplication set to "pool file duplication". After everything "settled" after installing the new drive....the new drive has a little over 200 GB of "unduplicated" data. I don't recall having this unduplicated section before. I don't have any files set in the settings not to duplicate. Just wondering why this is happening and how to rectify? Thanks in advance!

Chris....as usual (you have helped me many times), thank you very much. As mentioned in my first post, I'm on Windows 10, 64 bit. I'm running the latest versions of Drivepool (2.1.1.561) and Scanner (2.5.1.3062). The new drive I just installed shows almost 26k worth of damaged sectors. I told drivepool to remove it from the pool and it did. The drive is still connected, and it has been running the burst test for 16 hours (how long should I let it run)? With that many bad sectors on a new drive, should I just opt to return it to the vendor (newegg)? I'm almost out of space on my server (about 750GB left), but do have another HD I can add into the pool, but have to remove the other new drive as I'm out of ports on my motherboard. Looking into an external multi-bay enclosure. Please advise. Thanks again! Eric

Good morning. I've been a longtime user of Driverpool/Scanner. I have a small home server used mostly for media throughout my home (Plex media server). One of my drives has periodically shown "damaged" sectors and in scanner it states "not predicting immenant failure....etc), I have everythign in my pool duplicated, so I hadn't worried about it too much. I had another drive that was overheating quite a bit, and eventually Scanner detected a problem and on that drive it did detect imminant failure and automatically started migrating the data off the drive by rebalancing. As a result, I purchased another 3 tb drive, removed the "imminant failure drive" from the pool. Placed the new drive in the system and added it to the pool. This is where things get weird. Once added to the pool, Drivepool "measured" and then rebalanced....and then I restarted the computer (normal Windows update stuff...I'm on windows 10 btw). When it restarted, the computer went to diskchk and got to 65% and stayed there forever. I eventually just restarted and told it to skip disk checking and it booted into windows. I went to scanner and told it to scan the new drive. It did, and it found damaged sectors on the new disk as well, with the same "not predicting imminant failure" message. Now, drivepool starts remeasuring and trying to rebalance again. I let the rebalance run for 16 hours and it only got to .05 percent. I'm not certain what is causing the problem (new drive that is "damaged" or older drive that is "damaged" or both. Furthermore, I'm not sure what to do to take the system out of the state of flux of rebalancing/remeasuring. Again, I have everythign duplicated, but have no idea how to proceed without losing anything. Please help! Eric

As always, thank you Christopher. If you recall, I was having some problems with my circuit breaker "popping" quite often, and then my pool would have to "re-measure". I got a UPS as you suggested, but I think a diode on the circuit board of the HD probably popped trying to protect the drive from the constant power surges...I'm assuming this is why I had multiple drive failures in a short period. In any case, thank you for you advice. Sounds like although unfortunate...I'm back on the right path.

I have the worst luck. I had been having some problems with drivepool (turns out it was a failing disk that was the problem). I removed the disk from the pool and all problems went away. Unfortunately, I had to turn off duplication when I lost the disk intending to get another ASAP. As luck would have it, I lost a 2nd disk about 10 days later (with no duplication). Scanner didn't detect any problems beforehand, and drivepool just suddenly reported "disk missing from pool". I pulled the disk out and verified that it's not spinning up at all. I am going to get a replacement circuit board and have the firmware transferred in hopes of resurrecting. My question is: I use my pool primarily for a media server. I'm not sure what data I lost; however, some of my automated processes have stopped working, so I recognized some of the config files were missing, so I was going to reinstall. However, now I'm getting a "access denied" and permission needed errors when I try to write to the pool. Nothing I have done resolves it. I'm assuming this is by design to protect the pool while the disk is missing? I also assume maybe it would resolve these issues if I "remove" the damaged disk from the pool. However, would I be able to "re-add" the disk back to the pool and it would be recognized with the data it previously had if the repair attempt is successful? Or would I just need to connect the drive up and manually move the data back over? Am I on the right track with what I'm thinking here? Thanks in advance.

Well I formatted and everything seemed to be resolved....but now it has reared it's ugly head again. I think I have narrowed down part of the problem. I have a huge draw on my office with all the electrical equipment in there, so a breaker will pop pretty often (this new house has AFI breakers which tend to pop more easily with dc power supplies). My breaker will trigger about once a week or more. Yes, I know this is part of a larger problem, which I'm trying to address. But every time the breaker "pops", drivepool goes back to "measuring". Which takes two days or more typically. During this time, everything goes to a crawl again. If the breaker triggers again during this time, it extends things. Should drivepool start "measuring" every FREAKING time power is lost unexpectedly? Please advise as I've loved the community and Christopher has been a saint, but I just can't keep dealing with not being able to access my pool while "measuring" all the time. Like I said, I'm addressing the "afi breaker issue"...but this is crazy. Let me know your thoughts please.

I had to go out of town on business so this got put on the back burner. However, it's still <somewhat> of an issue. I probably just need to format to resolve the SFC findings (hopefully). Is anyone familiar with the "refresh your PC" option in Windows 8? Anyway, a couple of observations. While I was gone, the performance increased substantially on the pool <not quite back to where it was, but much better>. However, recently resorted back to the poor performance. I noticed that when the pool is performing terribly, it is "measuring" (which typically takes a day and a half). During this time, it acts like it did in the video above. When it's done and the bar at the bottom of the interface turns from the yellow "measuring" to blue...it gets MUCH better. However in a day or two, it starts "measuring" again. What initiates the "measuring" procedure if I am not doing it manually? Just back to the troubleshooting side of this and wanted to ask since that is dramatically impacting my issue. I will probably resinstall windows in the near future, but would also like to take any steps to avoid being in this same boat after the install. Thanks!

Thanks again for sticking with me on this Christopher. I don't have any removable devices or card readers...no usb drives or optical drives. I do have the typical peripherals (ie mouse, keyboard, etc connected via usb). I also have a PCI-e sata card for the additional drives. Ironically, the exclamation points in device manager are now gone, and now say they are "functioning properly". I haven't run a mem test <yet>. The chkdsk came back with no errors; however the sfc /scannow returned some errors: "Windows REsource Protection found corrupt files but was unable to fix some of them". Any idea what that is? In the event viewer, I do have some errors/warnings. One that jumped out at me was storahci error 129. Not sure what that is, but looks like it could be disk related. Another piece of information that could be helpful is I had disabled scanner just because some people have claimed compatibility issues with some hardware so I wanted to eliminate that. However when I re-enabled it, I have an error on one of my disks that looks like this: ST3000DM001-1CH166 - 3 warnings There are currently 18960 reallocated sectors on the hard disk. A reallocated sector is created when a sector cannot be read or written to. In such a case, the next time the sector is written to it is swapped in for a good one from the spare sector pool. Having reallocated sectors decrease read/write performance and indicates drive trouble. These are currently 232 unstable sectors on the hard disk. An unstable sector is a sector that can't be read. The drive will automatically swap the bad sector for a good one whenever new data is written to it, however, the original data may be lost. These are currently 232 uncorrectable sectors on the hard disk. An uncorrectable sector is counted when the drive cannot read or write to a sector. This can indicate mechanical drive trouble. This is on a drive that has quite a bit of data on it. Would you suggest "moving " the data to another drive? Any additional help is greatly appreciated as this whole thing seems to be falling apart and it makes it painfully obvious how much my family relies on that media server Thanks again!

Thanks again Christopher. I did the manual install as you suggested. Didn't seem to help...actually if anything, things seem to be worse now as "scanner" is stuck on the "initializing" screen and drivepool has been stuck on "starting services" for the last 15 minutes. Although, I can access my pooled drive, but exhibiting the same slow behavior. I was thinking of disconnecting each drive one at a time and restarting to see how things shape up. Another "weird" thing, when I was in device manager after the "reinstall" I noticed some weird looking "errors" See attached. I have errors associated with portable devices which look to be drives. It says windows has stopped the device because it has reported problems. Another weird caveat is that I don't have anything assigned letter "g" but it's reporting a problem. This is the strangest thing! On the burst test, when I started it (when I could still get scanner to start), it said to run for at least 24 hours on each disk...is this what you were suggesting? Regarding the trial vs licensed...I know it was completely coincidental. I was just trying to state that everything had worked as expected at one point and hadn't been displaying this odd behavior from the get go. Any other suggestions? Thanks! Just an update, both scanner and drivepool have started. Displaying the same behavior, but both are running.

I have posted a video showing the crazy "lag" associated with accessing the pool on the host computer (my server). That video can be found here: Obviously with that type of delay accessing the pool on the host, streaming over my network has no chance. I have copied a folder out of the pool and placed it directly on one of the disks within the pool and shared that drive over my network and then shared the folder with plex. I can stream fine again, so directly related to the pool for sure. As previously stated, I have enabled file logging and have sent that file to you. I also tried the option you suggested below regarding filters. That result is attached here as well. No anti-virus installed, and no disk tools or any other utilities installed/running. I try to keep my server as stripped down as possible. Something that is weird regarding this situation is I initially just did the "trial" version of both drivepool and scanner. Both worked fine for my entire demo period. I ran it in "trial" mode until the trial period only had one day left and then purchased both. Almost immediately, i started having problems. I'm not insinuating that my issues have anythign to do with the license, but just wanted to verify that functionality hasn't been flawed the entire time....Please help! As this simply isn't functional for me in it's current state and I need to figure out what direction I need to go with this. Thanks again Christopher!

Thanks again Christopher, I have enabled logging. The problem is there isn't a moment where there is a defined error. Accessing the pool (even on the host machine) is just extremely slow. I have noticed that now when streaming, it will stop to buffer or freeze completely where it would NEVER do that before. I'm assuming it's because plex on the host server is having trouble reading the data (same delays I can witness live when on that machine). Like I previously said, if I move the data out of the pool and place it directly on one of the disks that's part of the pool, the problems goes away...so it appears to be directly related to drivepool's pool. Should I just let it run for a while and try to access various disks or stream data and then send the log? Or what do I need to do since I'm not technically seeing an error, just delays in access. Please advise. Thanks!

Thanks for the replies guys. And thanks once again "Darshna"! Actually, to the contrary, it doesn't seem to be a network related issue, and I can replicate the problem on the host machine itself. For example, if I open a folder with all my photos (probably 100 folders, each with several pictures in it), initially when I open the directory it says "this folder is empty", and then the scrubber bar at the top slowly starts filling and the "please wait" icon (used to be the hourglass) starts spinning, and eventually the folders start showing up and the thumbnails become visable. I had a similar problem where I had a symbolic link "forwarding" my appdata directory to "Plex" to the large "pool" drive. None of my movie posters or data from that folder were showing up within plex. I read that Drivepool had problems with the symbolic links and Plex (in the plex forums), so I copied the data to a drive within the pool but placed the data directly on the drive, and the problem was fixed. As a test, I did the same thing with my "pictures" directory described above, and then re-mapped the drive to my network. On the host itself, the folder refreshed very quickly and also did so over my network. This appears to be directly related to drivepool and the symtoms didn't start until I migrated away from storage spaces. Oh, and in quick settings on drivepool, I selected "server" which auto-populates the Network IO boost and read striping. And to answer your question, my server is an I5 3570 3.5 GHz with 8GB ram. Running windows 8.1. I started reading the link you referenced, but it's over 20 pages so I'll have to continue with that shortly. Any other suggestions to my particular problem since it doesn't seem to be network related?

I recently migrated from Storage spaces to drivepool mostly for the rebalancing feature. A big thanks to Chris for helping me get converted over. He answered more questions than he should have had to and even responded to me at all hours. In any case, I'm migrated over and functioning. However, I have noticed a dramatic drop in performance regading the pool I run a media server with about 20 tb of data within the pool (mostly movies, music, tv shows etc). The server is a dedicated system that is accessed via various clients (Roku, PCs, apple TV, mobile devices etc). On my main PC, I have the pooled "drive" mapped and can access it. When I click the mapped drive there is about a 3-4 second delay before the contents show up. And when I click on any folder it shows it's empty....and then 3-4 seconds later it shows the contents. A similar issue is now happening when I try to watch a movie on a client (such as a Roku). It will stream fine and then it will freeze and say "loading". Furthermore, on the server itself, occasionally when I click on the pool (drive "d"), it displays similar behavior (there is a delay before showing the contents). I NEVER had this or similar issues with Storage spaces so I have to assume the issue is directly related to drivepool. I am also running scanner. Right now, I don't have any files "duplicated" as I was working through "baby steps". Any help or suggestions are greatl appreciated. Thanks in advance! Cranky