Rob Manderson

If you mean in the area on the bottom right under performance then yes, it's completely normal that it shows nothing. Methinks the performance area only shows activity not initiated by Drivepool itself.

It'll be seen as a regular shared drive. I've been doing this for years. No need for drivepool on the client pc's (those connecting to a share).

As long as Drivepool can see the drives it'll know exactly which pool they belong to. I move drives around regularly between my server and an external diskshelf and they always reconnect to the correct pools.

As umfriend says, deactivate the license on WHS2011, then install the latest version on the new machine. Enter the old license key and voila. Install the drives in the new machine and they'll be recognised. I've done this at least a dozen times over the last decade or so and DP has never yet failed to recognise a pool transplanted from one machine to the next.

Yep - Drivepool really doesn't care how the drive is connected - just so it is connected. I've moved drives from internal bays on my R710 to an external disk shelf and to usb enclosures (and back again) and they're always found.

If you buy the discounted extra license where you enter your existing key to prove you already have a license it simply increases the number of licenses available on that key. You enter the same key into the new installation and that uses up the second license. The key doesn't change. I've moved pools around from machine to machine and it doesn't care which machine it's on. I have 4 drivepool licenses and 6 Scanner licenses and they all use the same key.

Where are you located? I have 7 proboxes in total. One contains my backup set, one is for general usage and 5 are unused. Complete including the original box. If you're in the US you can have one for the price of shipping. I moved all my drives out of the Proboxes and into a NetApp DS4246 Disk Shelf but I was lucky, I bought just before Chia and the price was still reasonable. And I didn't think to add this until after posting :-) PM me if you're interested and we'll sort it out.

Very likely totally unrelated, but as I moved to my 7th Mediasonic Probox and 4th asmedia eSata controller I started noticing that I had to stop and restart scanner every few hours - it just got slower and slower. It got so bad I'd just restart scanner after the 11AM system drive backup. Unfortunately I didn't check memory consumption. However, 2 weeks ago I moved all my drives into a NetApp DS4243 disk shelf connected to the server via an LSI SAS2 Falcon 2008 HBA and suddenly I don't see those symptoms. Like I say, probably totally unrelated but you never know. How are you connecting to your drives? As an aside, I'm delighted with the NetApp diskshelf. Bought it on ebay for $224 and $132 shipping. I can understand the shipping - it's built like a tank and weighs almost as much. But it's hotswap (never had that before and didn't know how good it would be), came with 4 power supplies (it can run on one) and holds 24 3.5" drives. I ran 2 drives per Mediasonic Probox to keep drive temperatures down. In the NetApp diskshelf temperatures are about 2C higher than I was able to achieve with the Proboxes (when limited to 2 drives per). More importantly, they hardly vary, whatever the room temperature is. I'm hoping they won't break 40C once we hit the Phoenix summer. Oh, and it's pretty quiet - certainly much quieter than 7 Proboxes. Anyone want to buy some Proboxes? :-)

I tried those too. The first 3 were Hitachi 7,200 RPM drives. Been in the server for about 7 months and so far so good. Zeroed out smart data (not sure if that's a good idea or not) but so far they've passed 7 complete scans with no errors. I replace a drive if it gets even 1 reallocated sector. Can't complain about the price though they do run a little warmer than I'd like (all of 34 C). I've also bought 4 HGST 5,700 RPM drives though I've only had 'em a week. They run about 5 C cooler (as you'd expect with the reduction in speed). All 4 passed their first scanner pass and, significantly, they stayed at 28 C throughout the entire scan. Most drives warm up somewhat during a complete scan but not these. I'm quite happy with the HGST renewed/5 year warranty though time will tell if the warranty is honoured. I have no reason to believe it won't be if one fails within the next 5 years. I'm not overly fussed with the speeds. I can still saturate a 1GB/s connection and the server does media, not database.

And that explains something that's puzzled me for years - why I have short bars, even on new drives, when 'longer bars are better. Most of my drives are seagate and hgst - and an awful lot of them show 39.2% or 78.4%.

I'd be inclined to close out of the warning for now and remeasure the pool first. (Click on the Manage Pool text below the pie chart and select re-measure). If that doesn't resolve it.... hmmm not sure what I'd try next.

I'm pretty sure it's not harmful - I have 4 drives in an enclosure that was originally connected through USB3 and therefore considered external. A few months ago I switched the enclosure to eSata but the drives are still considered external. I assume it's because they were external when added to the pool. Nonetheless, it irks me that they are considered external! :-) But it's not so important that I'd be prepared to remove them one drive at a time and re-add (along with the balancing etc) just to get that internal designation. Anyway, I've seen no problems arising due to the incorrect designation and this is over a period of 3 or 4 months.

You're a brave person! :-)

I've been using Mediasonic 4 bay with eSata for about 9 years. I now have six of em and they're rock solid reliable. I use x3 duplication for the entire pool - about 37 TB in total with 26 TB free space (I really love the duplication feature of DP - in 9 years I've had drives fail but never ever lost a file). This is on Windows Server 2019 standard. I did, however, encounter one anomaly. I have 4x 4TB Seagate SMR drives and I had extremely slow transfer times when adding them to the pool and doing a rebalance. At the time I had x2 duplication. I was getting duplication speeds in the 500K/sec range on eSata. It was so slow I gave up and the SMR drives sat unused for over a year. Eventually I put all four SMR drives into their own Mediasonic enclosure, connected to a different computer through USB 3, and ran a robocopy job weekly to duplicate the pool to the SMR's as a backup (using DP on the second computer to make the 4x 4 into a ~16 TB pool). I consistently got 100 MB/sec duplication speeds - even on the initial copy which involved copying 10 TB of data. Well, you know how it is, I had to know why. I still don't but earlier this year (2020) I added the 4x 4 SMR drives to my main pool, in the Mediasonic enclosure via USB3 and to my amazement I saw ~100 MB/sec balancing speeds. It was still x2 duplication at that time. Then I turned on x3 and let it rebalance/reduplicate. I still saw ~100 MB/sec to the SMR drives. So how could eSata be so slow and yet USB3 achieved the transfer rates one would expect? I don't know. CMR drives on eSata perform exactly as expected. I now have all Mediasonic enclosures on eSata - even the one with SMR drives. I add maybe 10 Gigs a week and that doesn't cause any slowdown. I don't do rebalances at all - when you're adding photos in the 10 Meg range the balancing evens things out pretty well and no drive contains more than a gig over what it's size would dictate. When you're talking 3, 4, 5 and 6 TB drives a gig is nothing. Even adding 1 gig video files evens out after a fortnight. DP is awesome! :-) I'm thinking it may be time to ditch the eSata interfaces (a decision aided by the fact that it seems to have dropped out of favour) and stick with USB3. It's fast and in the six or seven months I ran that SMR enclosure on USB3 I never saw a single dropout.

This is just a guess but.... the recycle bin is 'special'. It's not a real folder, it's a virtual folder. Ever noticed that the recycle bin is the one place in Windows where you can have two or more files with the same name in what looks like the same directory? I suspect DP may be getting confused by files having the same name. Or I may just be wrong :-)