Rob Manderson
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Posts posted by Rob Manderson
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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? :-)
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On 1/21/2021 at 2:15 AM, gtaus said:
Amazon.com has had a special going on with renewed 4TB HDDs for $60.00 which have 5 year warranties. I bought a few of those because they were NAS drives and the 5 year warranty is better than the 2 year warranty I was getting on my new drives. So far, the drives have all checked out fine. They also report 0 hours on the renewed drives and no SMART warnings. Don't know if buying renewed drives will prove to be a good investment, but I am not getting 5 years out of my newest bunch of drives with only 2 year warranties. So, at least I am getting 5 years covered with the renewed drives.
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.
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On 2/26/2021 at 9:50 AM, bejhan said:
After a bit of research, I've discovered that even though the maximum value of an attribute is 255, manufacturers choose a maximum value that suits them (usually a nice round number). In WD's case, they have chosen 200 (200 / 255 = 78.4%). I have an HGST drive that seems to be using 100 instead which results in 39.2%.
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%.
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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.
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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.
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1 hour ago, KingfisherUK said:
Well, I finally bit the bullet and replaced/upgraded all my drives - I now have only 3 drives more than 141 days old and the oldest of those is just over 3 years old so should keep me going for a while!
You're a brave person! :-)
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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.
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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 :-)
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Nope - as far as I'm concerned even one bad sector is reason enough to replace the entire drive.
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I have the following scenario.
I have one pool with x2 duplication turned on for all folders/files. No balancing or file placement rules (stock standard out of the box install with no customisations). Let's call this the Primary Pool.
I have another pool which contains a copy of all the files in the first pool but without duplication. Let's call this the Secondary Pool. The file and folder structure exactly matches that of the Primary Pool - in fact it was copied using RoboCopy with the /MIR option.
What I'm thinking of doing is creating a new pool and adding the Primary and Secondary pools to it, then turning on x2 duplication between the two sub-pools (i.e., at the top pool level). I'm sure this will work but what worries me is whether DrivePool itself will consider the pools to be equivalent and therefore not attempt to do any balancing between the two immediately following the pool creation. The secondary pool consists of SMR drives.
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You can run the 2016 WSEE (Windows Server Essentials Experience) on 2019 - I upgraded my server this very weekend to 2019 and still have client backup, dashboard etc. See here
for the dirty details. It isn't for the faint hearted though. At the very least you'll need to be able to do a clean 2016 install and stop before configuring the WSEE component in order to grab the unmodified files and registry entries. Then you get to do a 2019 install and copy a bazillion files etc before running the configuration. But it definitely does work. I did client backups and server backup last night with no issues. And, being a paranoid kind of bloke, I did a bare metal reinstall of a scratch machine from the client backup and it worked just fine.
In a side note - I was immensely impressed at how DrivePool and Scanner handled the move - I just entered my keys, it noticed that it was the same hardware and instant authorisation with no impact (so far as I can see) on the three other Scanner licences and two other DP licenses I have running. I wish other companies were this smart about licensiing.
Note to Christopher - I don't know if I've broken site etiquette by posting this - I hope not. But if I have I'll completely understand if you delete this post.
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That's exactly how it works. Disconnect, install and activate, reconnect drives, install drivepool and Bob's your uncle. I wish other software were as easy to deal with as DrivePool. You *may* have to reactivate the license - depends on whether it notices a sufficiently significant change in the system. However, the trial license will give more than ample time to work through that issue with CoveCube.
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Heh - I have triplication turned on - for the same reason you went duplicated. Started out with ~8TB duplicated and went to triplication - it took 3 days and that was without a single one of those damn SMR drives installed.
I've given up on the SMR drives - nothing will make them behave. Yep, other peoples experience may differ - I can only go by what I see and what I see is that anywhere between 20 and 100 GB of continuous writes is all they'll take before they slow to ~500KB/s write speeds. Leave them powered up for 24 hours with no further writes and they're *still* sitting at ~500KB/s. 48 hours? Still ~500KB/s. Patience ran out at that point.
I won't be buying another SMR drive any time soon and the 4 I have are sitting there unused on a shelf. I think I'll end up throwing them out. The thing is that the SSD optimizer didn't seem to help. After all, if I add them to a pool the expectation is that I can do some balancing to spread the data around. What if one of my non SMR drives fails and needs to be removed? The SMR drives will be the targets and the same issue arises - it will take weeks (months?) to remove the failing drive because copying to the SMR drives takes so long. For my use case the SMR drives are totally unsuitable.
I ended up spending the extra bucks (which wasn't all that much) and installing Toshiba X300 4TB drives.
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Hmmm and now I don't have the Stablebit Scanner entry on the start menu at all.
Edit: Cancel that - I was looking at the wrong machine! Doh! I do still have tne start menu entry but I can't see it in the Stablebit GUI. I can't remember if it was there in the 1.x version I was running on WHS2011.
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Start Menu, Stablebit Scanner - Tools
(Well, at least on WSE2016).
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Ah, ok. So you recommend that I add (say two) of these drives to the existing array plus an SSD. My normal writes go first to the SSD and in the background it replicates to the SMR drives. Since those are empty they'll receive the writes until they match the other disks and after that writes will start consuming space on the existing drives? I say two drives because I have duplication turned on (one of the best features of DP). Since I have duplication on do I need to have two SSD's?
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Follow up. I think I found the reason why duplication was soooo slow. My legendary cheapness caught me out!
My array had consisted of a mixture of 2, 3 & 4TB drives. The new 4tb drive mentioned in the first post above was a Seagate ST4000DM004 drive, which is an SMR drive. Apparently these drives are intended for the archive market and have very slow write speeds if you're pumping a lot of data into them in a short time. This is one reason they're cheap (and why I chose them). Such a pity the Amazon product page makes no mention of this. Indeed I only found out by searching on the model number and reading a lot of posts by other users.
I replaced it with a Toshiba 4TB model and duplication (and write) speeds returned to normal. (This is a couple of months ago now and I apologise for taking so long to update this post).
Given the slow write speeds I'm at a loss to think of a usable scenario for this product. Surely commercial users don't take weeks or months to fill a 4TB drive? My measurements show that from clean (new volume/partition) they manage about 20GB of writing before significant slowdown occurs. After that write speeds can drop to less than a MB/s for large files (> 250MB). For small files (< 1MB) throughput can drop to under 100KB/s. Let the drive sit for a few minutes still powered up while it does it's thing and write speeds return until the next time you overflow their cache.
I have four of these things!
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Thanks for the reply. I think I'll live with a monthly reboot of the server.
Balancing activity
in General
Posted
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.