[Physically remove a pool on external disk without shutting the server down?]

As the title says.

I have a 24TB pool (with duplication on) permanently connected to Server 2016 essentials.  I have another 16TB pool in an external cabinet which lives elsewhere in case of that fire that's going to happen some day.   On a monthly basis I bring that pool in, connect it and use robocopy to sync.  Then, when the sync is done it seems necessary to shut the server down to have the pool correctly shut down.  If I just remove the pool DrivePool wants to remeasure the next time it's connected.

Is there some command I've missed where I can tell DrivePool to do it's thing to mark the pool clean and disconnect it without shutting the server down yet not require a remeasure the next time it's connected?

 

On reflection it seems this probably isn't anything to do with DrivePool as such.  The external cabinet is connected via an eSata port and doesn't appear in the list of 'disconnectable' devices the way a USB device would.  So it's probably a Windows thing - Windows won't necessarily mark the filesystem clean unless it shuts down cleanly.

Rob

[Reformatted Drives not appearing in the Non-Pooled list]

Aha!  Found a hint to the answer on about page 86 of this forum.  I deleted the volume and created a new one and voila - there the new drive is in the non-pooled section.  I think volume id's are the culprit!

[Reformatted Drives not appearing in the Non-Pooled list]

I was seeing extremely long duplication times in my new server (much much longer than in the older machine that died - we're talking a week to duplicate about 500 MB). 

So I bought 4 new 4TB drives and a new enclosure (this was the perfect excuse).  Copied the entire contents of the old pool to a new pool.  The intention was to reformat the older drives, create a new pool using them and copy the data back, then add the new drives to the recreated pool and end up with a much larger pool.

So I took the new pool offline to reduce mistakes.  Stopped the DrivePool service, uninstalled drive pool and rebooted.  Then I did an NTFS quick format of each of the original drives.  Reinstalled DrivePool, brought the newer pool back online and sure enough, DrivePool sees the newer pool and all it's data.  But it does not see the older drives.  StableBit scanner can see them but they do not appear in the non-pooled list.  Nor does the old pool appear in the list of pools visible to DrivePool in the UI.

The drives appear in Disk Manager and are Basic volumes.  Is there some metadata hanging around from the earlier install before I reformatted the drives that DrivePool is using to exclude the volumes from the non-pooled list?

Help!

 

[Duplication time is extremely long!]

My motherboard recently died and it became time to move from DP on WHS2011 to DP on Server 2016 Essentials.  So I did the install, added appropriate drivers for my eSata cards etc, installed DP and up it comes.  Everything working fine.  The entire array is set to duplication.

At which point I decided to add a 4TB drive to DP and withdraw, one at a time, a pair of 2TB drives so I could assign them as a separate pool for use as a backup target folder.  So I added the 4TB drive, no problem.  And then I think I shot myself in the foot!  I've replaced bad drives a number of times over the years, and I've always done the immediate removal followed by automatic duplication and it's always worked.  So, even though the drive wasn't bad, I did the same.

It now reports (for a total pool size of 25.5 TB) the following when measure runs.

Free space 10.1TB

Unduplicated 1.31 TB

Duplicated 14.1 TB

Other 6.53 GB

The numbers look about right.

However, after the measure, it goes into checking and at about the 25% point it starts trying to duplicate.  And then it sits there for what feels like forever.  If I hover over the bouncing bar at the bottom of the GUI I can see it's working on a particular folder in the Video area.  When I switch to that folder there's a file named (random guid).copytemp where random guid really is just a random guid.  I can see, by comparing reported file sizes, that it's a copy of a particular file in the same folder.  The file is about 250 MB in size.  After about 15 minutes it finishes with that folder and moves on to another, and I see a new file in that folder with random guid etc.  Go back to the first folder and sure enough the copytemp file is gone.

The problem isn't any particular folder, it seems to be that as it's catching up with duplication it really is duplicating, just frustratingly slow.  If it's taking about 15 minutes to duplicate a 250 MB file and I have 1.31 TB to duplicate I'm wondering if it'll finish in time for me to see it (I'm in my mid 60's! :-)  ).

Specific data.  I'm using 2.2.3.939 beta on Windows Server 2016 Essentials x64 .  I had initially installed 2.2.2.934 with the same behaviour.  My storage is 3 Mediasonic Probox enclosures with 9 sata drives of varying sizes (a mix of 2TB, 3TB and 4TB drives).  I'm using Mediasonic ProBox HP1-SS3 2 Port External SATA III PCI Express Cards (asm1061x drivers).  These are the same enclosures and cards I've been using successfully with WH2011 for about 5 years.  I doubt any of the drives is that old though (I seem to replace one or two per year but they're cheap and the great thing about DP is you don't much care given how painless a replacement is).  I have realtime duplication turned off.

The asm 1061x drivers are actually the same drivers I used on WHS2011, i.e., for server 2008 but, apart from duplication, my system is having no problems.  No instability, no BSODs,  throughput in the 50 MB/s range.  Serviio (a DLNA media server running on the same machine) finds and serves up videos just fine.  I doubt it's a hardware issue.  I had been using the WHS2011 version of DP (somewhere in the 1.3.5.xxx range) on the old machine and that's what I'm comparing current behaviour against.

Regarding that throughput figure above - that was measured copying a 2GB file from the pool to a non pooled drive across the network while the duplication is in progress. I don't think throughput is the issue here!  I should add that when I'm using files on DP (i.e., something other than DP is working on the pool) I see disk activity on the drive enclosures.  When DP is the only thing touching the pool I see no activity for minutes on end, followed by a brief flurry of activity and then a long lull again.  Pressing the 'increase priority' chevron in the DP GUI doesn't seem to change that at all.

Any ideas on what the problem might be?

 

Edit:  I left it running ov ernight - I now have 1.28TB unduplicated and 14.2 TB duplicated.  So it seems it *is* duplicating - just taking a very long time over it.