Carsten

I have two disk in an external ESATA enclosure and tried to scan both of them at once. The first is working, but the second just sayss "Waiting to scan". I unchecked all options in the Scanner / Throttling tab, and tried to stop and restart the scan, but still the scanner doesn't start.

How can I create a new folder and force it immediatly to a certain drive? I tried to add the new folder in the drive pool (which got placed on a random disk) and then use the folder placement in "Balance" to force this new empty folder on this certain disk. But even after several hours nothing happend. I then tried rebalance, but unfortunately this also takes hours, because it starts the very expensive completely rebalance with all space balancing rules instead of first obeying the rules where to place a folder. And after a complete day, the folder is stil on the wrong disk. One thing I need this for is when I add a new disk with data on it. Because copying 2-4 TB of data is really very slow and also a space problem, I want to create the DrivePool folder and then just move the data from out of the DrivePool directory on the same drive into the (hidden) DrivePool directory.

After logging of and on again the strange letter disappeared. I don't think it has to do something with dynamic disks and I never saw that before. But I found someone else in the net who had the same problem, but unfortunately the thread didn't reveal the reason or solution. So DrivePool is propably not the reason either. See: http://www.sevenforums.com/performance-maintenance/286853-w7-resource-monitor-shows-activity-wrong-drive.html Anyway the "problem" went away after a new logon,

Christopfer, thanks forSome more questions: Your wrote: This is intentional. It does have a "file scanner" to that will attempt to read and then save affected files to a new location. . 1) What does the the file scanner do exactly? If it can read the file after some retries, does it it the file to another location? Is this transparent for access to the Pool and does it copy it to another file name? What happens to pool integrity? 2) What happpens, when the scanner cannot read the file? Will it use information of a duplicated disk? 3) What happenes, when the pool tries to read from a duplicated file and one version of the file is not readable? Does it use the other disk and reduplicates the file by writing to it again? Maybe the scanning should be in DrivePool instead of the scanner? Is there an integrity check in drivepool which compares the duplicated file for binary identity? If yes, DrivePool could scan the drives and in case of read errors, just rewrite the file. In case of inkonsistencies (readable but binary different), it should either stop access to the fiel and let the use decide which file version to use, or just use any of the versions and overwrite the other. If there is more then one additional copy of the file, it could use the contents which is on the majority of drives. 4) Why is writing to a file remove the ability to recover it? It should only write successfully read data, i.e. a sector is not readable and let's say the scanner can read it after 20 tries, then it should write this sector immediately to force remapping. It should never write a sector which it can't read and which belongs to a file. 5) Basically there are two kinds of bad sectors: those in files and those in freespace. Bad sectors in free space can be overwritten immediately with zeros, for those in files you have to wait until you can read it or read it from a duplicated version and then write it. 6) To you point who to find exactly the sector: From the clustermap you should now which files belongs to which clusters or sectors. Then either just rewrite data in the specific position in the file via file system or use the microsoft defragmentation api.

As far as I understand, the scanner just reads data, and identifies unreadable sectors, and just reports problems it but does to fix them. Here is what I would expect: Case 1: unduplicated If it ever manages to read the sectors by several retries, it should write to the sector to force the drive firmware to replace the sector by a replacement sector and to ensure that the sector will not become unreadable again. There should also be a threshold for the number of repair operations to identify a failing drive, where write operations should be avoided as far as possible, but the user should just try to move all the data from the drive. Case 2 : duplicated a) Move everything away from the drive. There is already an option to do this. But but a single unreadable sectors on a 3-4TB drive does not make the drive completely unusable. So there should be another option : As there is a duplicate copy of the file on another drive, the specific sector can be read from the other drive and the scanner can repair the bad sectors by writing the data to the defective sector (or file). There should also be a threshold on the number of repair these operations. If this is met try to move everything off the drive. Can you please comment or maybe my view is not correct what really happens currently. Another thing would be to have a new function to rewrite all sectors (magnetic refresh) whould could be scheduled every couple of months. This should ensure that even with data with changes very seldom, the sectors do not become unreadable over time.

Actually I loose two bays. Because the x510 are headless servers (impossible or at least very difficult to attach a keyboard and screen) restore is really complicated and costs hours of work. I had this problem with several servers and decided to go for WHS2011 and disk mirroring of the system drive. Then I loose 2xTB of storage space in drive pool. I looked at the diskpart information, but it looks quite normal (one NTFS partition): DISKPART> list partition Partition ### Typ Größe Offset ------------- ---------------- ------- ------- Partition 1 Dynamische Daten 931 GB 31 KB The other drive with three partitions look a little different: There seems to be a 992KB pseudo partition which is not in the disk manager. Apart from that it also looks not strange: Partition ### Typ Größe Offset ------------- ---------------- ------- ------- Partition 1 Dynamische Daten 992 KB 31 KB Partition 2 Dynamische Daten 100 MB 1024 KB Partition 3 Dynamische Daten 60 GB 101 MB Partition 4 Dynamische Daten 1802 GB 60 GB So what is the problem?

I am not sure, whether this has to do with DrivePool, but I never saw that on any system without DrivePool. The system drive is on a dynamic disk (not in the pool) and all disk access in the resource monitor is displayed with a drive letter i:0\ . The real drive letter of the system drive however is c:\.

Tha'ts really a pity. I think most Homeservers have 3-6 disks, and two of them are lost for storage, if you want to protect 60GB of the system partition by mirrorring. In my case of an HP-x510 with 4 drives, I had lots of reinstallation problems due to failed systems disks in the past, so I want the system partition secured by mirroring (only 60GB of 2000 GB of the two drives). But then I loose almost 2 x 2TB storage space, because I cannot use the simple volumes of 1940GB it in DrivePool. Could you please rethink to support dynamic disks? It would not be necessary to support mirrored or extended volumes just simple volume which reside on a dynamic disk (the disk is dynamic because a small part, the system partition, is mirrored).

I have WHS2011 on a HP x510 and mirrored the system drive (60GB) on two hard drives to guard against a system drive failure. The rest of the two harddrives have data partitions d: and e:, which are not mirrored, but simple volumes. Unfortunately I am not able to add these two volumes to the drive pool. Why? What special things is drivepool doing, that it cannot use these two volumnes? Is there a trick to add them and would there be negative consequences?