Ultradianguy

Sorry - just saw this. Didn't have a chance to try this, but Chris suggested using the ignore checksum setting and that solved the problem

Hi - I already submitted a ticket for this but in case anyone has input, I'm posting here. I added two new WD Enterprise Gold Drives recently - one is 16TB and one is 12TB. Both drives have been added to DrivePool successfully and both pass scanning in SB Scanner. However, the 12 TB drive is being reported by Scanner as "The on-disk SMART check is not accessible.", whereas SMART on the 16TB version is read. I checked with CrystalMark Disk Info and it reads the SMART parameters on both drives fine. I saw a mention of this issue in another thread and based on that tried checking the NoWMI setting in advanced settings, but that didn't resolve the problem.

Thanks @Shane. This problem appears to be resolved. There was a folder with over 4 million tiny log files that seemed to be tripping up the measuring process. I got rid of that and everything completed.

Hi all - I submitted a ticket on this, but thought perhaps I might get help here. I recently had a drive fail and another one develop issues. I removed both from the pool, but was able to add back one of them after fixing issues. I also added a brand new drive. This was six days ago. Since then, DrivePool has been measuring the new drive, ie for 6 days. It's already moved about 9TB of data onto that drive (total 14TB). I observe that it has almost completed the measuring process, showing just a small amount of space marked as "Other", and then it seems to reset, with the amount of unmeasured space suddenly increasing. When I look at the status, it shows that it's measuring many of the same folders. This process has been looping like this for 3 days. It always shows it's measuring the new drive, but never completes the process. As a result, two other disks still show as unmeasured and it hasn't been able to balance in days since this all happened (although it clearly moved data onto the new drive). I've rebooted the system, and also tried stopping and restarting the stablebit drivepool service. (Note I also have Stablebit scanner and cloud drive if that's relevant). Stablebit Scanner has completely scanned the drive and reports it as healthy. I'm not sure how to reset this or clear whatever is preventing completion of the measuring. If I reset all settings, will I lose all the file placement rules I've created?

I'm trying to figure out the best way to split my existing pool into subpools for two purposes. I recently bought a drive that is much bigger than all my existing ones by more than double, which of course means I can't use all that space for duplication. It occurred to me that I could deal with this by creating pools of a few drives at a time that are about the same size and then use those pools in my primary pool. That way each subpool could be used for duplication. I also saw a suggestion from someone that this was a good way to deal with end of life drives by creating a pool of old drives to be used for ONLY duplicated data. If the EOL drives are mixed into the overall pool, there's a risk that all copies of a file could end up on EOL drives. By putting them all in one subpool and using duplication only ACROSS subpools, this risk is eliminated My question is how do I move existing drives in my one very large pool - into separate pools to do this. Is there a way to do it without having to remove all existing content, remove from the existing pool and then recreate them? This will take a LONG time and will be a bit of a puzzle in order to move things around in the right order. I have about 40TB of data right now so it's not a trivial amount of data to move around.

Hi @Christopher (Drashna) I just added a new 20TB drive and wanted to have it scanned immediately before putting it into use. Unfortunately, there seems to be no way to tell Scanner - scan this drive now. I clicked Start Check (it was in automatic mode before), but that just starts scanning according to whatever rules Scanner uses to prioritize. It's working on other drives that have been previously scanned and still hasn't touched the new one. It would be very helpful to be able to right click on a drive (or whatever) and tell Scanner to do that one immediately - and thus override whatever other options I've set that might prevent immediate scanning. Thanks, Michael

@methejuggler @Shane I had a couple questions/requests regarding this very helpful balancer (these address gaps that were present in the official covecube balancers as well). Currently, there is no way to do what seems most useful to me - have equal space used for unduplicated data across drives. That is, if I have 20TB of data , and 4 drives, I'd like 5 TB on each drive, so that if one goes, I minimize the loss of unduplicated files. Currently, you can do this by % of space used, which does the same thing if the drives are about the same size. But over time, I've added larger drives as prices have dropped. So I have a mix of 2TB, 4TB, 6tB , 8TB and now a 20TB drive. If I use equal % used or equal empty space, I end up with far more data on the larger drives. This seems like a pretty obvious use case, and would be easily resolved by an option to equalize by actual space used, rather than percent. There is currently no way to equalize by absolute amount of data. The other issue I'm having was with the covecube balancers. I just switched to All in One so it remains to be seen if it will still be an issue But I found that when I set the balancers to equalize by percent used for unduplicated (unchecked duplicated), that the balancing ignored that and equalized total space used. As a result there were very large differences in unduplicated data across drives. I wasn't sure if the new all in one uses different code or just puts the existing code into a better UI . Thanks for the work on this!

I second that request. I would also like to see a rebalancing window in time rather than just a time to start balancing each day. Covecube folks - it's disappointing to see how little development has taken place on Drivepool for many years now. It's still a solid product and much appreciated, but it seems that the recent upgrades have been related to Stablebit Cloud, which is of course a subscription service. I paid for that to support you guys even though I don't think it adds that much - but if I'm going to pay for a subscription service, I'd rather pay for the products I need (Drivepool and Scanner) and see improvements in those. Drivepool has needed improvements in options for years now and almost none of the requests have found their way to production. I would happily pay a reasonable subscription cost if it would mean more development.

Curious about this @methejuggler. In another thread, I thought I saw that leaving Archive and SSD both unchecked means nothing will get put on the drive.

Same experience here.

I just added a new drive and Drivepool is rebalancing. So far - it seems to be doing things right (though very slowly as always) - been a couple days already. However, I noticed that another drive (that had been in the pool before) has the unduplicated marker at zero as if I had set the drive to have no unduplicated data. But in fact, I did not turn off unduplicated on this drive nor are file placement rules limiting that drive to folders that are duplicated. I also checked drive health in Stablebit Scanner - there are not damage indications that would trigger removing unduplicated data. Why does drivepool want to prevent unduplicated files on this drive? Michael

Hi - I noticed there is a new balancer called All in One that seems to combine the SSD balancer with a few others. Has anyone used this one? It seems it wasn't developed by Covecube so I'm wondering if it's reliable. Also - I see there is a checkbox for archive drive in addition to Duplicate and Unduplicated. I'm assuming if you pick SSD, it's to indicate you want to write cache - otherwise you can just treat it like any other drive. So why would you check Archive? Thanks

According to Christopher, this is expected behavior. I could use the ignore command from CMD but since the drive was damaged, I just removed it permanently, so not worried about it getting added back. But apparently the Remove command does nor prevent DP from recognizing a drive and adding it back in.

Thanks for the input. Due to other computer problems unrelated to DP, I ended up having to restore a system image from a few days before the problem with the drivepool service started, so that fixed the issue with no service.

Wow - all of that? I was just going to uninstall and reinstall. Why did you remove everything from the pools and re-create?