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PocketDemon

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Everything posted by PocketDemon

  1. With the onboard asm1061 eSATA controllers on a handful of motherboards I've owned, whilst they'd work perfectly with a single drive, I had unresolvable issues with port multiplying due to the drives switching off & having to reboot to get them back on again - & completely lost the will to live trying different driver versions. Now, for historical reasons, I'd bought one that uses the Marvell 88SX7042 controller - in my case the StarTech PEXSATA24E, but there are others - &, whilst I couldn't get port multiplying to work beyond driver version 1.2.0.1049, it's been rock solid with the 4 different DASes I've owned at different times over the last decade or so. Okay, the card (or rather cards, as I bought a 2nd one at a point for another machine - & have hung onto in case it's needed for something as they're reliable) I own still isn't particularly cheap new - but, depending on location, there's often good prices on 2nd hand ones on eBay... ...or you could obviously look for an alt with the same controller.
  2. Whilst YMMV, in my experience the cheaper multi-bay USB enclosures are nothing but trouble in terms of spasmodically disconnecting one or more drives - so, unless you've real money to spend, if you're after a cheap enclosure then it's eSATA all the way. So, given the options, a pcie SATA card would be the better option, imho, if cost is king... ...but it's your call as to whether using the server case or not is worth the extra for a new board.
  3. Having turned it off, I believe you also have to choose the "decrypt drive" option on the same Bitlocker page.
  4. Tbh, this sounds like it's nothing at all to do with DP, & instead is wholly an encryption problem. Now I'm guessing that it 'may' have been encrypted with Bitlocker - as that's the default Windows thing... (unless you were sent a USB drive with some bespoke s/w on or something) ...&, assuming that it is Bitlocker that's been used, the usual way to resolve this would be to go to Control Panel -> System and Security --> Bitlocker Drive Encryption... …unlock the drive, using the key you've been given, & then try to access it again. Then I can't talk to the reliability of your USB hub. Well, I've had some which have been b useless for almost everything... ...some which will do all & everything... ...& a strange problem with a 4x switch hub for using devices with 2 machines, where sometimes either the keyboard or mouse won't connect... ...but switching back & forth again resolves it. Otherwise, in terms of data recovery, the only thing that I've personally found to be decent is R-Studio (https://www.r-studio.com) - where, in the past, I've been able to, for example, connect half of a R10 array or total drives -1 of a R5 array or... ...on a completely different controller without, say, R5 support... ...& using non-OS native file systems... …& it's worked admirably. Okay, it obviously won't recover from clusters that have been written over, if the data itself has been corrupted or if the drives have mechanically failed... ...but it's the best thing that I've found. (more accurately, having found something that could handle any problems that I could reasonably expect it to, I stopped looking)
  5. I'm not saying you're wrong, as I've never had this happen with a DP drive & I read the description that the OP completely differently - however my experience of permission issues didn't make the data wholly inaccessible... ...just limited what can be done with it. The way to test this would be to assign a letter to the specific drive & see if the data can be accessed AND if there's any limitations on ownership of the files. Then I suppose another option might be that DP is incompatible with whatever it's been protected with that needs a password - & so DP isn't picking the drive up on boot... ...which, again having assigned a letter (& checked the permissions), would be moving everything off -> formatting --> adding back into the pool ---> & copying everything back again.
  6. The only thought I have is to ask if you've tried connecting it to a standard SATA port rather than the HBA card? Well, I know that I can pull SATA drives from my LSI card & they'll work on either an onboard Intel SATA controller (I've simply not tried AMD or SIL or whatever controller, so I'm not saying that they wouldn't work) or a random USB dock... …& it 'might' be the case that your Highpoint HBA writes something to the drive to identify it which Seagate's recovery service has screwed up. [Edit] Otherwise, it's really not ideal that you're having problems with the drives so quickly. Okay, obviously any product will have a rate of infant mortality - since not all of the initial bathtub curve will be caught by internal testing - & I've had a very small number of WD & (in the dim & distant) Samsung HDDs either be DOA or fail completely within a matter of days over the years... ...however these have always been mechanical or controller failures - in which case you'd get a replacement - not the data vanishing & being recovered.
  7. The safest option would always be by booting into "safe mode with command prompt" & using a DOS/command line updater - however it depends how Seagate's s/w works; since it's reasonable to assume that the big manufacturers know what they're doing... ...though, if it's using something generic to unofficial update, I would only recommend going for the DOS/Command Prompt version. (I'm not saying that using unofficial s/w in Windows will go wrong of course, so I have flashed GFX cards in Windows a couple of times - but that was obviously me making a calculated risk about my own kit; not what I'd publicly recommend to anyone else.) So, taking my Samsung SSDs as an example, the update s/w is Windows based & so that's what I'd use... …& the same for CD/DVD/BR drives... …& for my LSI card... …&.. ...whereas for something like unofficially updating individual OROMs on motherboards then I would always go for the command prompt option - or, with unofficial BIOSes, via the flash within the BIOS/UFEI. Then, with something like unofficially flashing HDDs or SSDs, I would personally pull all of the drives other than a single drive that I was looking to update (& a USB drive or DVD/BR drive for a disk with the s/w on of course) & connect it directly to the motherboard - as it limits the potential for things to go horrendously wrong.
  8. Always a good idea to at consider new versions of s/w & f/w & drivers & whatnot. Yeah, whilst it's probably not necessary as (touch wood) everything's working fine, I spasmodically (every month or two) have a look at the changelogs for the betas - http://dl.covecube.com/DrivePoolWindows/beta/download/ & http://dl.covecube.com/ScannerWindows/beta/download/ (for the 2 things I use) - to see whether it looks to be worthwhile to move forward... …& it's easy to revert to the previous versions that I know worked were there to be any issue.
  9. Have you enabled showing hidden files in File Explorer, as stated in the wiki, as it's certainly there in mine?
  10. http://wiki.covecube.com/StableBit_DrivePool_2.x_Advanced_Settings
  11. I knew that there was some discussion about DP & drives clicking going back &, having had some sleep, just had a quick search - & it was actually covered again a week & a half ago. So, as said, something (DP) competing with (probably) your Windows' Power Options settings. Yeah, the thread doesn't explain why it was enabled by default btw - but it's something you could look at.
  12. if you're leaving it as disabled then I honestly don't know why you didn't stick with the LSI card... Obviously your choice though. Otherwise, I guess in theory you could split every cable & wire in LEDs (& almost certainly resistors) part way along - but I've never seen any cables that natively have them... ...so the normal usage is with a backplane & a case with the LEDs. However, since my LSI card won't identify SATA drives with the 4U case I have, I just name & order the drives both consistently (ie both in the LSI Storage Manager & Computer Manager) & sensibly (so the drive names include a number relating to the position in the case - which also corresponds to the port number on the card). [Edit] Oh, & whilst my assumption was that you were allowing the 750 to spin the drives down - since that was the problem with the LSI card... ...it could alternatively be something competing with your "Turn off hard disk after..." settings in Windows' Power Options...
  13. I assume you looked at the spin down time in the HighPoint "Non-RAID Management Software" to see if it was coinciding with that - & also the delay before any scanning or monitoring s/w kicks in? Simply that 'an' option might be that you had competing s/w trying to respectively take things in & out of a spun down &/or idle power mode. Otherwise the most likely reason for clicking would usually be a sign of drive failure... ...cable failure would normally be seen as a drive dropping out... …&, unless the card's overheating (which would normally be one or more drives dropping out &/or BSOD), you physically damage part of them or there's some f/w issue (why you always check for updates), they either work or they don't.
  14. Right, addressing these in a way that hopefully makes sense... Firstly, this was looking at using the plugin you'd suggested to fulfil the OP's initial requirement that as little data as possible should ever be stored on the shonky 3rd drive. So they'd need the 'move existing data' bit enabled, otherwise it wouldn't move anything off of that drive if space became available on either of the other 2... ...which would be worse than the OP's idea of setting up a 99%/99%/1% rule, as that would at least move some data if it more than 1% of the capacity was filled. Secondly, part of the comment about the plugin was thinking aloud about how what it says it does vs how it'd practically work overall - as I think part of the description for it is misleading outside of an add data only environment - as it can't reasonably keep each set of data written together for all & ever whilst simultaneously placing data onto earlier drives where deletion's occurred &/or rebalancing to have the drives filled in order. (& using folder placement rules appropriate to the various drives' capacities, so that no disks were ever filled, was the only way that I could think of keep most of the data that would be written together to specific drives in the way that the plugin description described - which had nothing to do with using the *.* rule) So, whilst I fully accept that this specific element of what I'd written may have been OT, depending on what the OP actually saw as being valuable about that plugin of course, I think it was still worth thinking about... (Thirdly) ...however, x amount of it was also needed to explain why someone 'could' end up in a situation where, having filled the first drive (obviously I'm talking about one half of the duplication in the OP's situation) & had data on one or more other drives in the sequence, the thing was rebalancing semi-constantly to move data towards the lowest ordering of the drives. (see the first point) Now, the key point for the OP's initial requirement was that this 'could' end up being a significant disadvantage of using that added plugin depending on their usage... ...whereas, using the standard balancers & adding rules akin to how I'd suggested to achieve the OP's original task then the only time DP would need to rebalance stuff in normal usage would be if BOTH disks 1 & 2 were filled to 99% & more data was added; which would obviously hit the shonky 3rd drive... …& then some data was deleted so that there was space for that extra data to be moved off of the 3rd drive & onto either or both of the other two. Anyway, it's obviously just a discussion - but I believe that my approach would be less likely to cause any unforeseen consequences; d.t. the way the plugin you're suggesting would have to be set up to fulfil the OP's initial requirements.
  15. Whilst this would certainly work as an alt method, my reading of the plugin is that this benefit - "Files copied at the same time will tend to be on the same disk. Because those files were copied at the same time, it stands to reason that they might be related. It can be beneficial, in terms of file recovery, to have related files be placed on the same disk." - would only actually work long term if you were only ever adding files to the pool; never deleting them. (now it 'may' be the case that this is going to be the OP's actual usage, but I can see nothing that states that it is) Well, as soon as you've filled the 1st drive & are onto a 2nd drive, by deleting something from the 1st then either, assuming there's space for one or more (but not all of) the files the next set of data you write will end up being split between the 1st & 2nd drive - or the plugin will randomly move data from the 2nd to the 1st to fulfil the rule... …& either way then, whilst you'd have a lovely arrangement on day one, this would deteriorate over time. &, at least in theory, you 'could' end up in a situation where it was spending inordinate amounts of background time balancing & rebalancing to move data from the 2nd drive to the 1st... …& the 3rd drive to the 1st or 2nd... …&... ...as you deleted &/or replaced data over time. I mean it's not even the case that the OP would have pairs of drives with the same data on - since they're using 1 big drive for one half of the duplication & (up to) 3 small ones for the other. Yeah, the only way I'm aware of to actually keep data fixed to a drive within an environment where you are deleting/replacing files, is to not fill a/the drive/s - either by having spare capacity on a single drive or to have different placement rules for different folders/data types to keep spare capacity on all of the drives.
  16. Rather than setting the slow faulty drive to 1%, why not limit the placement of the folders to not include that drive... ...however, along with having duplication enabled & setting the File Placement of folders to 99% on the 3 primary drives... ...set the Balancers to prioritise the "Drive Usage Limiter" above the "Duplication Space Optimizer" - whilst disabling the "Prevent Drive Overfill" option... …& enable the "Allow files to be placed on other disks if the selected disks are full" option in the File Placement. Well, this should only allow data in the selected folders to be placed on the 4th drive if there's not enough space to duplicate to either the 1st or the 2nd & 3rd drives (it's not clear which is smaller) - & then move the data off of the 4th drive once there's space to do so... ...whereas your 1% would tend to result in the 4th drive always having some data on. As to creating a global setting ttbomk there's 2 potential options. 1. Either you could create a single folder that you place all of the other data folders on the pool into - & then do the placement limitation & whatnot from above... ...this would cover all of the data & folders - but would use up some of the max path length. (you could also map that main folder to a drive letter) 2. OR you could create a "*.*" Rule in the File Placement - & then do the placement limitation & whatnot from above... ...which would cover all of the data, not the folders - & would save a bit of the path length.
  17. My recollection is that Chris' issue with Highpoint was with SAS/SATA HBA cards with 'RocketRAID' (aka 'RAID on a Highpoint Rocket card') - which I believe also had driver compatibility issues with FreeNAS & whatnot... ...whereas the 750 simply doesn't use that which makes things much simpler. Shouldn't be an issue for the OP for the reason above, but I guess some of it may be about how much time you're prepared to spend searching for & trialling different drivers vs having something that'll just work... So, whilst he also doesn't recommend SIL controllers, adding a simple 4-bay DAS to my low spec 24/7 machine simply wouldn't work properly using either the onboard ASMedia eSATA (explicitly having PortMultiplier) or the ASMedia & Intel USB controllers; with the drives spasmodically dropping out several times a day irrespective of the driver version - which then obviously caused issues with DP... ...whereas a cheap StarTech SIL PCI-E eSATA controller &, whilst the latest SIL drivers seemed to have randomly stopped port-multiplication working, going back a couple of versions & it's rock solid. Conversely though, everyone loved the 24 port HP expanders - whereas, even after buying a HP card to flash the stupid thing to the latest f/w, I just found them painfully slow... ...so people expectations & experiences certainly vary. Yeah, so obviously the 750 isn't a performance card, as mentioned, but for a DP media backup usage (vs FreeNAS) then it should be perfectly adequate for the OP's usage. Otherwise, I've also no idea how the OP was getting a sustained 400MB/s write speed - & would also be interested to know about the testing method for that. Well, there's not a cache on that LSI card - so either something's misreporting the speeds; or there's another write cache somewhere in the setup; or, as you say, it's writing to a few drives simultaneously.
  18. Well, you're losing the ability to ever use SAS drives - though, whilst the 750 is a slower card with a lower total throughput, your current usage (given that you're using the Seagate archive drives & DP) is unlikely to ever make that a limiting issue. Then, imho, editing the registry is really no big deal - whether it's sorting out something stupid like altering the default search engine to make it region specific or trying to troubleshoot an issue with Windows or something like this... ...so it really depends on what the LSI card cost you (assuming you'll never use SAS otherwise you'll have to buy another card) - as if it was cheaper then I'd stick with what you've got &, if needed, edit the registry. Otherwise, within a price bracket, it's all about finding the best balance for your usage - so, for me - - losing the ability to spin down active drives on a LSI RAID card (as I don't want to flash it to IT mode - turning it into a HBA - where I could then use the registry edit) isn't important; as that machine's not on 24/7, only for specific tasks, & it removes the relatively small risk of drives not spinning up fast enough & dropping out. - whilst having a cache, BBU & the ability to use SAS drives are important for elements of what I use the machine for. But that's just prioritising what's important to me - not what anyone else should do.
  19. As noted before, I'm using a RAID controller, not a HBA, so you'd need to explore the f/w, drivers & s/w for your card. That said, a quick google search & there's this - - however, as far as I can see, 4&83E10FE&0&00E0 is not necessarily a fixed device ID - so you'd need to look in the registry for the equivalent.
  20. Yeah, I was about to post that I'd just tried HWMonitor today & it doesn't pick up my RAID card. Otherwise I have honestly no idea whether that's normal for the Seagate Archive drives as I use WD (plus there's a handful of ancient Samsungs that are refusing to die), though they are reported to be noisy... ...or are you using Stablebit Scanner as well? As I don't use LSI HBA cards, what I'd suggest is to have a look on https://www.broadcom.com/products/storage/host-bus-adapters/sas-9305-24i#downloads - with a view to updating the f/w & drivers, as well as seeing if the Management s/w & tools has any options... Though for some unknown reason it's only showing downloads for your card in under Archive, not Current.
  21. Ummm… Not at home to try things atm &, tbh, I'm used to LSI RAID cards where they have a Windows GUI for setting stuff up & monitoring & whatnot - which your HBA doesn't appear to use according to the relevant download page on the Broadcom site. If I had to make an educated guess though, I would imagine that HWMonitor - https://www.cpuid.com/softwares/hwmonitor.html - is the most likely thing to give the temp of the IOC; assuming that it actually has a sensor .
  22. Taking these the other way around as I think it possibly makes better sense - Whilst I suppose you could assign every drive a drive letter & then run out of them... ...what I do is to not assign drive letters to any of the drives in a pool, but instead only to each pool. Yeah, this is one of the reasons for choosing to use DP or RAID (inc JBOD & R0 which aren't technically RAID of course) or Storage Spaces or... ...& I can personally see no value whatsoever in being able to randomly see the contents of each individual drive in a pool constantly... …& it doesn't affect any other s/w that I'm using (ie for defragging or virus scans or whatever)… ...though I do still name all of the drives (in Computer Management &, where appropriate, in the RAID & expander cards s/w) for organisational & maintenance purposes. Well, providing you tell it to only search the drive letter assigned to the pool (as opposed to all of the drives within the pool together, as this would clearly cause issues if you're using DP's duplication), I can see no reason whatsoever why you couldn't use a 3rd party app to search for duplicates - though, quite obviously, you need to manually verify what you're deleting.
  23. Oh, certainly... Which is why I'd written on the 22nd of March in the thread that - "Obviously the downside to what we're suggesting though is voiding the warranty by shucking them..." So, it was about agreeing with you that going for NAS/Enterprise drives is a good thing; esp as you start to increase the drive count - BUT that this didn't contradict what had been suggested earlier about shucking the WD externals IF purchase price trumped warranty.
  24. Along with balancing personal budget, price/TB & warranty (if that matters to you) & whatnot... ...it's also about how many HDDs you can physically connect up vs how your data's growing - since many people get by with just a small SSD in a laptop - whilst others (like myself) are 'data-whores' have many 10s or 100s of TBs of random stuff. As to looking at NAS storage, part of the reason why people look at shucking the higher capacity WD external drives is that they all use WD/HGSC helium 5400rpm filled drives - which are effectively equivalent to the WD Reds... (some of the smaller capacity ones switched to using WD Greens/Blues - I believe only <=4TB but I don't know that for certain) ...though they 'may' alternatively be some version of a WD Gold or HTSC HC500 or...??? ...all of which are designed for NAS - but buying the external drives is cheaper.
  25. If it doesn't come up at the bottom having added the drive to the pool, re-measuring the pool with the balancer at the bottom should either start the thing or give you the option - depending on your automatic balancing settings.
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