gtaus

Trying to think of this more clearly, I only want the proposed 6TB HDD to accept folder \movies files and BLOCK any and all other files\folders on that drive.

I have a Seagate USB 6TB HDD that I would like to add to my existing 16 HDD DrivePool. However, I don't have 100% confidence in the HDD because I ran across a few corrupted files on it that were causing problems. I offloaded the entire HDD and moved those files to DrivePool. I ran a few MS diagnostic short tests on that HDD and it passed. I ran the Seagate Long Generic Seatools (almost 24 hours) test on it and it failed, but gave me no report what was wrong. I then loaded up HD Tune and ran the disk sector complete scan (about 18 hours) and it detected no errors and passed the drive as good. As of now, I am thinking\wishing that the Seagate 6TB drive is probably good. It could have just been those corrupted files that were causing some problems and maybe not any bad sectors on the HDD itself. At this point, I would like to add that 6TB Seagate HDD to my DrivePool, but only let my backup media files to be placed on that HDD. That way, if the drive has problems, it would only affect files that I have archived elsewhere so I could rebuild the data. In other words, I only want that 6TB HDD to have the \movies folder on it an no other folders or files. Also, since I have \movies folder spread over the existing 16 HDDs in DrivePool, I cannot use File Placement to only check the one 6TB for that folder. In File Placement, I see how to check which drives the folder(s) can be placed on. Is there a way to select the HDD, and limit it to only accepting files for the \movies folder while still allowing the other HDDs to continue to also use the existing \movies folders. Any help appreciated. Thanks.

Definitely, no guarantees with any of these software monitoring programs, but they each have some features that may help. Too bad that HDDs don't gradually "wear out" and show signs of problems long before they completely crap out. In my experience, most of my serious problems have been with drives that just suddenly die, for whatever reason, and I really had no prior notification. However, the monitoring programs have saved me a small number of times and automatically moved data off a failing HDD before it completely died. Replacement still seems to the best option whenever you notice any problems.

I have a mix of HDDs in MediaSonic ProBox enclosures and external USB standalone HDDs. I, too, have named and labeled my DrivePool HDDs and put them in order (DP01, DP02, DP03....). If any HDD(s) go offline, I immediately know which one is not online by looking at the DrivePool GUI. Works for me.

I am not an expert on DrivePool, but I too have had to deal with similar problems that you report. What has worked for me in the past is to move as many files off the bad drive as you can to a good drive. In my case, I only had one or two corrupt files remaining that could not be read and were raising havoc in my Pool. So I was able to take the HDD offline, reformat it, test it, and put it back into the Pool and my problem was solved. If your HDD is failing, and needs to be replaced, then I would not suggest putting it back in the Pool. There are a number of utilities and programs that can verify the integrity of your HDD before you decide to reuse it, or not. If you have to move a large number of files, then I would suggest a program called Teracopy. When Windows File Explorer moves files, and comes upon a file that is corrupted, it stops all transfers and waits for you to respond to a prompt. Teracopy, on the other hand, will attempt to move/copy the file and if unsuccessful, will continue moving the other files in the list and notify you of the problem file(s) when it reaches the end of the transfer list. When I am moving large amounts of files from one disk to another, I now use Teracopy because I don't have to babysit the file transfer process. And, usually, I only move large amounts of files overnight when there is a problem to begin with on a HDD, so Teracopy is a better solution for me. It moves everything off the bad HDD and reports any file(s) that were unreadable the next morning. I use the free home version, but there is a paid Pro version for commercial companies that has a few extra features.

I had some problems with a HDD that Stablebit Scanner did not detect. I found a very useful program called Hard Disk Sentinel which is like Scanner, but also different. Hard Disk Sentinel comes in both a free version, which is what I am using, but also a paid version with extra features. The free version of Hard Disk Sentinel will check/test your HDDs and give you an estimate of their Health Status, which is a %. For example, most of my HDDs have a Health Status of 95-100%, but the failing drive tested out and reported an estimated 3% Heath Status with a warning to immediately move all data to another drive. It correctly reported that the drive was failing, whereas, Stablebit Scanner, for whatever reason, did not flag it. The paid version of Hard Disk Sentinel has extra features which allow your to "fix" some HDD problems and restore the health of the drive towards 100%. Essentially, from what I understand, it scans the HDD for bad sectors, blocks them off from use, so they no longer are used to store files and corrupt your data. In my case, the bad HDD was totally failing and it could not have been fixed even with the paid version.

That's where I was at. The "Balancing plug-ins respect file placement rules" was ticked. I ended just removing the HDDs and not putting them back into the DrivePool when emptied. So that forced the files to go to the HDDs that I wanted. In the end, even with the files on the correct HDDs, my problem with my media server was not solved so I am back to letting DrivePool put all the movie files on any HDD in DrivePool. I like the concept of File Placement and may try to use it again sometime the future, but there are a number of things going on with that system and it does appear to be tricky to get everything placed exactly where you want. Thanks for the response.

I am trying to organize all my movie files on specific HDDs in my DrivePool. In File Placement, I have checked the HDDs where the movie files should go. I removed one HDD from the DrivePool to force these movie files into the correct HDDs. That seemed to work. When the HDD removal was complete, I added it back to DrivePool and made sure that the movies File Placement was unchecked for the empty drive. However, when I add new movie files to DrivePool, all the new movie files are going directly to the empty HDD which is not part of the File Placement rule!? There is more than enough room on the existing HDDs to take the movie files where I want them in the File Placement rule. Any idea why this is happening? Any way to force move the movie files to the designated HDDs in File Placement - either automatically by DrivePool or manually if I must? Thanks for any suggestions. FYI: Balancers in this order 1) SSD Optimizer 2) StableBit Scanner 3) Volume Equalization 4) Drive Usage Limiter 5) Prevent Drive Overfill 6) Duplication Space Optimizer

Thanks. I download Everything by Voidtools and tried it out. It appears that it is exactly what I was looking for in a search program. The only issue I have at this point with the program is that it did not scan and index any of my DrivePool HDDs because I removed all the Drive Letters assigned to the DrivePool HDDs. As a test, I reassigned a Drive Letter to one of the DrivePool HDDs, and Everything scanned and indexed it just fine. I am hoping that Everything has some way of scanning HDDs with no Drive Letter assignment, but if not, I will temporarily reassign drive letters to the HDDs while I troubleshoot my Plex/Kodi server issue. I posted a question on the Everything forum about scanning HDDs with no Drive Letter assigned to them. My DrivePool has 14 HDDs and I removed the Drive Letter assignments on those HDDs to clean up my File Explorer desktop. However, if you are familiar with both DrivePool and Everything, do you know if it is possible for Everything to scan HDDs without Drive Letter assignments? Again, thanks for the suggestion on Everything by Voidtools which I think will be the tool I need for my troubleshooting.

I ran into a problem building up my DrivePool for my Plex/Kodi server. In DrivePool, Kodi, for example, reports that some of the movie files have "Invalid Arguement" and will not load/play. After reading error reports on Kodi support forums, I see the problem might be that Kodi cannot see USB drives connected to the server via a USB hub whereas USB drives that are directly connected are read normally. In my DrivePool, I have 1 folder designated to hold my movie files. I currently have 14 USB HDDs in my DrivePool. I have 2 MediaSonic 4 bay ProBox units housing 7 drives, and I believe they are considered a direct connect because they do not go through any external USB hub before connecting into the computer. I have added 7 USB HDDs into DrivePool using a USB hub because I only have 4 USB 3.0 direct connect ports. It appears that my movie files on those HDDs connected via USB hub were added fine to DrivePool, but Kodi cannot load/play them from behind the USB hub connection. So, I am at the point where I am trying to find the exact location (on which HDD) the files reporting "Invalid Argument" in my DrivePool. I would be able to determine if that file was on a HDD connected to the USB hub or not, and that would help me with my troubleshooting. I imagine the file could currently be on any one of the 14 HDDs in the DrivePool. Is there any easy way to determine the exact HDD where the file resides? If not, I suppose I can open up each HDD and manually look into the PoolPart directory. But I am hoping that someone else has seen this issue and may be able to offer some suggestions. Thanks in advance.

I have just started using DrivePool, seriously, for a short while. It crashed once after a MS Windows 10 update, but tech support showed me how to reset the DrivePool and everything came back online with no data loss. I'll have to look at that option, but in my case, all my DrivePool HDDs are in external USB 3.0 boxes - except for the new SSD which I added to my desktop computer and use it as cache for my DrivePool. I was running Windows Storage Spaces for years. When it works, it was great. However, after my third catastrophic failure of Storage Spaces with massive file loss, I came over to DrivePool. In Storage Spaces, I was running 24 HDDs in the pool with 2 disc failure (in theory) recovery. What happened is my oldest, smallest, USB HHD failed and it wiped out my entire Storage Spaces pool. As you said, I too am no longer a fan of block-based pools. I was fortunate with DrivePool to have it crash in my first weeks of trial. I was able to reset the DrivePool and all my data was still there. That made me a believer in DrivePool - data recovery after a crash is much better in DrivePool. It proved to be impossible in Storage Spaces. At first, I was disappointed in DrivePool write speeds compared to Storage Spaces, but was willing to give up some of that speed for a more reliable system. Now, I have added an SSD cache to my DrivePool and have faster write times than I ever had with Storage Spaces. Having said that, most of my file transfers are from one computer to another on my home network and the bottleneck is the transfer rate of the files from slower drives to my DrivePool. But local transfers on the server computer are as fast as the bus will allow using the SSD cache in DrivePool. The SSD Optimizer add-on works great for me. Just love it.

Yes, I have been considering that.

Just a quick update.... I transferred 15TB of movies over to my DrivePool Plex/Kodi server directory using the direct transfer on the same HDDs and DrivePool handled everything without any problems. This direct transfer took me less than 5 minutes as opposed to an estimated 3-4 days the way I started doing it using the DrivePool interface. The more I use DrivePool, the more I like it. Also, I find this forum invaluable. Again, thanks for the response.

Thanks. This will save me days of time.

I am adding movies files from USB HDDs to my DrivePool. For example, I have a 5TB USB HHD full of movies that I want to add to my DrivePool to build up a Plex/Kodi server directory on my DrivePool. I know I can move the movies files off that USB HDD to the DrivePool directory of my Plex/Kodi server, but transferring all 5TB via the DrivePool interface will take more than 1 day to complete. Can I simply add the new USB HDD to my DrivePool, and then move the files directly from that USB HDD to the PoolPart directory on that same USB HDD? If I can, that transfer on the same HDD would take place almost instantaneously. But, I don't want to break my DrivePool in my effort to save time on file transfers. I am concerned that a direct file transfer into the PoolPart - not using DrivePool as the interface - will somehow corrupt the brains/tracking of DrivePool and I may end up losing files and/or creating other problems that might take even longer to correct. Since I have a number of USB HDDs that I would like to move to DrivePool, I think I better ask up front if a direct transfer is possible or not. Thanks for any response.

Thanks for the response. I'll look into MultiPar and SnapRAID to see how they work. FWIW, after I posted my question, I plugged in a 5 year old 5TB USB HDD and discovered it would not load up and I had no access to any data on that 5TB drive. I did some research on YouTube and learned about a program called Hard Disk Sentinel. I removed the failed 5TB HDD from the USB enclosure and dropped the bare HDD into my desktop HDD caddy. After a period of time, it was able to load the directory and I could see my files. Hard Disk Sentinel reported that 5TB HDD had only 9% health and was in immediate danger of failing completely. For the past few days, I have been transferring files off that failing 5TB HDD onto my DrivePool, for storage into something more permanent later. I have moved about half the files off the failing HDD on to my DrivePool, and, so far, only a few directories/files have been unrecoverable. Point is, my theoretical question about failing HDDs in storage became a real life problem. So I am more serious than ever in finding a solution to long term data storage with the ability to recover lost/damaged files.

I am looking for a better way to archive media files in storage. In the past, I used to burn backups to DVDs. With the larger media files of today, I have been saving files to 2 HDD's and placing them in the closet. But I read that HDDs degrade over time and can die in 4-6 years even in storage without being used. Is there a way to use DrivePool to create backup storage media that I could periodically reattach to my computer system and check for data integrity, and maybe catch and replace a failing drive before the files are lost? My current idea is to take the old backup HDDs out of storage maybe every 2 years, transfer the files to DrivePool, and then copy back the files to 2 new HDDs (with DrivePool for those 2 HDDs using duplication). I would put the new backup HDDs back into storage and use the older HDDs in my current DrivePool (using duplication) so if an older HDD starts to fail, DrivePool would flag it and remove it for me. Essentially, it would be a planned HDD replacement system as I don't trust HDDs of today for long term backup storage. I don't want to reinvent the wheel, however, and if there is a better way to backup my media files for long term storage I would like to know how to do it even if I don't end up using DrivePool. Thanks in advance for any feedback.

I have only been using DrivePool for a short period, but if I understand your situation, you should be able to open the DrivePool UI and click on the "Remove" drive for the drives you no longer want in the pool. I have done this in DrivePool and it did a good job in transferring the files from the "remove" drive to the other pool drives. However, given nowadays we have large HDDs in our pools, the process takes a long time. Patience is a virtue. Another option is to simply view the hidden files on those HDDs you no long want to keep in DrivePool, and then copy them all over to the one drive you want to consolidate all your information. Once you verify all your files have been successfully reassembled on that one drive, you could go back and format those other drives. The main advantage I see with using DrivePool is that the files are written to the HDD as standard NTFS files, and if you decided to leave the DrivePool environment, all those files are still accessible by simply viewing the hidden directory. I am coming from the Windows Storage Space system where bits and pieces of files are written to the HDDs in the pool. When things go bad with Storage Spaces, there is no way to reassemble the broken files spread across a number of HDDs. At least with DrivePool, the entire file is written to a HDD as a standard file, so in theory you should be able to copy those files from the pool HDDs over to one HDD and have a complete directory. I used the Duplication feature of DrivePool for important directories. Again, I am still learning the benefits of DrivePool over Storage Spaces, but so far, I think DrivePool has the advantage of recovering data from a catastrophic failure whereas I lost all my data in Storage Spaces. If there is a better to transfer your DrivePool files to 1 HDD, I would like to know for my benefit as well.

I did open a support ticket and Stablebit sent me reset directions for DrivePool. That fixed the problem.

I have a few days left on my Stablebit Scanner evaluation. A couple days ago, Scanner found a bad sector on a 5TB HDD in the pool. DrivePool removed all the files off that drive - took almost 2 days. So I checked the "bad" 5TB HDD with Windows 10 chkdsk and no errors are found. I checked the S.M.A.R.T. and everything is healthy there too. So, I appreciate Scanner finding a bad sector on my 5TB drive and moving all files on the HDD to other HDDs in the pool, but now I have a blank 5TB HDD that Windows thinks is fine but will not work in DrivePool because Scanner reports 1 bad sector. Is there some way to "fix" this 5TB HDD so I can use it in DrivePool? Again, chkdsk found no errors so it never attempted to "fix" anything. Given the price of a 5TB HDD, I would like to get in back in service with DrivePool, if possible. Thanks in advance for any suggestions.

I set Drivepool up on a desktop computer which is used as a media server. I do not normally use a monitor on that system. I do most of my computer work using either a laptop computer or my home office desktop computer - and I use TeamViewer to log into the media server and make changes or to monitor that system. Anyway, last night, I was unable to remote manage Drivepool from my laptop computer - it reported that my server was no longer on the LAN. So I tried to remote manage Drivepool from my home desktop computer - but got the same error messages. So I logged into my media server computer using TeamViewer and discovered that - evidently - Windows 10 had updated the system and rebooted. I tried to run Drivepool on the media server itself, but it will no longer connect to the background service. Scanner no longer connects to the background service. I have attempted to restart the media server computer and that did not help. I then completely shut down the media server, and then restarted from a cold boot. Unfortunately, Drivepool and Scanner still will not connect to the background service. FYI, I had previously mapped the network drives on my LAN and all the Drivepool folders still appear on my J: Drive as before. I just have no way to manage the Drivepool anymore. And Scanner no longer runs either. I have not noticed any other problems with my home media server except for Drivepool and Scanner no longer connect to the background service. I have no problems connecting to the media server with TeamViewer and the media server is still sending media to my Fire TV Stick on my big screen TV running KODI. Something broke with Drivepool and Scanner and any help on how to troubleshoot this situation would be most helpful. Thanks.

Thanks for the response. Turns out, I was clicking on the down arrow and that did not give the option of enable auto scanning. So after reading your response, I clicked on the "button" itself and it toggled to enabled. Problem solved. Auto scanning immediately started so I know that it is working. Thanks.

Trial User here checking out Scanner. My GUI states "Automatic Scanning Disabled." I have checked the settings and it is set to auto check the drives every 30 days. So I manually initiated a scanner check and all my HDDs were healthy (it took about 4 days to complete the scan). Anyway, I am trying to set Scanner to auto check my HDDs so I changed the scanner settings to recheck the drives every 3 days, thinking maybe the auto scanning feature would not register out 30 days since I only have 20 days left on the trial. Still, after having set the scanner to scan every 3 days, the GUI displays Automatic Scanning Disabled. Is the Automatic Scanning feature disabled on Trial Versions of Scanner? If not, how do I set the program to auto scan my HDDs? I would like to see at least one auto Scanner event triggered by the program before my trial period ends. If the auto scanner feature does not work, then that portion of the Stablebit package would have little value to me as I already have other programs that I can manually check the drives. Thanks for any feedback.

Thanks for the link. I read, and reread those articles. It seems to me that "balancing" in Drive Pool only moves files off a drive if there is not enough free space on other drives for duplication. In my case, I have 6 drives, 5 of which are less than half full so there is no need to move files off my 1 drive that is 93% full. If my understanding is correct, I am very happy with this strategy because I don't care to move files around just for the sake of having all drives at the same % of free space.

After another catastrophic failure and data loss with Windows Storage Spaces, I am looking into Drive Pool as a safer replacement. I started out with 1 HDD, filled 2.53/2.73 TB with data, then added 2 more HDDs. New data was written to the new HDDs. Everything is working fine. Now I added another three 4TB HDDs to the pool to make a total of 18.2TB in the pool. As I started transferring data to the Drive Pool, again it wrote the transferred data to the newly added empty drives. All good. Last night I noticed that Drive Pool was doing a "Balancing" of the HDDs in the pool. This morning, I see not much changes in the data levels on the HDDs and my original HDD is still at 2.53/2.73 TB. The other HDDs are, more or less, reporting 1.38/3.64 TB. In short, I have 5 HDDs which all appear to be "balanced" at ~40% but 1 HDD, my original HDD, is still sitting at 93% used. I would like to learn more about how Drive Pool balances the data levels on the HDDs and whether or not I should be concerned that after "Balancing" I have on drive still at 93% and the other 5 drives all sitting at about ~40%. Any links to relevant articles on Drive Pool Balancing methods or help in responses to my question would be most welcome. Thank you.