gtaus

I don't know why you saw so much memory usage on your first install of DrivePool. I have never seen anything like that. Is it possible that DrivePool was performing some intensive task at that moment? I am glad that Christopher was able to get you back on track and that things are going much better (normal) now.
A long yellow bar usually means DrivePool activity or an error state - like duplication needs to be re-checked. The green bar usually means everything is OK with DrivePool and does not need any attention. If you have a green bar, then I don't understand why you would be looking for a cancellation option. Is there some task running in the background? Your screenshot of DrivePool looks all good to me.
Speaking of background tasks, I have suggested that if would be nice to have an option to select that more information be displayed of what is going on in the background tasks running in DrivePool. Many of those tasks and status on them seems to be hidden, maybe for a good reason. Most of the time, I'm just happy to let DrivePool do its thing in the background and I don't need to see the inner workings. But, it would be good to have an option to get more info and status on those tasks for those few times I do care to understand what is going on behind the curtain.
Under normal circumstances, DrivePool pretty much takes care of itself. However, I have noticed a few times that it appeared to me that a task like balancing might not be behaving properly. Don't know if it was a DrivePool issue, or a Windows issue, but I rebooted the computer and everything went back to "normal." That's pretty much my first step to take if I notice something fishy going on with my computer. Again, I don't know if it's a DrivePool issue, or a Windows issue. As you know, Windows can lock itself up for unknown reasons and a fresh reboot seems to correct the OS. And that certainly has nothing to do with DrivePool.
I would also suggest keeping an informal log (note on piece of paper) of what was wrong and how you corrected it. If you see a pattern of misbehavior, you could share that with Christopher and maybe he could look for a bug to correct. One thing I appreciate with DrivePool is that the programmer(s) are looking for ways to improve the software and they issue new releases. 

@TPham
You simply click the mouse and drag the cursor over the text you want to copy. The text should turn to blue background. When you get to the end of your selection, release the mouse and a popup box should appear "Quote selection". Click on the popup box and it will transfer that quote to your response box.
Unlike Windows File Manager, you don't need a drive letter for DrivePool to see and list the drive. I just added another HDD to DrivePool this morning, without a Drive Letter, and all I had to do was simply click the add button on the Non-Pooled drives list on the DrivePool GUI.
I currently have 18 HDDs and 1 SSD in my DrivePool. So I wanted to remove all drive letters from my pool drives and free those Drive Letters for flash drives and/or other devices I might want to temporarily add to my system.
If you ever need to work with any drive in Windows, you can go into Disk Management and add a Drive Letter to any pool drive you want. DrivePool does not care if you add/remove a Drive Letter to the drive, it identifies the drive by the hidden PoolPart folder it writes to the drive itself.
That is one way of organizing your duplication folders that I have also considered. It certainly would clean up the root directory to only 3 folders.
I really noticed a performance boost in DrivePool when I added a front end SSD. DrivePool is limited to the speed of the drive it is writing data to at that time. If it is writing to a SSD cache, then it's very fast. When I transfer large amounts of data, I am glad I have that SSD front end cache.
DrivePool can use a SSD as a front end cache for writes. That works good enough for me. If you are a power user and need more speed in your server, I would suggest you take a look at PrimoCache. PrimoCache can use both your system RAM and your SSD as cache/buffers for reads/writes. I believe PrimoCache still offers a free trial period to use their software to see if it works for you.
Years ago I tried PrimoCache, but I only had 4GB RAM and no SSD on my system. Writing/reading from RAM was lightning fast with PrimoCache, but with limited RAM, the buffer filled up in no time with large data transfers (>3GB at that time) and dropped back down to the slow write speed of my archive HDD. So it was not worth it for me at the time to buy the program. Your situation is different with 16GB RAM and 2 SSDs. I'd recommend checking out the program at least for the free trial period.
I use DrivePool primarily as my home media storage server, so using the SSD as a front end cache is enough for me. Even without using the SSD, DrivePool was just fine for my needs and I had no complaints. The SSD just caches the writes faster on large data transfers. Sometimes that comes in handy.
Yeah, I had a hard time trying to figure out what drive/serial number I was working with in Storage Spaces. If you buy a few of the same HDD models, only the serial number may be different, which was a real pain for me.
Anyway, when I set up DrivePool, I just named my HDDs DP01, DP02, DP03, etc... I placed them in physical order on my shelf and I also tagged each drive/case with the drive name. The drives I have in my ProBox enclosures are also in physical order, so I know exactly which drive is in the slot. My life was easier when I got away from using serial numbers to identify the pool drives.
I don't have any magic way to identify your HDDs with serial numbers in your enclosures. Sometimes the software will have a feature to "identify" your drive which might flash a light on the drive slot if your enclosure has that feature. Mine did not. If you have a USB disk caddy, you could pull your enclosure drives and identify them in the caddy. I'd label the drives at that time, if needed, before returning them to the enclosure. But, like I said, with DrivePool, I just tagged and named the drives in the physical order that they are placed in the enclosure and/or on the shelf. Anything to make like simpler works better for me.

If setting the drive volume label to match the drive's serial number works for you, then stay with it.
My approach is different and works better for me. First of all, I currently have 18 USB HDDs in my DrivePool. I don't use Drive Letters on any of the pool drives. There are just too many drives in the pool and DrivePool does not need Drive Letters anyway. I preferred to clean up my Windows File Explorer listing, so the Drive Letters had to go.
What I do is just name the drives in logical order as they sit on the shelf. Being not too creative, my pool drives are labeled as DP01, DP02, DP03, etc.... I also put a label on each drive case. I have DrivePool GUI sort the pool list by name for easy reading. If there is any problem with a HDD, I immediately know which drive is affected.
I have lots of unduplicated home media files in my DrivePool. But I also have a few folders that I want 2X duplication. Not only do I find the duplication options better in DrivePool than Storage Spaces, but the net result is that I am saving lots of money by not duplicating my entire pool when it is not required for about 85% of my stored media files.
Also, I have had a couple HDD failures in the past month, and I have been able to recover almost all my data off the drives. In the meantime, DrivePool was still serving up all my other files like nothing happened. When my Storage Spaces crashed, it could takes weeks to rebuild. I don't miss Storage Spaces....
 
 

+1
Have a similar problem with using the DrivePool GUI on one of my remote computers. Got the error message "Licence not Found/valid" despite DrivePool is up and running fine on the server. I have narrowed down my issue to having different DrivePool versions on the server and that remote computer, i.e. the server is running Version 2.2.4.1162 whereas the remote computer had the latest update. So, I tried to update my server with the latest version of DrivePool, but it does not auto update and when I click on force update check, it just says it will notify me but does not. So I'll have to figure out how to update manually.
Now I wonder if my license will work if I update DrivePool on my server. My license number for DrivePool GUI did not work on the update version on my remote computer.
Currently I am using Remote Desktop to control DrivePool on my server from a remote computer, but the remote DrivePool GUI would be my preferred method.

Yes, DrivePool, like many of my Windows programs, sometimes hangs and requires a reboot. Most of the time DrivePool works without any problems, but I have run into some circumstances where DrivePool misbehaves and does not correct itself until after a reboot.
I ran Windows Storage Spaces for ~7 years, and the small problems I occasionally experience with DrivePool are nothing compared to the problems I had with Storage Spaces trying to manage the same size pool (currently 70TB).
IF I had any real complaint about DrivePool, it would be that it really keeps you in the dark on background tasks it performs. I personally would like more status info displayed in the DrviePool GUI in those cases, because background tasks might have a really low priority and it may look like nothing is happening. Well, it may be happening but not very fast. Or, maybe the task got hung up and needs a reboot. Sometimes you can go into Task Manager and check for disk activity there. I have done that on occasion to verify activity was really going on in the background tasks. It would be nice to have the option of seeing some of that background activity on the DrivePool GUI. Most of the time I don't care as long as it gets done. Sometimes I want to verify work is actually going on.
FWIW, I had the same idea as you when I was testing out DrivePool. I did a couple disk removals, but they worked just fine on my system, so I started off with a positive experience.

Last week I had a 5TB HDD failure and tried to remove the disk via DrivePool's GUI. It was unsuccessful. I did get an error message to run chkdsk on the HDD to correct the problem. Unfortunately, chkdsk corrupted the directory and I was left with no data on that drive. Total loss.
Today, I have another 6TB HDD that is misbehaving according to DrivePool. So, once again, I tried to remove the HDD using the DrivePool GUI. Again, it was unsuccessful and gave me an error message to run chkdsk on the HDD. NO WAY am I going to fall for that trap again. So I am currently moving data off that drive manually to other drives using TeraCopy. What I have discovered is that there are a few corrupt files on that HDD that cannot be moved. At least with TeraCopy, it will automatically skip over those corrupt files and continue to move the rest of the files on the list - and then give you an error report of the failed files at the end of the task. So I don't have to babysit the transfer of files over the next ~10 hours.
Questions:
1) Why is DrivePool unable to remove the drive when I have all 3 boxes checked to remove the drive and just to leave the failed files on the HDD? It appears to me that the remove task is erroring out when it hits the first corrupt file and does not try anymore.
2) If I have a HDD checked for removal, and it errors out, does DrivePool lock out that drive from the pool and not allow any new files to be written to it? I have ordered a couple new drives to replace these drives, but can I continue to use DrivePool without worrying about data being written to the drive marked for removal?
3) Since I am unable to remove the drive from within DrivePool's GUI, can I physically pull that drive out of the pool, then when DrivePool lists it as a missing disk, can I remove it then? After that, am I able to manually transfer files off that pulled disk back into the pool as is, or do I have to rename the PoolPart directory on that drive so DrivePool does not see it as part of the pool again?
I don't believe there is anything physically wrong with this current 6TB HDD. It reports at 100% Health, 100% Performance, and No error reports in SMART. Maybe related to the 5TB HDD failure of last week, for some reason, I got a few corrupt files thrown on this 6TB HDD. My intention if to vacate all data on this drive, run a few integrity tests on it for good measure, and assuming it passes, I will reformat the drive and put it back into DrivePool.
Let me end with saying something positive about DrivePool. Although I am having a few issues with a failed drive and now some corrupt files on (what appears to be) a good drive, with DrivePool I am still able to manually vacate the files off the drive, leaving only a few corrupt files on the drive that are causing me a problem. When I had problems with my old RAID and Storage Spaces pools, it was game over and I lost everything. This is another case that confirms my decision to move to DrivePool, and that is when you do have a HDD problem, chances are good with DrivePool that you might be able to minimize your loss and recover almost all your data.
 

You can attempt a Remove while the pool is measuring. If you don't have drive evacuation enabled (and active!) via the Stablebit Scanner balancer for Drivepool, I would also turn off balancing.
Since the first two Remove attempts failed and the drive's health is failing, I personally would tick all three boxes on the next attempt.
If that also doesn't work, or only recovers some of the files, you could stop the DrivePool service and attempt to manually move the remaining content of the hidden poolpart folder on that drive into the hidden poolpart folders of other drives in the same pool. If you do this I suggest using a good moving/copying utility such as Teracopy or Fastcopy rather than the Windows' Explorer, and (if prompted) do NOT replace any existing files on the destination (since that should only be possible if you have duplication enabled, and if the drive is failing you might be replacing good files with bad files).

I can remember when movies would fit on a CD ~700MB. Then the files were split on 2 CD's for ~1400MB. Then DVD's came in at 4.37GB and double sided DVDs at 9.4GB. Then BlueRay discs ~25GB but some BlueRay disc formats are up to 100GB. It's just a constant moving target, I guess. A 5000mb prefetch should be good for about half a 1080p movie these days.
Most of my current 1080p movies are between 8GB - 14GB. If I get a movie >15GB, I start to have buffering issues on my Amazon Fire TV stick. However, I have seen a number of new 4K movies uploaded at ~40GB to ~70GB. I don't have a 4K TV, so I don't even bother with those large 4K movie files. If I find a movie I really want only available in a large file, then I will run it through the free utility Shanna encoder and reduce it down to 1080p or 720p. I usually reduce to 720p. At 720p resolution, most files are reduced to ~3GB in size, so the entire file would fit on your prefetch forward to 5000mb.

I would like my drives to sleep when not in use. Where do you find the "default settings (Disabled Bitlocker_PoolPartUnlockDetect so that drives can sleep)"? My drives always seem to be powered up and awake. I just want to make sure that I have not changed that default setting. Thanks.
FWIW, I just leave the balancer(s) turned on all the time. DrivePool seems to handle everything without any problems, and the balancers work in the background as needed. I don't notice any DrivePool slow down or lag with my normal work load when the balancer(s) kick in.

... I'd guess that you could use Windows' Device Manager to disable the Covecube Virtual Disk and the Covecube Disk Enumerator, but I wouldn't mess with those unless Stablebit provided instructions.

I actually just thought of a solution for this which doesn't require a plugin! I could make separate pools for each of the drives I bought at the same time and NOT set duplication on these, and then make one big pool that only consists of those smaller pools and only set duplication on the one big pool. Then it would duplicate between pools, and ensure that the duplicates are on different groups of drives.
I'll probably do the same with any disks nearing their end of life. Place all near EoL disks in one pool to make sure it doesn't duplicate files on multiple near EoL disks.

Hybrid SSDs are nice for normal use, but in mixed-mode operating environments they get overwhelmed pretty quickly and start thrashing (ie. NAS with several users). There's also the problem of things like DrivePool mixing all your content up across the different drives, so the drive replaces your cached documents with a movie you decide to watch, and then the documents are slow again, even though you weren't going to watch the movie more than once. If there was a way to specify to only cache often written/edited files for increased speed, then maybe? But I think that would still run into issues with the balancer moving files between drives. The Hybrid drive wouldn't know the difference between that and legitimately newly written files.

Of course, I have Backblaze for cloud backup too, but re-downloading 10+ TB of data that could have been protected better locally isn't ideal.
I'm glad to hear you've had good luck so far, but don't fool yourself - multiple drive failure happens. Keep in mind that drives fail more when they're used more. The most common situations of multiple drive failure is that one drive fails, and you need to restore those files from your redundancies. During the restore process, another drive fails due to the increased use.
The most simultaneous failures I've heard of is 4 (not to me)... but that was in a larger raid. There's a reason for the parity drive count increasing every ~5 drives in parity based raids.
So far, I've been quite lucky. I've never permanently lost any files due to a drive failure - but I don't want that to start due to lack of diligence on my part either, so if I can find ways to make my storage solution more reliable I will.
In fact - one of the main reasons I went with DrivePool is that it seems more fault tolerant. Duplicates are spread between multiple drives (rather than mirroring, which relies entirely on one single other drive), so if you do lose two drives, you may lose some files, but not a full drive's worth. (Plus the lack of striping similarly makes sure that you don't lose the whole array if you can't restore.) I realize I don't need to explain any of this to someone who uses it, but just highlighting the reasons I found DP attractive in the first place - separating the duplicates amount multiple drives to reduce the chance of losses on failures. If that can be improved to further reduce those chances...

Currently I think my balancer works better than the official plugins. It offers all the features of all of them, but without any fighting. I also solved all the bugs I'm aware of in the disk space equalizer plugin (there were some corner cases where it balanced incorrectly).
I'm working on some issues with the ordered placement portion and then I'll release it.

I actually wrote a balancing plugin yesterday which is working pretty well now. It took a bit to figure out how to make it do what I want. There's almost no documentation for it, and it doesn't seem very intuitive in many places.
So far, I've been "combining" several of the official plugins together to make them actually work together properly. I found the official plugins like to fight each other sometimes. This means I can have SSD drop drives working with equalization and disk usage limitations with no thrashing. Currently this is working, although I ended up re-writing most of the original plugins from scratch anyway simply because they wouldn't combine very well as originally coded. Plus, the disk space equalizer plugin had some bugs in a way which made it easier to rewrite than fix.
I wasn't able to combine the scanner plugin - it seems to be obfuscated and baked into the main source, which made it difficult to see what it was doing.
Unfortunately, the main thing I wanted to do doesn't seem possible as far as I can tell. I had wanted to have it able to move files based on their creation/modified dates, so that I could keep new/frequently edited files on faster drives and move files that aren't edited often to slower drives. I'm hoping maybe they can make this possible in the future.
Another idea I had hoped to do was to create drive "groups" and have it avoid putting duplicate content on the same group. The idea behind that was that drives purchased at the same time are more likely to fail around the same time, so if I avoid putting both duplicated files on those drives, there's less likelihood of losing files in the case of multiple drive failure from the same group of drives. This also doesn't seem possible right now.

The drive may have failed. Do you have another computer you could test the drive in? Or if not, could you boot from a Live CD or Live USB to see if it shows up in a different OS?

Hi! I have the same issue, but worse. After this error code I rebooted my PC, and it took about 5 minutes to boot up again, and when it booted I noticed that the drive - that produced the error code when I tried to make new folder - was missing. It isn't shown in file manager and in the disk manager neither. Now I don't know what to do... 

Thank you for posting the solution!  Same problem, same fix.  I could see this having taken me a LONG time to figure out.

Yuuuuup.    This happens from time to time (I've seen it 4-5 times in the last 10 years, including both my systems and other peoples, so exceptionally rare). 
I'm glad you were able to figure this out, and posted the solution!  Hopefully, no more weird stuff for you!

After posting, I found an issue I had missed: the disk was marked as Read Only in disk management. 
After running DISKPART from cmd I managed to remove the read-only tag using the command attributes disk clear readonly  and it appears to be OK now.

Two years ago I tried running DrivePool on Windows 10. Everything seemed ok during the install but I had problems where Windows 7 mediacenter computers had problems opening the movie files.
I wasn't sure if the problem was caused by the pair of MediaSonic ProBoxes connected with the Asmedia 106x SATA controller or ethernet driver issues. I just put the Windows 7 OS SSD I put aside back in and continued until now with Win7.
I've now upgraded all the mediacenter computers to Windows 10 with Chameleon Media Center. Does anyone have a Drive Pool machine with a pair of ProBoxes/Asmedia 106 running fine in Windows 10?
Thanks,

Hi,
I bought DrivePool a couple days ago and it was running great for the first day. Since I have been plagued by it working correctly for 1-2 boots, then every boot afterwards takes approximately 10 minutes to load DrivePool upon logging in to Windows 10, I can open it but it said loading with the time taken so far. During this time the drive pools are inaccessible. I have had brief luck in waiting for it to load, then resetting the settings in DrivePool and then... reconfiguring the balancing (SSD Optimisation only). However, this is not an ideal situation. 
Does anyone have any ideas than may permanently resolve the issue?
Thanks in advance. 

I'm interested in extending the behavior of the current balancing plugins, but don't want to re-write them from scratch. Is there any chance the current balancing plugins could be made open source to allow the community to contribute and extend them?

Well, there may be some scenario where drive letters are required. But with 16 HDDs in my pool, I am more than happy to assign names to the HDDs and not have to bother with drive letters. In theory, DrivePool is able to pool many more than 26 HDDs, so you would reach a point where you would run out of drive letters anyway.
If you need to assign a drive letter to a DrivePool HDD that has a name only, you can easily do that in Disk Management and it will not affect DrivePool at all. Again, DrivePool does not read the drive letter at all. It only uses the hidden PoolPart directory for identification.
As mentioned, you may have to restart your computer if you decide to reassign drive letters to your DrivePool HDDs, not for DrivePool itself, but sometimes other Windows program will not recognize the newly named drive without a restart. IIRC, Disk Management will warn you about that when you change/add/remove a drive letter.

FWIW, I just removed all drive letters from my DrivePool HDDs. DrivePool does not need a drive letter to recognize a HDD in the pool. It uses the hidden PoolPart directory.
Removing drive letters on the HDDs makes a less cluttered display in Windows 10 File Explorer as it will only show HDDs with drive letters. That works great for me as I currently have 16 HDDs in my DrivePool. Those HDDs are dedicated to DrivePool and nothing else. So I don't need any drive letters assigned to them.
Of course, when you remove the drive letters, Windows 10 File Explorer can longer "see" the drive normally. You would have to go back into Disk Management and reassign a drive letter.
I track all my pool HDDs by name, such as DP01, DP02, DP03, etc.... which also corresponds to the physical location on my rack. I also put the drive name sticker on the physical drive/case for easy identification. The HDDs in my pool do not have drive letters assigned to them, as I stated. The DrivePool UI lists the names all in alphabetic order, which is very nice. However, if for some reason I want to reassign a drive letter to a particular drive, I just use Disk Management and look up the HDD by name. That is much easier then trying to track all the S/N of the HDDs.
I am not using Scanner, so I am not sure if that program requires drive letters to work. Is there some reason you need/want to keep any drive letters assigned to your pool HDDs? I found DrivePool was easier to work with when I removed all those drive letters from my pool HDDs. Just my thoughts to your initial question on how to not drive yourself crazy with numerous drives in DrivePool.