I don't use the File Order Placement on my DrivePool, but as I understand it, you can order your drives in the priority they should be used. If you designated your 12TB Seagate Exos as the last drive to be used in the pool, that should significantly reduce the writes to that drive as long as your other drives with higher priority have free space. At the same time, you could also manually transfer files to/from your 12TB Seagate drive when you want. If you have files on the 12TB Seagate that you constantly need to read, then I would manually move them to another drive.
If you have lots of frequently used files to move off the 12TB Seagate, then you might consider to "Remove" the drive from DrivePool, have DrivePool empty its data from your 12TB drive, and then add the 12TB Seagate back in again to the pool as the lowest priority drive in the pool. Then you could manually move rarely used files to the empty 12TB Seagate and basically have the 12TB drive there as storage. I think that would work. I'll be reading this thread to see if there are other ideas.
It's terrible to lose data. Having said that, I don't follow what your situation is. I have never had any data lost from adding a HDD to DrivePool.
Is it your Drive D that you believe was formatted? That's the only drive that appears to have no data.
On the top left corner of the Pie Chart DrivePool main page, you have 3 messages logged. You might want to click on that small pie chart and read what DrivePool has logged. Sometimes that gives you clues.
Is there a reason you added your Drive C to your DrivePool? I know it's possible to add Drive C to DrivePool, but I personally never use my Drive C for any pools. I try to keep that Drive C from outside storage programs.
As far as trusting DrivePool, well, it works better for me than my old hardware RAID setups, or when I used Windows Storage Spaces. I had massive data loses with a single HDD failure in both those other systems. In fact, even though I had triple redundancy on my Windows Storage Spaces, I had a single HDD failure and it destroyed my entire Storage Space volume. That was not supposed to happen.
I switched over to DrivePool a couple years ago. I have had HDD failures using DrivePool, but it only affects the data on the failed HDD. Many times, I was able to physically remove the drive, plug it into a desktop caddy, and transfer almost all the data off that failing HDD.
DrivePool is not a backup plan, but you can turn on duplication for the entire pool, or specific folders. In theory, that should allow you to rebuild your data faster when you add a new drive to the pool after a HDD failure. I find that useful for some data. Mostly, my DrivePool is used as my Home Media Server and I have all my data backed up on HDDs sitting in my closet. I mostly trust DrivePool to handle my server data, but like anything with computers, you really need to have a good backup plan to ensure no data loss if you have HDD failures. After running DrivePool for a couple of years, I only have single copies of media data on my DrivePool Home Media Server. If I lose a pool HDD, then I'll rebuild from my backup HDDs if still needed.
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.
