pclausen

Restarting the service did do the trick. I misspoke before when I said I restarted the service as I actually just clicked the X in the upper right hand corner and then launched the app again. I now realize that in essence just minimized the app I sent the error reports as requested. Thanks

I use these cards as well. The first thing I did was to flash them to the latest "IT" firmware. See here for details on how to do that: http://www.servethehome.com/ibm-serveraid-m1015-part-4/ The IT mode turns the card into straight HBA mode, so that all it does is pass connected disks through to the OS. You don't have to flash to IT mode, you can also disable raid in the BIOS, but I like removing the BIOS boot screen and remove all the firmware code that deals with RAID for as clean a setup as possible.

Thanks. That explains it. So I was successful in removing all but 22 data drives from my pool, consolidate those 22 data drives along with 2 parity drives into a single 24 bay chassis. Next I removed a couple of 2TB drives, one at a time, and replaced them with 4TB drives. Next I went into Disk Manager and relabeled the drives and also changed their mount points to match. DrivePool picked up on the changes within 20 seconds or so, but Scanner still hasn't several hours later. I stopped Scanner and restarted, but it still didn't pick up on the change. Here's a screenshot showing the correct labels and paths in DrivePool and the old ones in Scanner: Also, I hot swapped the drives and a couple of times Scanner crashed when doing this. I submitted an on-line error report the 2nd time. Once the balancing completes, I'll do a full reboot and hopefully Scanner will pick up the new disk IDs.

I'm now using the "Disk Usage Limiter" plugin and it is working great. Found one little issue with it that does not appear to affect functionality, but just looks a bit odd in the UI. I'm removing 3 drives from my pool. So I went into Disk Usage Limiter and unchecked both boxes for the 3 drives. I'm not in the process of removing the 2nd disk (the first one has completed). If you look at the below screen cap, you can see that I have both boxes unchecked for both of the remaining drives. But for some reason, that upper little triangle did not move all the way to the left in a UI as indicated by the green circle below for the last drive. It did move both triangles all the way to the left for both the 1st and 2nd (as seen by the red circle below) disks. It doesn't affect anything function wise as far as I can tell, so perhaps it is just a cosmetic bug. Minimizing the window and restoring it doesn't change anything.

I'll look into those 8TB archive HDs and the balancer plugin that lets you cap per individual HDDs. I went a different router morning I went ahead and "un-ignored" the SMART warning messages, then I enabled the Scanner Plugin, and allowed immediate balancing. Well, nothing happened after like a hour. I then told scanner to start scanning the drives, and it just hung. So I decided to do a reboot. The scanner service never started. Tried restarting the scanner service. No error, but when I started the scanner UI, it told me the service wasn't running and recommended doing a reboot. I went through this dance 3 times and then finally decided to go back to Windows 8.1 64 bit rather than do a rollback. I'm a big fan of clean installs. So I backed up the drivepool, scanner and snapraid dirs and various other things. I then proceeded with a clean install, wiping the C drive completely. It has a huge pain just to get started since I had 50 drives connected and the installer had to scan them all before I even was able to tell the installer where to install. Anyway, I'm just about done applying all the patches and also got all 48 drives mapped to folders matching exactly what I had before (c:\raid\data01, etc). I forgot to deactivate my drivepool and scanner licenses, so we'll see how that goes what I do fresh installs of those to apps. So after doing clean installs of those apps, should I copy any config files over from my backups, or am I better off just setting everything up fresh via the GUI? If I setup everything fresh, will the current drivepool hidden folders in which all my data resides still work? (see screen cap in first post for an example) I'm thinking that before installing drivepool, I might just manually move the folder/files off those failing 1TB drives. This way there won't be any balancing for drivepool to do for the time being. Thanks Peter

I think I'm going to go ahead and remove most of those other drives with the SMART errors from the pool. Based on my experience with removing one so far, I have a concern. Even with all balancing turned off, as soon as I remove the first drive from the pool via the GUI, DrivePool is going to begin moving the data on it to the other drives in the pool with the most free space. This is normally a good thing, but in my case, some of those are disks that I also want to remove from the pool. So how to I prevent data being moved to any of those drives?

Appreciate the response. As stated, I got a total of 48 drives (4 are 4TB parity drives and then 44 data disks 1, 2 and 4TB in size). All the ones with errors are my original 1TB Seagate ST31000340NS Barracuda ES.2 Enterprise drives. I purchased 24 of these originally and over the years I was able to replace about 10 of them under warranty. The replacement units only came with a 1 year warranty unfortunately. I still have 19 of these running in my pool Here are the SMART errors on them: As you can see, only 1 of the 19 has no SMART errors. I removed the one from the pool with over 2000 reallocated sectors as indicated above. I do have enough space left in the pool to migrate the data off the other 18. Some of them are actually mostly empty right now. So do you think I should just go ahead and do that now, or do you think they may have another 6 years left in them? Btw, my drives never spin down to idle since I moved to my current HBA controllers, and it has probably been 6 months since the server was last powered down. Plenty of reboots, but no power downs, so I don't think the 18 drives with spin retry counts have had to try to spin up for 6 months.

Appreciate the feedback. Since I have 10 disks with SMART errors, most of which are rather innocent (spin retry count), I didn't want to automatically move data off all those disks to other disks. That said, the disks with warnings are all Seagate 1TB Enterprise drives that are, on average, over 5 years old. Some of them are coming up on their 7 year anniversary. So what I did was to remove the ones with severe errors (reallocated sector counts in the 1000s) from the pool by simply clicking the "Remove" button from the gui. This worked beautifully and automatically spread the content to a few of the other disks in the pool with the most free space. Keep in mind that I got 44 drives in my pool, a mix of 1, 2 and 4TB drives with a total of 71TB with 24TB free. So for the drives with the spin retry count SMART errors, I chose to "Ignore Warnings" until new ones show up. So with that done, if I was to enable one of the 2 options you mention above, would DrivePool begin moving data off those drives immediately, or would it wait until an additional SMART error occurred? Thanks! Peter

Yep, I submitted a ticket about this. I found a solution to get around the situation for now. I basically gave everybody full control and made myself the owner: That did the trick and I'm now able to write/delete to the drivepool across the network and apps running on the server are able to do their thing. I plan to slowly restrict access back to more normal levels and see at which point things start to break. Might have been a one time fluke being that I'm on Windows 10.

Another possible clue. I'm able to delete files ok from the server, but when I attempt to do it from within an application, it fails. So I think this rules out it having anything to do with network shares. For example, I can delete a trailer from say F:\Blu-Ray\testmovie "by hand" just fine, but if I attempt to delete it from within JRiver Media Center (using the Remove from Media Library and permanently delete from disk) I get the following error message: There was a problem deleting files. Please ensure that the files are not in use by another program and that the files have delete permissions

So I went ahead and registered DrivePool (and Scanner) and applied the license to rule out it being a licensing issue. Problem persists. I enabled file logging and performed the action and disabled again. But when I attempt to send the service folder to a compressed file, I get an error message about half way through that states: File not found or no read permission I'm able to manually create a new folder in C:\ProgramData\StableBit PrivePool just fine. So I made a copy of the Service folder and dropped it on my desktop. I was then able to create a zip file there just fine of it's contents, I have submitted that file via the support link you provided. Thanks

Thanks! I neglected to mention that I'm also running SnapRaid, so I disabled the Scanner plug-in. Perhaps I can run all 3 together? I'll have to look into that. Definitely would be cool to automate moving data off disks that are failing.

DrivePool still shows 24.1 days left in the trail. I'm able to create folders and copy files to them just fine from the "server" itself. I ran "fsmgmt.msc" and then I browse to the folder in question, it shows me "peter" as the user. The "Open Mode" is "Read". Just for grins, I shared my D: drive on the server and then from the other computer on the network, was able to create a new folder there with no problem. It was the same user and "Open Mode" was "Read" as well. I'll capture the log information when I get a chance to see if that reveals anything. Thanks!

Thanks. That was set to read only, but I changed it to full control as seen here: But I'm still not able to create a new folder. On the networked computer, I did exit all the way out and went back into my shares, and still no dice.

I seem to have a related issue. On the server running DrivePool, I set the ownership to the defaults you suggest above as seen here: I also ran the following command to make the admin group the owner of all files and folders: takeown /a /r /d Y /f F:\ I'm able to create folders, copy files, etc just fine from a RDP session to the server. However, when I'm on one of my workstations on the same network, I'm not able to create folders or copy files to them. This is the message I get: I'm using the same local account name on all computers and they are all members of the admin group. What gives?

I was wondering what the best practices are for moving files around between drives within a pool. I have a number of drives that are giving me SMART warnings, and I want to move the contents of those drives onto other healthy drives on the same pool that have plenty of available space. Is this the recommended procedure: 1. Stop DrivePool Service 2. Move the content from within the DrivePool hidden folder from the source disk to the target disk as seen in the below screenshot: 3. Start DrivePool Service 4. Remove empty drive(s) from DrivePool via GUI Thanks! Peter

Great thanks. Just wanted to make sure. Also, can I change the DrivePool drive letter from Windows Disk Manager with no ill effects? (in my case, I'd like to change it from F: to Z:)

I'm just using DrivePool to pool 44 drives into one. I use snapraid for protection. So I have neither Pool File nor Folder duplication enabled, yet DrivePool runs a "Duplication" task pretty frequently, and it takes several hours to complete. Why does it do that? Here's an example of what I'm seeing: As you can see, the size is almost nothing at 8.85MB. This has been the amount from the very beginning. I'm assuming this some config info or something to keep things safe. Also, what's this 96.5 GB of "Other"? Thanks! Peter

Windows 10 build 10041 is working fine for me. Got 44 drives in a pool.