vnangia

Useful reads both, thanks. I do find the units for many of the SMART attributes to be lacking. For example, reallocated sector count on the current spinning disk is reporting Value: 100; Worst: 100; Threshold: 5; Raw Value: 0, which suggests that the disk is at its worst state now, well above the threshold, but in reality means the disk is fine. Let me give it some more thought. As I said, the money isn't the issue; I just want to make sure I'm staying on Windows. One thing I've discovered overnight is that both Parallels and VMWare support snapshotting the Windows VM, which is infinitely useful when an update goes bad. That sounds like a really useful feature and not something that can be done easily if you're running Windows bare-metal. Eh well.

Thanks - will read. No problem on long reads - I came on the internet to get away from the inane video on the TV and I'm grievously offended that it's followed me here. Not worried terribly by processor usage. I currently have a Core 2 Duo E8600 in the EX490, 4GB of RAM and a 24TB pool, of which about 14TB are in use. zpool scrub takes about six hours or so, so I just have it run once a week on a day I'm not likely to be using the server (Friday nights are great for this) - and of course, it also transparently calculates parity on access and fixes the file if there's an issue in between. So far, so good. Plex's indexing engine is way more demanding than the zfs scrubbing, truth be told. I'll read up tomorrow though. Thanks

Referring to all of the above, actually. The hardware longevity is definitely part of it and I hadn't realized that Scanner mitigated against that. I don't mind spending the money if I was staying on Windows, but ... not convinced yet. ZFS also does a couple of other things that I really like (incremental replication in particular - makes my off-site backup so much quicker) and it's a bit more efficient on space side. With duplication enabled on everything (yes I know, I *could* just do it for a couple of essential folders, but I'm lazy and don't want to copy everything back if something fails), DP makes my current 10x2TB stack of disks a 10TB pool, while a RAIDZ3 would give me a 14TB pool and a RAIDZ2 would give me a 16TB pool. Eventually I think ReFS will get there, but having tried testing ReFS and watched it unable to recover from transient errors, I'm going to stick with ZFS on the reliability side. That said, ZFS is also a PITA when it comes to creating pools from arbitrary sized disks, and I have a whole bunch of not-same-size disks that I need to think about. Now that the WS is up and running, I can postpone the decision back to summer when I have some time to tinker. I do have the APCd installed - it used to tell the other server the power was gone as well. I think it still does need to be installed to start the server back up again after an orderly shutdown because as far as the BIOS is concerned, an orderly shutdown isn't a powerloss so the machine doesn't come back up. I've fixed the power plan for now, but c'est la vie. ETA: we should probably move the last few posts to a new thread in off-topic. Sorry.

Actually - I've generally found catastrophic disk failure the easiest thing to diagnose - you can usually hear it clucking or making a weird noise. What keeps me up at night is silent corruption / bitrot. That's in large part why I'm thinking about using ZFS - I'd use btrfs, but the community around btrfs is a bit terrifying, while OpenZFS on OS X is quite supportive and welcoming. In fact, I actually have an HP EX490 that's been Hackintoshed running ZFS right now so it wasn't the end of the world when the server went down. Hooray rsync/BTSync. We used to use a HD HomeRun Prime for several years, until everything ended up being on Sunday night and the wife yelled when she couldn't record all her shows. So we now have a Ceton Infinitv 6 ETH, but decrypting HDCP-encrypted broadcasts is still impossible on any OS other than Windows. We also made a commitment to basically cut our stuff quite a bit and go digital several years ago, and have done so. I've encoded almost every disc I have and it's served by Plex, a cousin of Emby, so we're quite happy with the setup right now - that's the vast majority of stuff on the Drivepool right now. And yeah, I know what you said about the power plans not switching, and yet, I can consistently reproduce the problem by yanking the UPS out of the socket. It switches almost instantly to the Balanced plan from High Power, but never back when plug it back in. Maybe it's the UPS software? I think I should just remove the Balanced plan... Anyway.

Hi Christopher, yes, same ticket - thanks for putting it in here. rtech73, the TL;DR is there was a curious entry in the system log that read "Reset to device, \Device\RaidPort0, was issued." Googling that got this article, and when I went to check, sure enough that's what happened. More detail: I'm mainly a *nix guy, and have used OS X as my primary OS since uhh ... 10.1? Maybe the DP? A while at any rate. The reason I have a Windows Server is to support the Windows-based HTPC which in turn exists only because I have to have a cablecard. So a number of things which I guess is normal in Windows world never occured to me. The obvious symptom was that the pool was freezing up, so I posted here and then saw that I was eligible to submit a ticket, so I did. Some rounds of troubleshooting later, Christopher mentioned checking the system log (which I forgot Windows had, honestly - "Event Viewer" doesn't immediately translate to "log" to an OS X / Unix guy). And then the rest fell into place - I know that the power went the day the errors began but the system is on a UPS, so naturally it switched over and there were no FS errors. What I didn't realize it also apparently switched power plans; again to a Unix person this is weird behavior because a) why should there be power plans; and why would a server of all things have power plans - it's a desktop server, not a laptop. The standard power plan has the PCI Express Link State Power Management option to "off"; the "balanced" plan has it to "moderate". And when I switched it, it suddenly started functioning again, so I asked Christopher to close the ticket. Honestly, this might have been the straw that broke the camel's back. I think I'm going to use VMWare or Parallels to virtualize a Win7 instance for the HTPC on a Mac Mini and retire the Windows Server, though WAF needs to be checked

Thank you for the quick turnaround. Let's use the support thread; feel free to lock this if you'd like. For what it's worth, it's just Explorer that's freezing.

Hello. Apologies if this has been asked before, but I can't find it using search either here or on the FAQ page. I had DrivePool 2.1.1.561_x64 running a 10-disk pool on Windows Server 2012 R2 Essentials. For the past 48 hours, the pool is simply not responding as far as I can tell. Explorer shows no information in the "My Computer" about the poolsize or available space. Attempts to access the pool meet with immediate Explorer freeze. The Drivepool UI is not loading at all. Disk Management freezes connecting to the virtual disk service. Neither processor nor RAM is under load, nor are any of the processes marked as hung. It's also not possible to stop or restart the Service. A quick check through the logs shows nothing untoward, except "Cannot calculate balance ratio, pool is not measured. (Pool mode: PoolModeNormal)" in the logs. Does any one have any suggestions how to fix this? I have tried: -Restarting the computer, several times. -Uninstalling and reinstalling DrivePool. -Starting in Safe Mode. Bit at my wits end here. Sorry, edited to add: I previously had the SSD Optimizer plugin installed, but no longer as there's no longer a caching drive. The pool hasn't changed at all in setup since the initial configuration, except for the removal of the caching drive. No Windows updates in the last 3-4 weeks.