Alex

Thank you. As a silver surfer it is nice to know that I am not going senile.
 
You guys offer amazing support.
 
Nigel

I think the Ordered File Placement plugin could be used to do this. Setup your folder rule to place all music on drive 1 & 2. Then use the OFP plugin to designate drive 1 with a higher priority than drive 2.

ended up being a problem with windows.  as per alex i ended up doing a "refresh".  have to reinstall all programs, but scanner works after the refresh and reinstall.

Alright guys, starting with build 511 file placement rules will no longer include added drives by default. There is now a new option to enable that on a rule by rule basis.
 
I've also added the ability to rearrange folder based rules, as long as you don't break folder depth rules. See attached image to illustrate what this looks like now.
 
Download: http://dl.covecube.com/DrivePoolWindows/beta/download/
 
Edit: Multiselect implemented in build 512.

NCage,
 
This is very normal if you haven't really added any files to the pool since adding the disk.
 
The reason for this is that DrivePool tends to add new files to the disks with the most free space by default. If you haven't added any, and none of the other balancers placement settings have been "violated", it's not going to fill the new disks.
 
However, if you really do want your data to be forcibly spread out between the disks, then you may want to install the "Disk Space Equalizer" balancer plugin. This balancer plugin does exactly what it sounds like it does.
https://stablebit.com/DrivePool/Plugins

This feature has been one I've been eagerly anticipating and I've got to say it is amazing.
 
I love that no matter what happens to my pool I can take an individual drive and be confident that my entire music collection is there. No trying to merge the contents of five different drives to get my albums back in order if anything catostrophic happens.
 
It's easy to set my documents on the fastest disk and set archival content on a slow archival disk.
 
The sheer level of control is fantastic.
 
This feature alone puts DrivePool head and shoulders above any competing product.
 
So for all the effort to make this happen. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

First off... great start!   Been waiting for this for some time since posting a while back and so happy to see it.  Now to get more drives to make room for this to work
 
So to my questions and suggestions.
 
In the Balancing > File Placement > Folders section I see the list of folders and then the list of available drives on the right for creation of that relationship...
1.  Would it be possible to add the actual drive model/size to the list of drives?  
2.  If I remember correctly you said you do some level of performance measuring in DP (not sure to what extent).   Does this info lend itself to applying a "good/better/best" color flagging to the drives in this list to gauge relative actual performance?
3.  If not (or maybe as an enhancement to 2 above) have you thought of adding the ability to, on a schedule or manually, "test" all drives for performance indexing that can be applied to my suggestion 2 or some other way?
4.  If you are selecting folders/drives in the folders tab and you hit "save" the entire dialog closes.   Please add an "apply" button to create the actual rule rather than having every click create a rule.   The problem here is you can easily end up with rules that don't automatically remove themselves if you "uncheck" what you changed.  
5.  When navigating down folders in the tree child folders should always display the drive selection of it's parent folder unless explicitly changed. 
6.  Along the lines of the apply/save comment maybe it could be "apply to rules" in the folders tab for the current selection(s) and then a ".   Of course I know buttons should usually have single word but just stating as for examples sake.
 
 
 
Have you thought of creating more traditional rules that can be grown/expanded as needed? For example I might have a rule called "HD movies" and within that rule are all the folders and drives that apply to that rule.   So I can have one rule for a given set of folders and assigned drives.  If I delete that rule I remove all those custom relationships.  If I ever want to assign a new folder to the rule I can just add the folder to the rule without having to create an entire new set of folder/drive assignments per folder.   Assuming this makes sense.    So in your Rules pane you'd have:
 
RuleName1
+Folders:
-- Folder 1
-- Folder 2
-- Folder 3
+Drives
-- Drive 1
-- Drive 2
-- Drive 3
 
RuleName2
+Folders
-- Folder 5
-- Folder 6
+Drives
-- Drive 2
-- Drive 4
-- Drive 5
 
 
Questions/comments aside thanks for such a great product.  I don't know what I'd do without it... maybe use raid again /shudder.
 

Thanks for confirming both parts.
 
And just FYI, we are looking to push out the newer beta version out, but we want to make sure they're stable and ready before doing so.

Multiselect works brilliantly. Saved a bunch of time setting up my rules again.

Alex, I know its a shot in the dark, but can you make a personal cloud app for whs2011?  Something to act like dropbox.   Instant camera uploads and all.  Just a thought, or maybe a dream.

Alright guys, starting with build 511 file placement rules will no longer include added drives by default. There is now a new option to enable that on a rule by rule basis.
 
I've also added the ability to rearrange folder based rules, as long as you don't break folder depth rules. See attached image to illustrate what this looks like now.
 
Download: http://dl.covecube.com/DrivePoolWindows/beta/download/
 
Edit: Multiselect implemented in build 512.

By default, the rules are now ordered like this (top being highest priority):
Manually entered rules are inserted at the top. Folder based rules look for a place to insert themselves starting at the bottom and moving towards the top. Once a folder place rule encounters another folder placement rule with the same path depth or a higher path depth it inserts itself right under that rule. If it doesn't find such a rule then it inserts itself at the top of the topmost folder placement rule. The system tries to put any existing rules (prior to priority being implemented) into an order that fits the rules above, but I haven't tested that part thoroughly yet.
 
If you're having trouble with your existing rules in build 510, remove all of them, hit save and redefine them.
 
 
Ok, I'll add a checkbox for each rule that will say something like "Place files on new drives added to the pool." It will be unchecked by default.
 
 
Multiselect, hmm... Perhaps. I'll see how difficult it would be to adjust the existing code.

I noticed this as well. It would be nice to be able select multiple placement rules and select/deselect drives for all of those rules at the same time. Something a little like setting access permissions on a group of folders. Drives that differ in a group would be in a semi-selected state unless you tick/untick it. Drives that are common between the rules would appear normally.
 
That way adding a new drive to the pool would be a fairly trivial matter to add to a group of placement rules.

Another question on File Placement Rules!!
 
I set all my folders to the specified drives with File Placement Rules. All went well and everything is on the drives that I want it to be on.
However I added a new drive earlier and Drivepool is set to allow anything and everything to go on it. So If my Music is set to be only on Mount point 4 adding another drive (Mount Pont 8) will automatically allow music to be placed on Mount Point 8 after going to all the trouble of making sure that the music was only on Mount Point 4.
Multiply this by about 20 server folders and its a pita.
 
Can I suggest that the default for new drives is that all the Folder Placement checkboxes are unticked and not ticked. I know adding a drive is not an every day event but I still think the default should be to allow nothing on the drive until you allow it. Had I not realised in advance and then hit balance all my neat and tidy music would have again been scattered over 2 drives.

Changing Smart_NoWmi to True in the scanner.service.exe.config file has resolved my SMART error issues.
 
Thank you!  

If the throttling doesn't work... 
Try this:
http://community.covecube.com/index.php?/topic/597-constant-emails-warning-of-impending-disk-death-but-all-disks-check-out/&do=findComment&comment=3667

That is actually 100% expected. 
 
Specifically the service controls the "Remote Control" feature of DrivePool, which allows you to administer the pool from another PC on the network. 

Well, glad that you're liking it! 
 
And yeah, very simple and very nice to use!

I've got remote management of Drivepool working on both PCs now, it works well, glad I asked.

No, actually the rules are combined right now. So if you have a file \Media\Movies\MyMovie.MKV, that will match all the rules. The system now combines the rules in a restrictive way. In other words you've just told the system that you don't want that file on Drives 1, 2, 3. If you have no other drives in the pool it will continue on as if there are no restrictions.
 
And you've kind of hit on something that I've been thinking of since I published build 503. I've talked to Christopher about this over here and I think that we have a nice solution to this.
 
It will work like this:
Rules defined in a folders tab cannot be combined with any other rules. So one folder based rule will apply at all times. In the case of when multiple folder based rules match a path, the rule with the highest priority wins. Folder based rule priority is automatic. Rules with more "\" characters in them get higher priority. In other words, rules on deeper directory structures win. Pattern based rules will have an explicit priority that you define by moving the rule up or down in the list, kind of like we already have with the balancers. So if you place your *.MKV rule above the other folder rules then it will win, otherwise the folder rules will win. I think this makes sense and I'm still thinking about whether there should be a way to combine pattern based rules. Right now I'm leaning towards a no.
 
Expect to see these changes implemented soon. I've already caught a file pattern balancing bug and fixed it in the latest internal BETA. Sometimes it was violating the rules even though the settings told it not to.

The new file placement rules are fantastic and a feature I've been awaiting with much anticipation. I have a few questions on their behavior.
 
If I setup a rule on a path and on a child path and a relative rule, what rule takes precedence? For example:
 
\Media\* (Limit to Drive 1)
\Media\Movies\* (Limit to Drive 2)
*.mkv (Limit to Drive 3)
 
Will the movies directory be placed on Drive 1 because it is matched by the first rule? Or will it end up on Drive 2 because the second rule is more specific? If a movie ends in mkv will it be placed on Drive 3? Is there any way to set the priority of the file matching rules?
 
Wildcards are definitely useful in building a rule. Are there any other matching parameters? Could I do a more robust pattern match like:
 
\Media\TV\[0-9]* (Limit to Drive 1)
\Media\TV\[A-L]* (Limit to Drive 2)
\Media\TV\[M-Z]* (Limit to Drive 3)
 
If not, I'd love to see that added

Sounds like we can start testing with ReFS. We can surely add support, provided that there are no showstoppers.
 
You would not be able to mix ReFS / NTFS on the same pool though.

Very astute. You've just struck a very important aspect of disk I/O, it's called synchronization (by us programmers). Obviously, if such a thing were allowed then you would end up with file corruption.
 
StableBit DrivePool has a well defined locking model to prevent such things from happening (as does the rest of the Windows kernel), and frankly this is most of the work of writing a reliable pooling solution.

As far as duplicated file performance, here's how it works:
 
The Windows NT kernel is inherently asynchronous. In other words, performing an operation does not block the caller. You may have experienced this in other Windows applications, you click a button and then the whole Window freezes until some operation completes. This is not how the Windows kernel works (where our pooling is done). The original designers had the foresight to make the whole thing asynchronous. Which essentially means that nothing waits for something else to complete.

For example, if I need to read a file I issue a READ IRP (a command) to some driver (some code that someone else wrote). If the driver can't service the read request immediately it tells us "Ok, great! I'll get back to you when the read is complete. Do you have any other requests?". This is how everything works under the hood.

We take advantage of this and basically for duplicated files we issue multiple write requests in parallel. This means that the total time that it takes to complete the request is the turnaround time of the slowest drive.

Build 2.1.0.503 with this feature is now live on stablebit.com: http://stablebit.com/DrivePool/Download