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DragonQ

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Posts posted by DragonQ

  1. On 1/2/2018 at 8:18 PM, Christopher (Drashna) said:

    The list is generated over a small window. So it may list stuff that isn't open anymore.

    As for the randomness, Windows Search may be a culprit here.  Also, Explorer may be attempting to generate thumbnails.  Etc.  
    All sorts of access can generate behavior on ... well, any disk. 

    And this would likely (should) be very similar to what you'd see with RESMON or Procmon or other tools. 

    That's kinda the reason I asked - Resource Monitor shows exactly ZERO files being open for read/write on the pool, yet DrivePool shows non-zero numbers all the time. Hence I am wondering what files it thinks are being used.

  2. I notice the latest beta has an "Open Files" stat on the performance pane. The numbers seem to be pretty random, for example being stuck at 2 when seemingly nothing is being used, then being around 24 the next day, then jumping to 1024 playing an audio file on the pool. Resource Manager shows no disk activity on the pooled drive so I'm a bit confused about what's going on. Is there any way to see more information on this? A list of open files somewhere in the log maybe?

    Thanks.

  3. We do apologize for the long delay.  You can read about that in detail here: 

    http://community.covecube.com/index.php?/topic/2620-is-drivepool-abandoned-software/&do=findComment&comment=18022

     

    That said, the public betas are very stable, and the internal betas are also very stable. 

     

     

    That said, we have a "Known issues" post, that summarize many of the current and fixed issues that we do know about.  

    http://community.covecube.com/index.php?/topic/1206-stablebit-drivepool-known-issues-and-limitations/

     

    This isn't comprehensive, but covers most of the bigger issues.

     

     

     

    You should be okay using either version, but I would personally recommend the latest internal beta. 

    Thanks for that, will have a read. :)

  4. Hi,

     

    I see there hasn't been an update of this software in quite a while, yet new beta builds are made weekly. How stable are these releases considered? Is this branch close to making it into an official release any time soon? It looks like there's lots of bug fixes and small improvements but I obviously don't want to disturb a stable set-up.

     

    Thanks.

  5. So those little symbols should mean some files aren't in the correct place according to the file placement rules if I have all other balancing plugins disabled? That's interesting, I might try that and see what it shows - I know from looking at the drives themselves that the data is all in the correct place right now.

     

    By the way, setting the "Server" service to start delayed seems to have fixed the missing pool shares issue, thanks.

  6. Well I noticed that I couldn't connect to my shares, then when I checked the shares on the server all of the ones pointing to folders on the pool were gone. The pool drive itself was listed in Computer (P:) so I could access the folders locally that way. I re-made the shares and had to reboot a second time for more Windows Updates, then the shares disappeared once more.

     

    I plan to make a batch script to create the shares because remaking them all manually is tedious. Once I've done that I'll try restarting the "Server" service after a reboot, as you suggest. I'm using the latest release build (not beta) on Windows Server 2012 by the way.

  7. No they're not off by 1. Strange but oh well, seems to be stable at the moment so I'll leave it for now.

     

    However, I had to reboot my server today due to Windows Updates and noticed another issue - all of my SMB shares on the pooled drive disappear after each reboot and need manually re-adding. How can I fix this problem? If you'd like me to open a new thread for this issue please let me know.

  8. I see. I set it to "balance immediately" just before I left work. The progress bar went straight to 6.3% (presumably 100/16 based on the fact I have 8 HDDs in the pool?) and Resource Manager said it was moving a file from one of my nearly-full drives. Not sure where it was moving it to since the drives have obscure IDs in Resource Monitor (no drive letters) and the DrivePool GUI only says where it's moving the file from. I'll check it when I get home but I hope it doesn't start moving a bunch of files around for no reason - they should all be on the correct drives according to the file placement rules already.

  9. I'm not in front of the PC at the moment but what do you mean by ensuring balancing is enabled? I don't remember a specific toggle for that. Do you mean at least one balancing plugin needs to be enabled? Or that balancing needs to be run at least once to ensure file placement rules are adhered to?

     

    In any case, since restarting the machine for another reason, so far it seems to be putting files in the right place. I will continue to monitor it and report any issues!

  10. So I've created a pool and moved my existing files into it. Transfer speeds are awesome, I'm getting 115 MB/s over my network (for files on the newer, faster drives anyway)!

     

    However, the file placement rules I've set up aren't being adhered to. For example, I've set my "Adam" folder to only use Disk 1 unless it's 99% full. It's currently ~90% full but when I copy a file over the network into that pool folder, it ends up on Disk 6. Is there something wrong with my setup? Do I need to restart the service or the PC itself for the rules to take effect or something? Screenshots below!

     

    Note I've also tried completely disabling all of the plugins in the Balancing tab but it hasn't changed the behaviour.

    post-2291-0-83781800-1452025314_thumb.png

    post-2291-0-82335200-1452025315_thumb.png

    post-2291-0-50262700-1452025316_thumb.png

  11. Thanks for the reply. I had assumed balancing would mess with RAID snapshots, so I was always thinking that would be disabled. I basically want to define where new files go so folders stay together but I don't need the facility to have existing files moved or balanced, since they're already in the right place, so that should be fine. However, the following statement in the DrivePool user manual concerns me:

     

     

     

    A file placement rule can be violated when renaming or moving a file on the pool. Such violations are detected and a background balancing pass is scheduled in order to resolve the violation by reordering the moved files.

     

    So if I move a file within the pool, it'll get shoved on a random drive rather than obeying the file placement rule I've set up? That's a bit annoying, especially if I can't have balancing fix the issue automatically.

     

    The answer regarding speeds is promising, I have some free time tonight so I'll try to get it set up and use the file-move trick to get my existing files in the pool, then test the file placement rules. If it works as intended I'll then do some speed testing. The only annoying thing is that moving the files will invalidate my RAID snapshot and redoing that will take more than a day (during which time I can't access my media), so I don't really want to commit to DrivePool without being confident it's a good improvement on my current solution. Particularly I want to see what happens with drive spin-ups when accessing various folders.

  12. I currently use FlexRAID RAID-F for snapshot RAID, which I'm pretty happy with. I also use the FlexRAID drive pooling feature to merge 8 HDDs, which I'm not particularly happy with since it doesn't work as I'd like it to (and is also, IMO, simply broken). I'd like to try migrating my current setup to use DrivePool in conjunction with snapshot RAID. My first question is: are there any known issues with such a setup? For example, does DrivePool do anything that would invalidate daily RAID snapshots?

     

    Secondly, I'd like confirmation that DrivePool can actually do what I want. Here's an example of the root directories on my drives:

    • Drive 1: Data, Audio, Backups
    • Drive 2: Video\TV
    • Drive 3: Video\TV
    • Drive 4: Video\Films
    • Drive 5: Video\Films

    In this scenario, if I copied a file into the \Video\Films folder, I want it to go to either Drive 4 or Drive 5 (not really bothered which, but I suppose it'd make sense to fill one up before using the other). The only scenario that should lead to drives 1-3 having files from the \Video\Films folder on them is if Drives 4 & 5 are full. In addition, I'd like only drives 4 & 5 to spin up (ideally at the same time) when accessing the \Video\Films folder via a network share. At the moment, going to such a share takes ages since FlexRAID shoves files on random drives without being asked to and then spins all of them up one a time. Sometimes traversing subdirectories incurs additional delays as (presumably) even more drives are spun up.

     

    Finally, what kind of transfer speeds should I expect when copying files into the pool? With FlexRAID pooling, I get ~35 MB/s when writing to the pool, whereas writing to a drive directly yields 150+ MB/s. How about over a gigabit network (where I'll be doing most of my transfers)?

     

    Thanks for any advice!

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