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B00ze

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Everything posted by B00ze

  1. Hey Christopher, Version 904 is not listed on http://stablebit.com/DrivePool/Download and also, the auto-update still only offers 903... Regards,
  2. Good day. So last night I disbanded the RAID and created my new shiny pool. I thought about using Ordered File Placement, since "By Folder Placement" is not implemented (Drive Bender wanted to implement this like 3 years ago, but it did not come.) But filling-up disk by disk is not quite what I want, it's close but not quite. Why? Because I will be using one or two of the disks "outside" of the poolpart, so I do not necessarily want to fill them up - letting DrivePool use always the least-full disk ensures each disk will always be as free as possible, and this makes sense if you're going to use the disks for stuff outside of the pool folder. Enter file-placement rules. I always thought I would never need them. But it turns out I will be using them after all - I will tell DrivePool to use 2 of the 3 disks for all my data files that are normal size and duplicated (e.g. documents and the like) and it will be placing the rest (e.g. movies) where it wants. I think this will be really good - all the important data will be together, mirrored on two disks, so it will make everything simple for recovery (e.g. just like with the Ordered File Placement) but I will also have the advantage of always having the maximum amount of free space on each disk. Amazing how flexible Drivepool is. I still wish there was a per-folder balancer, but when I think about writing one, it quickly becomes complicated - you need a "chunk size" because if a folder is 6TB in size you can't just treat it as a single entity, you need to be able to split big folders into chucks so you have some flexibility in placement and duplication. Anyway, maybe one day Alex can think about it. Regards,
  3. Hi Chistopher. Nope, LastWake is useless, here is what it prints: Wake History Count - 1, Wake History [0], Wake Source Count - 0. And I got ALL the wake-up methods disabled in the NIC, so that's not it, I think maybe it's not supported on desktops, it's some bug in Windows, something like it wakes-up immediately so it can watch for the critical % coming-up. I just use the critical action, set sleep to do nothing. Regards,
  4. Alright, tonight was UPS testing night. As far as Active PFC and simulated sine waves, no issues, but I can only pull 200W off the UPS (I currently do not have a graphics card). Unfortunately, not everything works. If I set the computer to sleep at say 80% and to shutdown at 70%, it goes to sleep correctly but then it wakes-up immediately, and stays turned on until it hits the critical level. Event log is not helping, it always says the wake-up source is unknown (even if you wake with the mouse). This works fine with a laptop, not so well with a UPS and a desktop. Maybe it works better in Windows 10? At least it does shut down correctly at the critical level (when I power it on again it records that it shutdown unexpectedly in the event log; hopefully it flushes its buffers correctly when it shuts down!) Anyway, thanks for the Active PFC info!
  5. Ah man! I didn't know about Active PFC until now! And of course my relatively cheap UPS uses simulated sine waves. So I had to search for EVGA and UPS and Active PFC. According to a FAQ on the EVGA website, my PSU should be fine with my UPS, but I will have to do tests to make sure. I should've talked to you BEFORE getting the UPS, lol. As for line interactive, I thought they would all be like that by now. According to this, my Back-UPS "Pro" should be Line-Interactive: http://www.apc.com/us/en/faqs/FA157448/ Regards,
  6. I went with an APC BR1500; I only have the one PC so I do not need an industrial one like you lol. And APC batteries are easy to get on Amazon. APC's aren't that good, and their software is really bad, but because they are popular you can find batteries everywhere.
  7. Note that I did not use Ignore-Poolpart, I just renamed or deleted the folders. I had a look at unignore-poolpart, but it wants a poolpart folder, which is difficult once the folder is deleted :-) Regards,
  8. Hi Christopher. Hmmm, maybe I should leave the service running? I had renamed the poolparts with the service down, and upon restarting the service, the pool drive disappeared but the 2 drives were no longer available to create a new pool. Tonight I tried again, created a pool, stopped the service, SHIFT-DELETED both poolparts, restarted the service: The pool drive disappeared, but both drives were no longer listed as available to create a pool with. I rebooted but no change. Looked at dpcmd options but nothing worked. I basically had to un-install DrivePool, delete the ProgramData and re-install. I am using release 890 on Windows 7. It works for you? The drives re-appear in the UI, ready to be added to a pool again? PS: Windows creates a recycle bin and a system volume information inside the pool? Annoying how it does this on every drive it finds; it could at least wait until VSS is called upon, if ever - I had to edit security to get rid of the poolpart. And noticed something else: That poolpart folder, the name is pretty long right? I ended-up with > 260 char paths, had to use LongPathFixer to delete the files (I had copied them with robocopy). I am going to have to think about this. Regards,
  9. Hi Christopher. Indeed, one of the reasons I went with DrivePool is the awesome support for reparse points (too bad Plex uses hardlinks). Plus I do want stuff scanned by the A/V on the pool, so unless I run into race conditions I'll definitively leave this as is! Thanks for checking! Yeah, I'll disable that Buffer-Flushing thing on the pool, I will gain milliseconds (maybe) and it doesn't really matter anyway! Even BSODs won't crash the drive because of this (they WILL crash the drive because Windows has write-cache, but not because of buffer flushing) so why not, I got a big UPS anyway. Best Regards,
  10. I tried that already, I stopped the service and renamed the poolpart folders, but when I restarted the service (the pool drive went away) and opened DrivePool, both drives were missing from the list; I could not create a new pool with them. You think this is a bug?
  11. Good day. BypassNtfsFilters is False by default @ least in the version I installed, which is 2.2.0.890 (beta). I'll leave it disabled, I'm going to download to the pool and I need those files scanned by the Anti-Virus as they are opened/closed. I'll come back if it becomes a problem. "CoveFs_BypassNtfsFilters": { "Default": false, "Override": null } As for that Buffer Flushing thing, yeah, the link I posted above has plenty of comments from people saying hard drives are lying anyway. Best Regards,
  12. Well, I finally found a good explanation of that Buffer Flushing setting: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20100909-00/?p=12913/ And I ran a real quick robocopy test; disabling Buffer Flushing saved ~10 seconds on a ~180 seconds copy, not exactly a superstellar improvement (I guess it is within the margin of error, meaning it might not have improved anything at all.) Regards,
  13. Good day. Sorry to flood the forum with questions. My first questions is about BypassNtfsFilters. The WIKI says that this is True by default, but it is in fact (nowadays) False by default. Have you found lots of programs that NEED this to be True? Because I'm thinking of getting a good write-back cache program, and it uses a filter to cache stuff, which means I would not be able to bypass. What about A/V? If we bypass the NTFS filters, will that not disable protection on those drives? My second question is about Window's "Disable Buffer Flushing" option. The internet is full of different opinions on this. Like I said above, I want to improve write-caching. Anyone know if that option in Windows will do this? See, I come from having tested an Intel built-in RAID, and to enable write-back caching we need to disable "Buffer Flushing." The difference is huge; the Intel RAID has horrible write performance without the write-back cache, so I am kinda sensitive to this subject right now. Thank you all.
  14. Good day. Ok, so I was testing DrivePool, created a pool on 2 drives, did some tests, all good. So now I need to get rid of the pool, destroy the raid so that I have 3 disks again, and create a new pool. No problem I thought, I'll just rename the poolpart folders and restart the service -> What happens when you do this is that yes, the pool disappears, but Drivepool REMEMBERs those disks, they do NOT become available to create a new pool with! So it is a bit like with dpcmd ignore-poolpart, it marks the disks and will not re-use them. I think there should be a way to destroy a pool and leave everything where it is, without marking the disks as "do not reUse." What I could've done is wipe ProgramData\Stablebit, but what I ended-up doing is I removed the disk with the least amount of data, let DP move the data to the remaining (much bigger) disk, and then removed that final disk. A "Delete Pool" choice in the UI would've been nice. Best Regards,
  15. B00ze

    Dual-Boot (continued)

    FYI - Works fine with a real license :-) The hard part will be software updates. If I update DP on Win7 and you convert some data files to a new format, when I boot Win10 it will crash on the updated data. I think the best way will be to boot into one O/S, disable the Drivepool service, split the ProgramData folder, boot into the other O/S, upgrade the software, boot back into the first O/S, upgrade the software, then merge the ProgramData again and finally restart the Drivepool service. This should take care of ProgramData files changing format, and also of Alternate Data Streams changing format. Regards,
  16. B00ze

    Dual-Boot (continued)

    Good day Christopher. Well, good news - I can redirect/Share the ENTIRE ProgramData folder, at least with the evaluation license. It did not complain about anything at all when I switched to Win10 and installed the second copy (after having junction'ed the ProgramData StableBit folder). It's a lot of fun; I can do something in Win7, which generates a notification (top left button in the UI) then boot Win10 and the notification is there, telling me I changed duplication 10 minutes ago (on another OS!) Now the real test comes; will it work with a real license? Stay tuned. PS: Just in case, I gave both OSes the same PCNAME. If this works, add some comments in the encryption code, something like "remember not to use PC SID or something similar to encrypt because some people dual-boot" ;-) Oh, and now that I've used the UI, I find the duplication pop-up pretty annoying. It's fine if you enable full pool duplication to have a kind of warning pop-up, but when you are playing with folder-level duplication, having a "Are you sure you want to duplicate" window pop-up every time you change a folder is pretty annoying. I understand it is asking also if I want to duplicate to more than 1 drive, and I'm not quite sure how to handle this better, but there is probably better way! The UI is nice. I would prefer a MMC snap-in to a custom UI, but it's not bad. I think you should make the "Manage Pool" words bigger, since this is where all the action is. Overall I do like the simplicity of it. Thank you.
  17. Good day Christopher. Well, I've been delaying DrivePool for some time now (we last spoke in Feb 2016). I was trying my disks in an Intel RAID5 configuration. I love it, but I loose a whole disk of space (on a 3 disks RAID) and expanding the RAID is a bit complicated and there are recovery issues (disks are unreadable on anything but another system with Intel RAID on it). So I want to buy a license to DrivePool and try it out. But it is important that I be able to dual boot the pool without it re-measuring every time I switch OSes. So I want to re-direct ProgramData\Drivepool to a shared folder, or keep 2 separate folders and sync them on shutdown, whatever works best. However, you once told me the data in there was encrypted. I really fail to see why you do this, but it doesn't matter, what matters is what you use to encrypt. If you encrypt with the license, and I can share the license file, then no issue. But if you encrypt with the license + OS version + whatever, or if I use 2 separate licenses, then it wont work. Can you check maybe with Alex? If he says "absolutely not it will never work because of the encryption" then I won't bother trying it. Thanks.
  18. Hi Christopher. I think he wants to create the empty folder(s) the you specify to disk management on the POOL drive; will that work? Regards,
  19. B00ze

    Dropbox

    Good day. Just wondering if running Dropbox on the pool is ok, i.e. does the pool support the ability of the OS to notify programs when a file changes (it probably does, but who knows, I read somewhere that there was a problem with OneDrive under Win8). Thank you. Best Regards,
  20. Alright, I'll let you know once I get there; maybe if we're lucky I can softlink some files and leave the license separate for each OS. We'll see, I'm not there yet. Indeed, hadn't thought of that, lol. Well, I think this concludes our little thread. I must thank you again for all the time you spent answering my questions. Best Regards,
  21. Installed WMF4, this works to suppress errors: Get-ChildItem d:\ -file -recurse | Remove-Item -Stream Zone.Identifier 2> $null
  22. Good day. > Well, switching between the OS's will still be an issue, the settings will be > different, and the measurement data may be off. You'd want to remeasure each > time you boot, ideally. And you could use the "dpcmd" utility to initiate a > remeasure, and set up a scheduled task to run on boot, to facilitate this. > Though, if you have a large pool, it make take a while to remeasure. Hmmm, I could create a junction for ProgramData\DrivePool and share it between OS'es. So long as the drives are called the same in both windows'es, this might work. Thoughts? > Get-ChildItem X:\ -file -recurse | Remove-Item -Stream Zone.Identifier > This will remove just the "Zone.Identifier" stream, and only on files (not > folders). and do so for the entire folder structure. You may see errors on > files with no streams. But you can ignore these. And depending on how many > files you have to go through, this may take a while. Thanks. I'll have to test this later this week, -file is not supported by PS20, nor is -Stream. And it may indeed produce an error on each file which doesn't have the specified stream, which will be annoying... > Yeah, it's a shame, but incredibly difficult to implement, if not outright > impossible. And what happens? "Request not supported". It just errors out. > Nothing harmful. But you can create a symbolic link instead. It should work > just as well. It may be complicated to allow people to hardlink on the pool (for one, hardlinks have to end-up on the same disc as the original file), but if I hardlink a file from the drive itsef rather than from the pool drive, then to DP it will just look like 2 files, I'm not sure it would create a problem, besides disc usage stats being off a little... Thanks. Best Regards,
  23. Good afternoon. > Measurement data is part of the program data. By UI data, I mean the UI > location, layout, sort order, etc. So UI element settings. Oh, then we're all good for MultiBoot :-) > Yes, it will discover the existing pool. I kinda expected it would, but no harm in asking. Thanks. > We include lienency to prevent issues with reinstallations, as long as it's the > same hardware (aside from the system disk), it should just activate. Nice. > Well, if you like powershell, you can write a script that ONLY deletes the > zone identifier stream. That would be preferable, I think. Also, there are a > lot of programs that use streams. But since they're "super hidden" by default, > it's very hard to tell. Probably some other programs use them, but that little Streams tool can also simply LIST the streams, and I have yet to find a stream other than that Zone Identifier in my data. There *are* some streams on the system disk, but nothing anywhere else. Strangely, in prep to this reply I scanned my data and found not a single Zone Identifier. I wonder what I did to disable zone creation. > In fact, here are some good examples This requires PowerShell 3; I will install it this week, I'm still @ 2.0... > If you want, I can see about writing a quick powershell script that will > parse and delete all of the zone identifier tags, if you like. Would you? I know nothing of PowerShell, the syntax if totally alien to me. I guess it would be something like get-childitem -rec | Remove-Item -Stream Zone.Identifier? I plan on learning it some day (I need a good book, lol) but for now all I know is CMD and C-Shell scripts (and COBOL and EasyTrieve and JCL and Rexx, lol, all useless). > hard links are the specific ones that are NOT supported. Ohhh :-( It wont prevent me from buying your wonderful product, but it's a shame. What happens if we hardlink some files in the pool anyway? Just multiple duplicates of the same file, or something worse? Thanks; I can't wait to get my disks and set-up a nice big pool :-)
  24. Good evening, > UI information is stored in the AppData folder. You mean when you "measure" the pool the stats are stored in AppData? Of Each User? That's strange, you'd think this went into ProgramData. You probably mean language selection or some such though? In any case, so long as it's only statistics, we're good... > General program settings are stored in the C:\ProgramData folder, such as balancing settings. That's fine. > And yes, this includes information about the disks. > But not specifically the pool state. Good. Will DrivePool "discover" the existing pool when I first install it in another O/S? > Dual booting is a tricking thing. However, the pool itself has no issues with that. > In fact, the pool is designed to "react well" to moving to new hardware, and the same > applies here. (as see above). But the Pool status, membership, duplication status > and reparse points shouldn't have any issues with dual booting. Good. > The biggest issues is licensing... I don't mind buying it twice, just wondering if it will let me activate twice inside 2 different O/S'es without having to use different licenses (I can go by without having the pool on the 32bit O/S, it's used for DOS only). Any plans on making a Linux version? > If the tool is run on the Pool drive, it shouldn't affect the pool ID, but it *may* stripe > the duplciation status of the folders. You can then manually set them back and that will > fix the issue. (heck, actually, you can use the "DPCMD" utility to change the status, > so you can script this). That's why I asked; DrivePool must "protect" its streams, and only expose non-DP streams. If it doesn't do that yet, then this is a good ticket to open; private streams should be invisible when stuff is accessed through the pool virtual drive. > However, if you let me know what tool you're using specifically, > I can test this out specifically. I use SysInternals' Streams, ie: STREAMS -s -d D:\ https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/streams.aspx > and yes, Alternate Data Streams are pretty awesome, and a great > way to store hidden files/settings! Yup, NTFS's Resource Forks; not used much, except for that ridiculous ZONE information that browsers tag to downloaded files. We forgot the reparse points (my fault, I had two #4s up there) -> I saw you say that hardlinks are not supported when you answered a question about Codi or Plex or whatever media library tool. But the following post says they are; are they? http://community.covecube.com/index.php?/topic/279-stablebit-drivepool-reparse-points/ Thank you. Best Regards,
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