JasonC

Recently I had an issue that caused me to move my array over to another disk. I think the issue caused a problem, as 5 disks show up with damage warnings. In each case the damaged block is shown to be the very last one on the disk. I assume this isn't some weird visual artifact where blocks are re-ordered to be grouped?
Anyway, clicking on the message about the bad disk of course gives a menu option to do a file scan. I decide to go ahead and do this, and of the 5 disks, I think only one actually apears to do anything- you can start see it trying to read all the files on the disk. The others, the option just seems to return, pretty much instantly, which makes no sense to me. They don't error or fail, or otherwise indicate a problem, they all just act like maybe there are no files on those disks to scan (there are). The disks vary in size, 2x4TB and the others are 10TB. One of the 4TB disks scanned fine, and indicated no problems, but it's not clear as to why it would work and the others wouldn't. 
Ideas?
Thanks!
 

Well, I've migrated the 2 disks I had in my 4 bay over to the new StarTech. I forgot I re-organized my disk layout a while ago, so I only had 2 SSDs in the 4 bay, so I can't yet speak to heat.  I don't recall how the StarTech is setup, I'll say this for the MediaSonic's, I thought they had excellent cooling in them.  But I also have my equipment in the basement where the ambiant temperature is always fairly cool.
Now, the sorta good news, the SSDs are holding virtual disks for VMs, so they are very sensitive to disconnects. It's only been about a day, but no issues so far, and the performance seems good.
I know what you are saying here, but I've had a different experience, the drivers have become mature, there aren't updates because there's nothing to update. They are stable and performant enough, that is, you are held up by disk speed or fundamental bus speed of SATA at this point, there's nothing left to optimize. I'm not sure what issues you have, I'm running Sil3132 based SATA controllers on Windows Server 2016 with no issues connecting eSATA with port multipliers. I've gone pretty good runs without reboots, it's more been external events (power failure) or Windows patching that's made me reboot.
I had almost done what you did, if port multipliers didn't pan out, I was looking at going to SAS, but boy was it expensive at the time.
 
 

I have the MediaSonic 8-bay you mention, and the earlier 4-bay version of it. I initially tried USB 3.0 connections with it, but found the connection a bit unstable (random disconnect about once a week), but it's solid under eSATA. I do not know, but kind of suspect that the USB instability was partly me being a pretty early adopter in USB 3 land, and drivers and possibly USB hardware being less stable then. Another caveat with these enclosures, they do not support UASP, so you don't get optimal performance on USB 3. I believe driver and hardware support of USB 3 to be much more mature and reliable now then it was when I first tried 4-5 years ago.
I just purchased another 8-bay unit, but this time the StarTech equivalent (S358BU33ERM), otherwise mostly the same. It has a bit less manual options (fan speed, connection) but I don't really find that to be an issue. I'm going to give it a try USB 3 first, partly because this unit DOES support UASP (One of the main reasons I switched from the MediaSonic) so I should get better performance. So far it seems very reliable and performant, but if I encounter any hiccups I will just move it to eSATA as well.
 
 
 

So, just a mildly interesting follow up....
I recently migrated my Drivepool off Windows Server and onto Windows 10 (CrashPlan exiting the home user market motivated it).  Anyway, it's now residing on a Win10 VM with the same configuration as the server machine had, but that little pause I was seeing before when I'd browse to it...I don't see anymore.  It's possible moving to the latest version impacted that as well though. In fact, overall, without any objective measurements, it just feels a little faster/more responsive. (I keep having a "that was quick" reaction as I'm navigating the share).

It's a minor thing, but something I've noticed since I switched over to DrivePool, when I first hit the file server, there's always a pause partway through displaying the share contents. It shows about the first 15 or 20 folders, pauses for a second or two, and then continues. I also see similar behavior in browsing at least some folders. I haven't been carefully tracking it, but I think it's probably folders with more stuff in them,  
 
I never had this pause when I was using StorageSpaces, and haven't ever seen it with other things, so I'm guessing it's something to do with DrivePool. I suspect maybe it's building/presenting the virtualized filesystem?
 
Anyway, is there anything I can do to mitigate that? On the one hand, it's a small thing, it really doesn't affect me a whole lot. On the other hand, it is a thing I constantly run into, so it's one of those minor irritations that constantly occurs. I always get just a little bit paranoid about it because under other circumstances, it feels like behavior you get when a disk is starting to fail, i.e. retries go through (I've checked, disks are all good).
 
Thanks!
 

Have you checked your event logs for any warnings being thrown?
 
Something doesn't make sense to me though, you said if you copy directly to the disk, bypassing using DrivePool, you still get slow speeds, yet you still think DrivePool is the issue? Have you just uninstalled DrivePool and then seen if you still have slowness to those disks? There should be no real harm to doing this, and re-adding your disks to a pool after you re-install, other then if you had significant amounts of file shares on the aggregate disk.
 
Copying directly to the pool disks would bypass any DrivePool involvement, so this seems to me to exclude DrivePool as the problem and suggests either cabling, controller, or disk problems. You can even go the extra step of temporarily stopping your drivepool service and seeing if you still have the slow performance directly to disk. 
 
How old are your disks?
 
Have you re-seated your cables/checked them?  Did you do the copy test directly to each disk in the pool, i.e. do they all exhibit slowness?  You have significant external USB disks, if you swap an internal disk and an external disk, does slowness on the previously internal disk go-away and does the disk that was USB now appear slow? If you pop task manager and resource monitor, and do a large copy, do you see anything unusual happening (excessively high CPU, or in resource monitor, processes that are touching the files you are copying)?
 
Boot safe mode and copy some files around between pool disks, still show performance problems?

I upgraded to the beta DrivePool per your recommendation Drashna and now I cannot get the SSD Optimizer settings to stick, so my SSD is now just being used as any other disk. I've uninstalled, and reinstalled (the optimizer plugin), with reboots between.
 
I can make a change and click Save successfully exactly one time per running the DrivePool UI.  Subsequent attempts without restarting the app result in missing object reference errors.

I've noticed that I fairly often run into a situation where if I rename a file on a network share, it's very slow to reflect the name change on other clients on the network.  Is this a normal situation with DrivePool? It's definitely not normal with any other Windows share that I've ever had. So for instance:
rename a file on client 1
client 2, if it has the same folder open at that time, doesn't reflect tihs change. In fact, I'm not sure how long, if ever, it will reflect the change.  Refreshing the folder doesn't update the file name. It seems like I have to leave the folder (up a level for instance) and then re-enter to get the file name change to be reflected.
 
I currently have the windows indexer on the server disabled, although I've never seen the indexer be responsible for this kind of behavior before. At a guess, Windows isn't being informed of the change, so cached values are sent to other clients until an operation that forces an explicit re-read happens.
 
Thank you
 

I've noticed that I fairly often run into a situation where if I rename a file on a network share, it's very slow to reflect the name change on other clients on the network.  Is this a normal situation with DrivePool? It's definitely not normal with any other Windows share that I've ever had. So for instance:
rename a file on client 1
client 2, if it has the same folder open at that time, doesn't reflect tihs change. In fact, I'm not sure how long, if ever, it will reflect the change.  Refreshing the folder doesn't update the file name. It seems like I have to leave the folder (up a level for instance) and then re-enter to get the file name change to be reflected.
 
I currently have the windows indexer on the server disabled, although I've never seen the indexer be responsible for this kind of behavior before. At a guess, Windows isn't being informed of the change, so cached values are sent to other clients until an operation that forces an explicit re-read happens.
 
Thank you
 

Thank you for the information!

Drashna has pointed out in one of my other threads that the message that it would not install was probably incorrect.  He is correct, it appears to have installed anyway.
 
I'm going to try using it, although I admit a little consternation at it. It's a bit of an interesting order of events that must happen to allow it to install, but still display a bad version/won't install message.
 
So in conclusion, House was right, everybody lies. Even the installer.
 
Thanks

So...the SSD Optimizer looks interesting to me, but apparently it doesn't recognize the beta version as a version it will install on.
 
Is there a way I can I safely install the current non-beta now, without trashing the pool, so I can enable the plugin functionality?
 

There are 10 disks my pool. 2 disks were pre-seeded.

Data is now only apparently writing to 5 of the other disks in the pool. 3 of the disks in the pool are not getting written to, based on the graph of how much each disk is full.  That doesn't seem to be in line with what I was expecting to have happen. Is that supposed to be that way?

 
At first, I thought perhaps it was filling up other disks until the reached the same fill level as the pre-seeded disks, but since 3 of the disks are not being written to at all, that doesn't seem to be the case.
 
Thanks
 

As I was migrating from a damaged StorageSpaces pool, I ended up pre-seeding a couple of disks before transferring all my disks to the DrivePool based disk. So I have a couple of disks that currently have the majority of the content on the pool. It's significant, so say, 2TB on each of a 4TB disk, but the total pool size is much larger.
 
Should I explicitly tell it to perform a re-balance now, or let it just get to it when it gets to it? It sort of seemed like from the settings that an automatic rebalance wouldn't bother re-allocating until they were much more full, so I'm wondering if I should actually wait until then or get ahead of it.
 
Thank you!
 

I'm curious, does anyone know if scanning a thin-provisioned disk will cause it to actually allocate it's maximum reported space?
i.e. might not want to fully scan(or scan at all) such a disk?
Thanks!