ataylor

Just to provide closure to this in case anyone comes across it in the future. After upgrading some of my network gear I discovered that the port my 2017 model TV (Sony kd65x8500e for those playing along at home) was connected to was only operating at 100Mbps. After checking the spec. sheet I was bamboozled to discover that Sony's 4k smart android TV was designed/sold with a 100Mbps Ethernet port (in 2017!!) this is perhaps the single most baffling hardware decision I've ever seen from anyone. In any case I now have an Nvidia Shield connected and it plays everything just fine. Nothing needed to change with my DrivePool configuration and I remain very happy with the software.

Thanks Christopher, Both speeds quoted are from the drive pool, I'd expect a slower speed when 'playing' the file as the media players would only pull down what they need as they go. I was including the higher figure to show that the network, archive drives, system etc. could reach good speeds when just dumping the file across the network. On the money here. I disabled Avast AV and the situation improved significantly. Files will now start playing instantly (where as previously it would be 30-60 sec before any action) but do still start struggling after a short while. After I uninstalled Avast to ensure it wasn't interfering at all and rebooted I've now got a drive failure to investigate before diagnosing this issue further. Will check in again when that is sorted.

I'm at a bit of a loss where to ask this question or what might be causing this but as it seems to be a file access problem and as folks around here are cluey on such things here it is.. When trying to play an UHD movie file (55gb file size for ~150min) from my drive pool across a network something can't keep up. I only get a handful of frames per minute and sound is broken or just lost. This behaviour is exhibited from both VLC on my PC (playing from a mapped network drive) or with a direct path from Kodi on my Android TV. When playing the file locally from a USB drive the movie works fine so the playback hardware can cope. The file is stored on a 4tb WD Red drive and duplicated to another. I've tried with Network I/O Boost and Read Striping both enabled and disabled. When playing the file, pool read speed jumps all over the place, generally between 1 MB/s - 7.5MB/s If I copy the file from the network drive onto a local hard drive pool read speed is a solid 80MB/s - 90MB/s (drive read and network speeds seems fine in this case) The next closest data point I've got is a 1080p movie file, 30gb for ~130min this plays just fine and read speed from the pool typically hovers quite nicely around 4MB/s - 5MB/s. I'm at a loss as to what would cause this. Any suggestions? Tools that might help diagnose, things I should check etc? Cheers, Andrew

Great, thanks for the answer Christoper!

Thanks, that's my fall back if I can't get an answer on the lossless change and partition resize.

I've got a couple of 4tb drives in my pool that were migrated from a very old WHS setup. When the drives were initialised on that system they were initialised as MBR disks limiting them to 2tb (I didn't realise at the time!) Now that I have them spinning in my Drivepool setup I want to extend the partition on the drive to full capacity but to do that I will have to convert it to a GPT drive. There are tools that will let me do that without data loss but my question is: Will either the conversion to GPT OR the change in partition size cause Drivepool not to recognise the drive? Should I terminate the drivepool service whilst making this change (or perhaps more reliably restart with 'startup' set to disabled)? Cheers, Andrew