daveyboy37

Lol. I have no idea what that is. Will Google it when I get home.

I had the exact same issue for the first time in several years of using DrivePool a couple of days ago. Whatever I tried it always came back to "file distribution not optimal." So is your machine on 24/7? If it is then try a reboot. Having planned to reinstall DrivePool to try and fix the issue on my days off from work, some other software gave me reason to reboot. Sure enough the balancing displayed as optimal straight after that. Definitely worth a try. I am using the latest beta btw.

No worries Christopher, thanks very much.

Sorry to bump an old post but I just wanted to say thanks for this. I just added another 8tb Seagate today and decided to format at 64k on the strength of this thread. Without the speed boost button I'm seeing 60-90 MB/s constant. (It didn't drop below 60MB/s in a twenty minute period.) With the speed boost enabled I do see drop offs, but much less frequently than on the previous 8tb (formatted at 4k) and by the same token I'm hitting 180-210 MB/s at times. Happy days. Anyway this latest drive addition will give me available space to empty and reformat the other drives over the next few weeks so I'm gonna do it. . Going back to your comment about fragmentation, I understand what you mean about larger clusters should lead to less fragmentation.. Am I also correct in thinking that if over time fragmentation occurs, the larger clusters will ALSO make it easier to defrag? I will add that all the Seagate archive drives will hopefully be write once as intended, so this question mainly applies to some of the 4TB drives that are much more read/write intensive. Either way thanks so much for your in depth reply to the guys in this thread. It all makes plenty of sense and definitely seems worth doing.

Hey Chris and everyone. As a long long time user of Drivepool I finally got around to trying the SSD optimizer plugin. I did have issues originally but was planning on a server reinstall anyway, so no major problem.Anyway its running amazingly well in single and duplicated mode with 2 SSD's. ​The one thing in the settings I have not yet looked at is the ordered placement settings. So before I look at these and decide If I want to use them, do they still obey the file placement rules? I'm wondering that if for example a particular Server Folder is allowed to reside on drives/mount points 1,2,9 & 11 it will still only be allowed on those 4 drives and simply fill them in the order I specify, or have I totally misunderstood things ? Thanks in advance and either way I love this Plug-In. Regards, Dave

Thanks for the link Chris that clarified lots. Yeah the new drive is a moot point with TV shows atm. I need at least another 2 archive drives just for the movies so it will be when finances allow.. After that I will start looking at more organisation of the shows. They themselves will need another 3 X 8TB. My friends just keep asking for more and more shows... Curse them As for Sonarr, yeah i found a lot to like with it. Sadly Im a private tracker person and there seems to be a little more maturity with getting some of the less mainstream trackers working. A couple of my most used trackers just wouldnt work with Sonarr. To add to that a couple of minor annoyances with SickRage seem to have been fixed over the last couple of weeks. Anyway thanks again for the help and advice.

Oh wow Thank you. I had totally forgotten about the ability to manually type in rules. That's definitely what I'm looking for. Because my movie collection is much larger than the single 8TB hard drive I had hoped for example as a starting point to just have movies starting with #-H So in effect all movies from "2 Fast 2 Furious" through to "Fury" Not necessarily an all in one rule but perhaps something like (in my case) \SERVERFOLDERS\COUCHPOTATO MOVIES\A* \SERVERFOLDERS\COUCHPOTATO MOVIES\B* Would this work and are those rules correct for movies beginning with A & B? As for deleting stuff it never ever happens (I have some amazingly bad movies in my collection) The nearest I get to deleting is when SickRage replaces a season of web-downloads with a Blu-Ray release that It finds or I purchase. This is the very reason that shows will not go on the archive drives at least until a show is ended/cancelled and the quality is at optimum. This way the archive drives will hopefully be "write once" which as you imply are their intended purpose. I cannot believe I forgot about the ability to write rules.... I tend to see a feature in programs think to myself "I will never use it" and then forget it exists.​ Anyway thanks for the help as always Chris... If you could confirm (or correct) the rules above It would be appreciated.

Well i havent been around much for a couple of years probably a sign that a program just works. Anways I have jut purchased my first 8TB archive drive and I'm looking at using it as exactly that. I want to fill that drive with movies to the required capacity defragment if needed and then have DrivePool see it as full. I'm thinking the "ordered file placement" plugin is what I need by setting the new drive at the top. I only want to fill the drive with movies as they tend to be pretty static as opposed to TV shows (new episodes) and Music (new albums for an existing artist.) But it seems there is no option to say fill only with a particular category. ATM I just have the one 8TB drive and my movies amount to 17TB around 1800 movies. Definitely I want the associated metadata to stay with the movie not be elsewhere on the pool. When the drive is at capacity defragment and catalog exactly what is on that hard drive. I know I can set rules via Balancing > File Placement > Folders. This will then ensure that the metadata stays on the same drive as the movie. The problem being this has to be done for each individual movie with no option for example to group select a bunch of movies and move them to the new drive. Obviously I cannot move all the movies because 17TB into 8TB doesn't go. So maybe a couple of feature requests... The ability to bulk select in Balancing > File Placement > Folders Also the ability to save personal setting such as rules should there be the need to ever reinstall. I will create the required rules if necessary but thought of manually creating thousands of rules and then a reinstall means they're all gone fills me with dread. There may of course be something I have totally missed or an easier way to go about this? I did wonder what would happen if I tell my 17TB of movies to only reside on the new drive. Will it fill the drive and then complain when its full (this would probably get me close to where I want to be) or will it say it cant do it at the start. I guess I will find out when I get home from work.​​

I also do the fly by the seat of my pants method..Everything ctitical is backed up three fold or more... If its a few TB of movies then c'est la vie. This approach may change though when the 8TB drives come down in price a little more. As for DrivePool itself... well (as another Plex user), the best endorsement I can give is that I have been using it since the very early beta stages. As someone who used to be extremely active on here I just don't have the time any more. BUT I don't need to be because it just works!!! Im well over two years of not having touched my server (windows updates aside) in fact I actually feel guilty that I guess I just take DrivePool for granted. It sits there silently in the notification area doing its stuff.

Oh Christopher. Seeing this just reminded me. I have never been able to get 1.00.169 to work. I always get an O/S unsupported message. That was on W8 now.. and previously S2012r2E and prior to that S2012E. Not a big problem because I still have 1.00.165 tucked away somewhere and that works on everything. EDIT: Cancel that. I just remoted in and tried again and it's now working on Windows 8.

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.

I'm pretty surprised by this.. Earlier today I duplicated 400GB of Flac files in an afternoon. Last night I duplicated all my TV series. They amount to 2TB of data. I set the duplication going at 8PM. I had finished when i got up the following morning.. So I cant say how long it actually took...But less than 12 hours. Would you happen to know what the write speeds are on all your drives?

Fair enough..Its the same as everything I guess. There's no good or bad just whatever works for the individual. Anyway it's confession time... As a user of Drivepool since the very begining , I have to admit to having a MAJOR issue that I was almost willing to blame on Drivepool for the first time ever . As mentioned on various threads I have being upgrading all my samsung 2TB drives with the dodgy firmware. Since last mentioning how responsive the system Is with the 4TB Seagate replacements, one of the Seagates was behaving badly and Stabebit scanner threw up an error. It became unresponsive and would crash at anything more than reading the drive. So copying data from it was fine, but if i selected move.. It was as if even deleting the data after it had copied would crash this one particular drive.It wouldn't even let me format it or run chkdsk. Anyway not ideal but one drive out of the 6 I purchased was no big deal and easy to RMA being less than a week old. In the meantime I had decided to purchase another to use as server backup. It was fine until you helped me with the permissions issue on the system files that I posted about a couple of days ago. After that the new drive showed the same symptoms as the "fatally damaged" drive. Normally I am keen on really troubleshooting issues but this was all in the middle of a string of 8 night shifts. However yesterday I had a little time before work. It turned out the issue was nothing to do with Drivepool or even failing drives or even a failing sata port. It was simply a dodgy sata cable throwing up I/O issues. A replacement drive in the same sata port using the same cable was just too much of a coincidence. Both the drives are fine it seems. I'm not sure if there is a way to force Scanner to recheck the drives immediately but that would give me ultimate piece of mind. On the subject of which I think it would be great we were able to select an individual drive and let scanner ...erm... Well.. scan it basically.

Ok thanks. Would that option still be in "folder options" from control panel? Found it lol. Google is my friend

Fair comment on Plex. I wasn't too sure about it at first but stuck with it just for the built in app on the TV. Performance wise though I think the new transcoder they introduced a couple of months ago really helped.

OK, Thanks Chris. I will try and locate them...But at first glance I cannot see them within the mount points for each drive. Could they possibly be inside one or more of the server folders or would it be outside of those as a standalone file/folder? I'm pretty certain I have "show hidden files/folders" enabled, but don't really know where to look.

Further to the last post. All sorted and all data migrated. However one of the old drives was definitely dying. It would not let me remove it from the pool from within Drivepool. The hard drive would lock up frequently. Fortunately I was able to shut down the pool and manually copy the data to one of the new drives. But even then if I tried to move instead of copy, the source drive locked up. All is now well and the system is probably the most responsive its ever been. The only niggling thing now is that I am getting a pool organisation warning (possibly due to the way I had to manually remove the bad drive) \System Volume Information\IndexerVolumeGuid and \System Volume Information\storageconfiguration.xml Both of the above say "file parts different". Drivepool offers to fix but then throws up a permission denied.(I get no other permission errors as far as I am aware.) Drivepool then instructs me to delete them manually. But where are they? A search finds nothing.

I think its just a limitation in Drivepool. At least it's a "set once then forget" thing.

Can we just check how you have set up the backup. With Drivepool, you need to set backup by browsing the serverpoolpart folders, rather than trying to back up the pool itself.

Well i'm pretty sure the issues are nothing to do with Drivepool but thanks anyway. The Externals are Seagate expansions. Price was definitely a factor for me especially needing 6 of them. They're only 5900 RPM but I'm getting aroung 150 M/bps write speeds bursting at over 200M/bps on the sata III ports. At the end of the day my server is more a Media server than anything so I couldn't really justify spending too much. As you probably guessed from the other post they have all arrived and the migration has begun. Then hopefully after this set of shifts I can kick back and load up Plex. (Not you're favourite media server I know . But I have a Samsung TV with it built in, so the obvious choice for me. So until I can eventually get round to building an HTPC it does me fine.

Ok. Thanks. I will try that. I was just thinking that the server folders on the second pool only exist on that pool. So I guess if I create dummy folders outside of the serverpoolpart and then drag the data as you suggest (but leaving the server folders inside the serverpoolpart) , I can then simply move the now empty server folders via the dashboard to the first pool and then move the data back within those? ( I hope that makes sense.)

Ok, so as mentioned in another thread I'm currently replacing all my 2TB drives with 4TB ones. I connected Two new 4TB drives to the server and added them to the pool. I then told Drivepool to remove 3 of the 2TB drives. (It's pretty sweet that Drivepool lets you queue up this as I'm currently working nights, so all happening while I either work or sleep.) So the first drive evacuated fine and the last one is doing its stuff now. However the second drive seemed to go ok and removed itself from the pool. Mousing over the now removed drive in (Server2012 R2 Essentials) Drivepool shows it as still having 1.18TB of used space. Worse still it's now giving me permission denied messages so I cannot actually check if the drive is empty. Meanwhile in Windows Explorer the relevant mount point for the drive says there is only 184MB of data used. So probably empty after all. So how do i get permissions for the drive to check this. I think I'm correct in thinking that Drivepool Utilities will not reset permissions unless the drive is part of the pool? If Windows Explorer is correct, is the false reporting in Drivepool a bug? Worse case scenario.... I know roughly how much data was on the three drives that I'm removing and can work on the basis that if there is roughly that amount of data on the new drives it went ok and its just a false alarm. Thanks in advance. Dave Edit: Cancel all that, bored at work I stopped the last drive migrating and rebooted the server. I have permissions back for the removed drives and they are indeed empty which Drivepool now correctly reports. But this then leads to something else... I have now decided that i really do not want two pools... What's the best method for getting rid of the second pool? I'm guessing simply moving the server folders from Pool B to Pool A , via the dashboard ? But Pool B is all my duplicated data. Will this complicate things? .

OK thanks for this info. I'm not too worried about the warranty, its a comprise that my *bank balance" is willing to make. Time will tell with the controller cards... Hopefully the dodgy 2TB Samsung drives will be gone by the weekend and thus the number of drives. This will then enable me to get rid of the cheapo sata cards. If it isn't those that are causing the slow loading times then I'm pretty much at a loss. Even during and after a fresh install the issue is still there. There is no other hardware attached to the system! I will see how I go when my final 4TB drives arrive. Thanks as always Chris.

I'm guessing that you don't have a spare sata slot for the 2TB drive that you are planning to add or a friend who could lend you a USB caddy or enclosure? Drivepool doesn't care if a drive is internal or external. If I'm not mistaken. And I also perhaps think that you misunderstood Umfriend? The 2TB drive you plan to add surely Isn't already part of the pool?

I'm pretty sure that Drashna (God) will be along shortly..But with the (very) little that I already know (or at least think I do).. 1 Change of hardware... No issue... Install drivepool on the new machine and the pool will be detected. 2 Change of O/S..I definitely know this is no issue. 3 Migrating from 2012 to 2012R2.. I'm not sure you can. I have ran both but always done a fresh install. But if by "What steps are required to migrate from Server 2012 Essentials to 2012 Essentials R2 (on the same hardware setup -- with the exception of the OS drive)" You mean you are expecting to have to reinstall then see 2 above. I'm sure Drashna will put right any duff info given here.