daveyboy37
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Posts posted by daveyboy37
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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? .
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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.
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Umfriend, I think that you have it, except that your point 2, the 2T drive is part of the pool. This is the only way that I can think of that I can expand a full diskpool. I am not sure how I would delete contents from only the 500GB drive? the whole issue is that I don't have 500Gig of free space in the pool to evacuate the drive.
I do have backups and I suppose that I could just take out the 500Gig drive, without evacuation, put in the 2T drive, add it to the pool and then restore the pool from backups. Is that what you are suggesting?
Reinsert old 2TB drive and hope DP recognises it and all will be fine? This is the part that kind of scares me :-)))
Also, without doing an evacuation of the 500Gig drive, are there going to be any lingering effects that I need to worry about? Is it going to keep asking me to reinsert the drive at every bootup, or anything like that?
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?
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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.
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Wow, that's .... Wow. I was not actually aware of this.
To be honest, in that situation, I'd pull out ALL of the disks. Put them into a pile. Then one at a time, update the firmeware, remove the disk and put into a "finished" pile. Screw up time! I want WORKING drives.
The putting them in a pile has often crossed my mind, though to be honest the next stage has involved a sledge hammer.
But fortunately despite all this I'm pretty sure I haven't lost any data. As mentioned in another post I'm working my way through them and replacing them all. No idea why a 4TB external is cheaper than an internal drive in the U.K., but the Seagates that I am pulling out of their enclosures are giving me write speeds of 150-180M/bps bursting at mid 200M/bps.
Probably not state of the art stuff but affordable and it will bring my data drives down from 9 (running on different speed conrollers) to 5 all running on a Sata III controller. This should make my case look tidier too. (Stablebit scanner likes them also, so full smart reporting on all my drives at last.)
Then when funds permit, I will invest in a decent Sata III card to future proof expanding data. Although possibly I may be upgrading the Mobo and CPU first.
Then once replaced, I'm wiping the Sammys, doing the firmware then possibly running spinrite on them. Then they're are all going back in the USB 3.0 cases from the Seagates.
As a side note on the occasions that I have reinstalled my server, the initial stage that scans the system and decides what drives are installed and then where to install the O/S etc.. It takes absolutely ages (15 minutes or more). I'm thinking that this may be the cheapo Sata I or Sata II cards installed that are slowing things down. Boot up times are also a good few minutes so I'm hoping that once I can pull the existing cards things will improve. I'm only guessing the sluggishness is hardware related because If I install with ONLY the SSD O/S drive attached its just as bad.
Can an add on card (even if not in use) slow things down so much? If not then It's definitely time to look at upgrading the Mobo.
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@Doug, Damaged != SMART errors. Damaged means damaged sectors.
Unless of course you are unfortunate enough to have a system full of Samsung HD204UI ( A few years old now). In which case smart errors mean the drive is (probably) healthy except that polling for smart data could then damage them. But good old sammy even brought a firmware to fix the issue and the firmware upgrades the firmware number to.... Yep the exact same firmware number.
I had lots of fun upgrading them all before realising this.. Still to this day I have no idea if I managed to do them all. Hence I turned smart reporting off for all the Sammy drives. Thank god they are all so close to being replaced from my system.
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Nevertheless, I would think that any OCD person would like to get a clear signal if and when, e.g.,
- Drives 1 & 4 are (or the smaller of the is) are full and files are spilling over onto other drives.
- Drive 1 or 4 is failing and/or is removed which would violate the folder placement directive etc.
But yeah, I'm getting the point of folder placement now.
Again this depends on organisation and on an individuals system and how they use it. I personally would never let the drives get to the position they would overflow. In my case Server 2012r2 and from past experience WHS2011 gives plenty of notice of such issues and thoughtful initial setup of the existing balancers will simply take care of the rest. The server backup on the operating systems mentioned are a pita to initially setup. You cannot just select which folders to back up. You have to browse to each individual serverpoolpart folder on each drive and select the relevant folders. With a 2 or 3 drive system that's no big deal but with 10-15 drives that's pretty time consuming. If music is scattered over a dozen drives and you miss selecting it on one of the drives backup will fail or at least be incomplete. Then it's back to all those drives to see what was missed. Mutiply that by the 10 or 15 different server folders and its a nightmare.
If my music is on two drives, then that's two drives i need to check that it's being backed up properly. Having replaced the numerous 2TB drives with the 4TB ones I personally will have plenty of scope to add another 4TB drive as and when needed. The folder placement will simply be another option for those who feel they need it.
Don't get me wrong. I am currently using two pools just to make sure all my flac files are duplicated but to be honest for me at least it just negates the benefit of having a pool in the first place.
Anyway i'm glad you are starting to realise why limiting folder placement will be a massive benefit to some (if not all) of us. In years to come as your system grows you may also come to realise just how much of a benefit. Though hopefully you will never get as OCD as Drashna and myself.
Finally with regard to the drive failing, I actually see limiting placement as a good thing. My personal plan is to have all my "must not lose because i probably cannot replace data" duplicated over two drives. If one of those drives fails. My full data is still on the other drive. A much better scenario than a random drive failing and losing a couple of tracks off most if not every single album.
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And yeah, OCD is a big factor in why I love DrivePool. The very "hands off" approach is great for those that are OCD.
And I have enough OCD to share with everyone else.My motherboard has 8 built in Sata ports (6 sata III and 2 Sata II). Also a 2 port Sata II card and a 4 port Sata I card. I'm using 13 of the 14 available ports.For a long long time I have hoped to be able to replace my 2TB drives with 3 TB drives but It never quite happened until now. Fortunately it has taken me so long to upgrade that price wise, I have been able to skip the 3TB and upgrade straight to 4TB. Two of them are installed and another three should be on there way to me today or tomorrow.So I have around 15TB of data on my system and its all precious to me. I don't have the storage overhead to duplicate everything and probably 12TB of my data is MKV movies. The vast majority of that is not that important. If a hard drive dies I will have no problem re-downloading Terminator 2, Independence Day, Fight Club etc...But what about the much rarer movies such as an early 80's Australian movie 720p that someone ripped off the TV. I'm pretty sure I will never find that again.So for me the choice is either migrate all my data onto a drive that must be duplicated (that should keep me busy for a good few days), or tell Drivepool to duplicate that movie.. Its a no-brainer and for me at least THE one thing that I badly need from Drivepool. Then with some organisation afterwards I could probably upgrade my 2TB server backup drive to a 4TB and even include the above mentioned difficult to get stuff in Server backup as well as having them duplicated. Media and OCD heaven for me.When the other 4TB drives arrive, the two cheapo sata cards will get ripped from the system and replaced with a 2 or 4 port Sata III card when needed. This will give me scope for another 8-16TB of space that I will probably struggle to fill until I'm 6 foot under.Please. please, please Alex.. Bring it on soon!!!
Edit... I'm really getting myself confused now... I do know know that I can duplicate any folder already but the ability to control placement would be optimal for me. I just really want to know that all my duplicated music & movies reside on drives 1 & 4 etc... -
It's just fishy to me. In part perhaps because my Pool is very small, I use a 2-disk, 2x duplication so I essentially have a very easy, smart and recoverable RAID-1 minus all the hassle of RAID. Folder Placement would be silly in my case. Anyway, do what you want
.And that's just it. With your set up it would be pointless...but
For those of us with more drives (12 in my case) with a huge collection of music , it isn't ideal to have tracks off a single album scattered (theoretically) over all those drives. The only option is to create a second pool to give any sort of control.
Taking on board Drashnas comments, I'm guessing the feature is likely to be in the shape of a balancer, then as with all the other balancers they can all be toggled on or off. Nothing is forced on you. There will be nothing restrictive if you simply choose not to use it.
Sorry but it just comes across that you feel it's a lame feature purely on the basis that it will be of no use to you personally. I say again....don't use it.
In the meantime... I am being FORCED to use a separate pool to achieve what I need Drivepool to do. It's just nice to have options.
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Basically, we, we've added it, but we want to make sure that it's good and stable before rolling it out
Just to clarify.. Are you talking about reparse points here, or the ability to control folder locations within the pool?
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Two works for you Ikon: Trouble Maker.
Because I had to double check to see if this would even work first... (because I wasn't sure).
- Stop the DrivePool Service (and any service that may be using the files from the pool)
- Move the files out of the hidden "PoolPart" folders
- Delete said PoolPart folders.
- Start the DrivePool Service
You'll see an empty DrivePool drive until you start the service backup. But I can confirm this definitely does work.
However, it did not like messing with the "system volume information" folders in these poolPart folders. You probably will need to take ownership of the folder, and then delete it to get it to work/delete.
Just thinking about this after step 2 would it not be more prudent to then remove the drive from the pool from within the program, before step 3. In theory this would hopefully guarantee no "disk missing" messages.
I only mention this as I have always done the drag and drop "shortcut" whenever I having been moving lots of data. Often this has led to permission issues down the line.
Today was the first time I let the program actually migrate the data for me and it went 100% flawlessly.
It was a lesson learned for me...No more cheats and shortcuts... Well not today anyway. -
Was just wondering if this is this being worked on now or has Alex still got work going on with reparse points ? (I have googled reparse points and am still unsure what they do). But Kudos to Alex all the same for his tireless work.
I just bought 3 X 4TB drives and am on a mass data migration mission
to get rid of a couple of iffy (according to my scanner trial) 2TB drives. So my 9 pooled drives will soon be 8... But I really don't like having tracks off a single album scattered over 8 or 9 drives...It just doesn't make sense. So if it's still some way off then I will probably create a second pool with 2 of the drives and seeing as my music is one of the few folders I duplicate, it should in theory create 2 complete copies all neat and tidy.
That said, I'm still looking forward to being able to control folder placement from within drivepool itself.
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Excellent news!!
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So, i was just wondering if there is any further development on this?
Im not meaning is it close to being implemened, more.. Is it still on the roadmap to happen?
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This is something that I have hoped for, for a very long time. I really have never been keen on having things scattered around the pool. Especially with music... 10 album tracks scattered over 5 or 6 drives.. But then I'm probably a bit O.C.D.
I'm sure for people who have various devices streaming to different rooms this must be a good thing. Knowing that all the Disney films are all on one hard drive for the rug rats, and the teenage daughter can watch her twilight knowing its on a separate drive so no risk of intensive I/O and so on. And yes i know that this could be achieved by organising multiple pools. However when you get to 13 drives and around 22TB of data creating new pools seems like a hassle.
First thought is that this would eliminate the need.
Second thought is that once implemented the folder placement would to my mind then simplify the operation of creating separate pools and may actually lead me to do it, instead of just thinking about it
I'm all for it!!!
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I can absolutely confirm that there are no issues at all.
Strange data reporting in Drivepool
in General
Posted
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.)