Christopher (Drashna)

Yeah, that's definitely not typical, and it would be worthe checking the logs. My guess is that Defender may have gotton a number of false positives. But none of our software should effect Defender and how it scans/works.

You have a lot of data on the O:\ drive, it looks like. You may want/need to run a disk check pass on the drive, if that should be in the pool. Also, it is likely why the balancing is reporting as such. https://stablebit.com/Support/DrivePool/2.X/Manual?Section=Pool Organization Bar

StableBit Scanner throttles the scans when there is activety, so that it does not intefere with normal usage. That may be why you're seeing the reduced load. Also, it only scans one drive per controller, by default. So this may prevent it from scanning very many drives. Both of these settings can be be configured in the settings. The throttling settings are in the Scanner settings, but the concurrency limit is in the advanced settings. As for the crashes, depending on the specifics, these may be harmless. Otherwise, head to https://stablebit.com/contact/

I highly recommend against ReFS. NTFS works fine, is well supported, and doesn't suffer for some of the issues that ReFS does. For instance, ReFS may not work at all on external drives. And by "external", I mean any drive that Windows things is external, which can include internal controller cards. This is something I found out last year, when my server's boot disk decided to become unbootable, and upgraded the OS. Additionally, integrity checking on ReFS is only enabled for the file system objects by default. It is not enabled for all of the files, normally. Additionally, if something goes wrong, there is no easy way to recover from file system errors. So, most of the advantages that ReFS has are outweighed by the issues it has. To the point that I have converted my entire pool from ReFS to NTFS. Just ... no desire to deal with those issues, again.

Good luck! Worst case, empty out a drive, move it over, and repeat.

That's a plus! That said, I know it doesn't help now, but there are a couple of posts on the forum here that cover how to index/catalog your files. It may be worth checking those out. Also, if it's TV shows/movies/etc, there are software that can help make inventorying them easier.

For the encryption key used here, there should be what you used and a hex variant that starts with a H. And it won't be the same as your Activation ID. If you do not have this, the drive cannot be unlocked. There is no way for us to help unlock the drive. You have to have the unlock key here.

It's a good idea to update, yeah. As for why it's not updating, if it's an old enough version, there was a switch between http and https that may be causing issues. The newer versions shouldn't run into the issue.

I'm sorry to hear about the drive failure! And yeah, any drives that were only on the drive that failed would no longer show up in the pool.

If read striping is enabled, it should automatically handle that. https://stablebit.com/Support/DrivePool/2.X/Manual?Section=Performance Options

There are no plans on adding support for this, at this time.

Unfortunately, no.

It's a good question. It depends on if the enclosure does anything weird with the drives. It's not too common, but it happens. Assuming that it doesn't do anything weird, you should be able to power off the system, pull the drives, and then move them over to the new enclosure. No issues, no fuss.

There isn't a simple way to handle this, I don't think. If you only have three drives, then this would be pretty simple. You could enable file placement rules and only select one drive for the folder. This should work, but isn't ideal.

Was about to ask, the amount of storae on the provider matters, as it will be checked against before creating the drive. If the account is unlimited, you may need to create a smaller drive and expand it out, IIRC.

Most likely, no. But I'll flag a request, just in case. https://stablebit.com/Admin/IssueAnalysis/28742

Well, file system errors can be caused by a whole bunch of reasons. But if DrivePool is also evacuating a drive, then it's likely because Scanner also marked that drive as bad. So, if this is all the same drive, it could be that the drive in question is actively trying to fail. And sometimes, new hardware isn't a bad idea. If you do, I recommend something that supports ECC memory.

I think you posted a ticket about this, as well? If not, could you open one at https://stablebit.com/contact Though, a quick guess is that the SMART data itself is the issue here, and it may be rolling over.

Hold hostage, no. But if there was a file system error, the repair process may take the volume offline to fix it. This is normal, and part of how CHKDSK (and related API) works. The disk scan from windows, CHKDSK and the file system check in StableBit Scanner all use the same API/method, and can do this.

I don't see a record of a ticket from you. Could you email me directly at christopher@covecube.com then?

You are very welcome!

hmm. Could you open a ticket at https://stablebit.com/contact about this?

please open a ticket at https://stablebit.com/contact if you have not already. All licensing issues are handled there.

You also opened a ticket for this. But to repeat what I said there, and echo what vapechiK said, This is perfectly normal, and expected. In all cases, here. the pool drive itself is fully virtual, but doesn't have any blocks/data on the drive. All of the data is "reverse proxied" to the underlying disks, and handled invisible. So CHKDSK won't work on the drive, and it does not appear in StableBit Scanner. And the size is normal, as Windows needs a size before that can be properly read, so the 2TB size is a placeholder.

Yeah, we try to not do anything too tricky/weird, as it mostly just causes more issues down the road. So "not exciting" sounds about right. And yeah, migrating could cause permission issues, in some cases, so I'm glad that this has fixed the issues!