Christopher (Drashna)

Also, could you open a ticket at https://stablebit.com/Contact Also, as shane mentioned, if this is a USB drive, they can ... behave oddly sometimes. Especially if you have them in the pool. Also, if you have duplication enabled on the pool, and one of the drives is having issues, it can cause this sort of behavior, too.

You could set the volume or drive as read only, but you may run into write errors when doing that. What has been outlined above is probably best.

If you're using an older version of StableBit DrivePool, it may not properly download the updates due to some hosting config (https vs http). You can always find the latest release version here: Index of /DrivePoolWindows/release/download

Mostly, because this is a complicated issue, and there isn't a "one size fits all" type solution. There are a number of things to try: Run "netsh interface tcp set global autotuninglevel=highlyrestricted" on both systems, from an elevated command prompt, and reboot the system. On the Network Adapter properties, disable any setting with "offload", or "checksum". Disable "green" features, and Interrupt Moderation, if present. Enable flow control, and disable jumbo packets (or toggle them, as they can help in some cases) Update the drivers for the network adapters Check for any antivirus software, and (temporarily) remove them Disable Windows Search on both systems.

Yup.

The Performance panel only shows activity that happens through the pool driver. Balancing and duplication activity is not reflected here. The reason for this is how Windows handles the performance counters, and that we don't want to use any hacks to try to make it reflect duplication/balancing, since those can lead to a lot more issues, than what it solves.

Okay, thank you for confirming that, at least. If this happens again, please open a ticket before doing anything else.

Just a heads up, the Set-Disk command is effectively doing the same thing that the diskpart commands are doing. Both are interfacing with the "Virtual disk service", which manages the drives/volumes/etc. Also, it should be noted that Windows Defender also has a number of ransomware prevention options that can be configured. And it may be worth looking into those.

Reparse point information is stored in the .covefs folder in the root of the pool. Worst case, delete the link, remove the contents of the .covefs folder, and then reboot.

Remeasuring the pool may have fixed this, as well. As may have resetting the settings.

IIRC, the pick of files is more or less random.

It contains internal data for the drive. Primarily, information about reparse points on the pool (junctions, symlinks, etc). If you have none of this (you can check by opening the folder), then it should be okay. But if you do, then messing with the folder can/will break the reparse points.

No worries! Sometimes, internet stuff .... But glad that we got it sorted.

Unfortunately, there isn't an easy way to do this. The "SSD Optimizer" balancer plugin won't accomplish this, since it moves the files off the "ssd" drive, as soon as possible. And the other balancers don't check the file access/modify dates, either. This would have to be done in some sort of manual way. (such as with file placement rules, and moving stuff around frequently).

Open the UI on the system that Scanner is installed on. Click on "Settings" and select "Scanner Settings". Open the "Licensing" tab, and click on the "Manage license" link. This will open a window that shows you the Activation ID, as well as a big button to "Deactivate" the license. Once you've done this, you can activate the license on a new system. If you don't have access to the old system, open a ticket at https://stablebit.com/Contact and we can see about resolving the issue. And in this case, please activate the trial period if you haven't already, as the trial period is fully featured and lasts for 30 days.

The only tickets I see from you are from this morning. Both of which have been responded to.

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

Oh, definitely! Balancing and duplication is already a low priority task, to prevent performance impact. But the data scrubbing part, or even just reading the checksums on the files... Is not low impact. A good example of this is the measuring for DrivePool. You may notice that it HAMMERS the system when measuring the pool. This is because it's opening each file to read it's attributes. This is very expensive to do, in terms of system resources. The more small files you have, the worse it is. This isn't even counting any sort of hashing, just opening the files. Also, an in depth integrity checker is something I'd love to see, personally.

Welcome! And if it makes you feel any better, all of my testing with stuff is done in Hyper-V VMs. Using VHDX files for them.

welcome, and glad to hear it!

I was until about April of last year, because my system installation nuked itself (like restores didn't work, but a reinstall did). I haven't bothered to reinstall it, at this point

There isn't a good answer here. It's complicated, at best, and it is very hit or miss. And with USB, it is very much dependant on the chips being used. ALso, if it's put into a RAID array, then SMART won't be accessible by StableBit Scanner. But should be accessible by StableBit DrivePool, in either case.

Correct. The balancing system will move the files to the "archive" drives, based on the balancing settings. Putting the VHDX files should be fine, since it's a simple file. However, WSL and the like use special drivers on top of the file system, and may do "non standard" things. Unfortunately, a lot of these are not documented (or at least, not documend in such a way that is useful for anyone implementing a file system or emulating it). So, a lot of reverse engineering would be needed, at best.

Double check to see if there are any other pools. Likely, it's not mounted to a drive letter, so it won't show up in "Computer". But should show up in the drop down.

They may/should be in the service logs ("C:\ProgamData\StableBitScanner")