Christopher (Drashna)

It's still an issue, so we'd like to fix it. Once StableBit CloudDrive has been released, Alex (the developer) is going to hit the issues (like this) and fix a bunch of them.

Well, DrivePool places files on the disk with the most (absolute) free space. that means taht the 1.5TB drives will be filled first, until there is 1TB free, and then use all three disks. So you may see files on the same disk. As for keeping related files together, there are two ways to do this. The Ordered File Placement Balancer plugin fills up one disk at a time (or two, with duplication enabled), and tends to/tries to keep the contents of a folder on the same disk. https://stablebit.com/DrivePool/Plugins The other option is to use StableBit DrivePool 2.X and use the "File Placement Rules", and micromanage the folders.

If you're using the Greens for just backup, then I think they are ideally suited for that task, actually. I'd still recommend running the "WDIDLE3" utiltity to turn off the head parking, to increase these drive's longevity, but other than that, they should be perfect for what you want. Also, depending on the OS, I would HIGHLY recommend the LightsOut add-in/program, so you can sleep/hibernate the server (if possible, though you should be able to manually enable hibernate by running "powercfg -h on" on the system). This way, the system can be off or in a low power state until needed. Additionally, shameless self promotion here, but I'd recommend StableBit Scanner for both systems as well. That way you can see the disk's health and replace them hopefully before a disk fails. And you can get the licenses at a discounted price, because you own StableBit DrivePool already (just ask, if you're interested)

It depends on the drive. I believe we don't support some removable storage. Namely, usb flash drives and SD cards, as these are very "temporary" devices and not well suited to being used as part of a pool. If you're using USB hard drives and they're not showing up, then let us know.

I'm not sure what you mean by "remain active" here... However, after removing it from the control panel, you'd want to remove the add-in entry from the dashboard as well.

Yes, dismounting the disk sets it offline, which causes DrivePool to recognized it as missing, which sets the pool in a read only mode. Sorry for not clarifying this. Once it finishes, it will "reappear" and everything will go back to working fine. As for the different versions...... The WHS installer has issues, where it doesn't updating things properly. To fix this, uninstall StableBit Scanner from the Control Panel, and then from the dashboard, and then install the newer version.

Okay, I just wanted to make sure here. A bad controller card could potentially be a cause here. Using the "burst test" on StableBit Scanner would be a good way to test. If you can stop using the pool in the meanwhile, and run a burst test on one or more of the disks... if it causes the BSOD or system instability there... then it may be a controller you're using. However, given the issue here, I suspect that this isn't the case (it could be). Have you run "sfc /scannow" on the system, to ensure the system integrity? Also, have you run a virus scan on the system, just in case?

Because Read Striping doesn't always read from both disks and cache the reads. If one of the disks is operating at a much higher bus speed, then it will only read from the faster disk instead. Details about the feature are here: http://stablebit.com/Support/DrivePool/2.X/Manual?Section=Performance%20Options

Wow, that is a lot of drives! And no, unfortunately we haven't made any progress on this. I'll "bump" the issue for Alex, but it may still be a while. Sorry.

I absolutely understand the frustration, and I'm sorry that it's still occurring. However, have you ran a memory test recently? Sometimes, frequent BSODs are caused by memory issues. Also, could you disable the read striping option (Pool Options -> performance). Issue: https://stablebit.com/Admin/IssueAnalysis/14522

Yup, I can tell you exactly why. The "WMI" method for querying SMART data (default), can cause unreliable behavior sometimes. We pick up on that and report the issue. If you enable the "NoWmi" option in the SMART section, this should fix the issue: http://wiki.covecube.com/StableBit_Scanner_Advanced_Settings Find the "SMART" section, and check the "NoWmi" option. Then you'll need to reboot the system, or restart the "StableBit Scanner Service" using "services.msc".

Yup. I only have one in my pool at the moment. I had planned on buying more, but stuff came up (car repairs, broke the cap/crown off of one of my teeth, and vet trip for one of my dogs), I'm tapped out on my discretionary funds. As Umfriend has said, the read speeds from the drives are fantastic (180MB/s reliably) The write speeds where pretty good as well (~150MB/s), but occasionally stalled (dropped to 0 bytes/s). If write speed is important, then I would recommend using the "SSD Optimizer" balancer and set the Archive drives to be ... well Archive drives (and no, this wasn't planned, just a coincidence for the names!). Though, one thing here. If you're going to be using a lot of larger files (eg, not pictures, but videos/ISOs/etc), then I would highly recommend formatting the drive and setting the Allocation Unite size to 64k. When I was testing the drive out, I found that the larger Unit size gave about 20MB/s more read speed. At least for these larger files. The reason I recommend this is that the larger allocation unit (cluster) size means larger sequential data (hence the faster read speeds), and reduced file fragmentation. However, you lose more space to partially allocated clusters. This means you may lose some space on the disk overall, but if you're using large files, this should be minimal. Also, this "lost" disk space shows up as "Other" space in DrivePool, so you may see more of that in your pool. Also, you may want to use the file placement rules to exclude the Client Computer Backup folder from the Archive Disks (if you're using Windows Home Server or Windows Server Essentials). As it is a database, and may severely impact performance.

Well, both programs do let you know if they have an update. Scanner should let you know in the "Applications/Add-ins" section of the dashboard, and Drivepool 2.x prompts you if you have logged in. Though, if you're not checking.... then yeah, We need to fix that, somehow. As for the file system repair. The "Force Repair Volume" prompt i there to let you know that it must forcible close the "handles" to any files accessing the disk. This is completely normal. It means that anything that is accessing the disk will be closed out. Eg, you need to close and save any files before doing this. You should definitely do this. Otherwise, you'll need to schedule a disk check for the next time you reboot (which can take a while).

Sorry for not getting to you. The simple answer is no. you need to install Essentials and then upgrade. However, Microsoft fixed this for Server 2012R2, where you can install the "Essentials Experience" role. However, Server 2012R2 removes the "setup website" from 2012... so you HAVE to set it up locally.

Alex and I do it manually. We go through the "undefined" devices periodically, and update the SMART data and the interpretation rules. As for helping, submitting the data to bitflock helps. And Scanner updates these rules every 7 days automatically. But running the "update" option forces this.

Well, one thing that MAY help, throttle the SMART queries made by StableBit Scanner. In some drives, this does help with the LCC value.

If this is a VM, and the VHD is sitting on that PNY SSD, it may be time to consider replacing it... or thoroughly testing it on the host.

In this case, lack of prior proper planning does constitute an emergency.... Sadly. And I can't blame them. 3000+ workstations is a huge job. I pity the person (or people) that got stuck with that task. Especially if they don't have WDS or SCCM setup to deploy Win7 or higher to all of those systems.

Sorry for taking so long to get back to you here. Specifically, we want the contents of the CoveFS folder, as that contains a low level kernel log of what EXACTLY is going on. However, I'm able to reproduce the issue on my end, with both Robocopy and xcopy. So WE are not supporting something properly here. Issue here: https://stablebit.com/Admin/IssueAnalysis/14519

Absolutely! And yeah, 5400-5900 RPM.

Well, as for the damaged sector... try rescanning it. If the issue persists, then it's definitely a disk error. And if that's the case, it may be an issue with the media that the system VHD is sitting on.

IIRC, there are several "lines" of the specific model... which is stupid, IMO. (It may also be wrong). If you have issues with the new drive, contact Seagate. They may have a fix or something... or even replace the drive with a different model... It's worth inquiring about, at least.

You're very welcome! If you have any more questions, don't hesitate to ask.

Yeah, I was reading that, and that part stuck out as well. While writing, data to it, I noticed that periodically it would completely stall (0 bytes/sec) for a few seconds. Aside from that, the article indicated that reading was a priority in most cases, which is fantastic if you want to pool the drive. I've done so, and it works VERY well in the pool from what I'm seeing. If this is actually the case, then it really means it's great for large pools that people like myself have. I keep the data for "archival" purposes (at least that's what I tell myself and my checkbook), because it can be hard to find stuff later on. Instead we built out a Veeam backup test to create a similar data model. In our test we saw, as expected, the SMR drives took much longer for a traditional full backup, averaging 30MB/s. However we saw sustained read speeds during a 400GB VM recovery in excess of 180MB/s, which is really the core metric.I'll second that "in excess of 180MB/s". I was getting the best result with 64k cluster sizes (allocation unit size), though I suspect I would get better if I used powershell to go to 128k or 256k clusters instead... but that was just too much disk space wasted for me (lots of images). But I was seeing 150-180MB/s consistently, and it peaked into the high 200's a few times (for a fairly "long" time" too). As for the performance issues... coupled with read striping, I these drives would make a fantastic pool.

There shouldn't be an issue with that. When StableBit DrivePool detects the drives, it should recreate the pool. When one disk goes offline, it will detect it's missing and put the pool into a read only mode. When ALL of the disks from the pool are offline, it will actually remove the pool. So you should be able to use it like this without any issues.