Christopher (Drashna)

Well, that corrupted folder is almost certainly the cause of the duplication failure here. For the disk in question (not the pool, but the disk with the error), you will want to run chkdsk on it. That should fix the folder issue. If it doesn't, then you may need to run "chkdsk /r" on it

That works too, and is probably a good idea, to boot. Lots of reasons. Mostly damage to the MFT/Partition table on the disk. A loose cable, or bad connection, or an issue with the controller, or the like could cause this. The best way to find out may be to check the event viewer, and look for disk, IO or controller errors at about the time it occurred. There isn't a "good" way. It's always bad when this happens. But sometimes, a power cycle can fix the issue. And there are tools out there that can repair the partition (or if you're crazy/skilled, it can be done "by hand"). But as I said, it's never a good thing, and whichever way you do it, you risk data loss. Move it back into the Pool directly. The Pool will then handle the placement of the files (in fact, you should probably do that now, if you have the space). We generally recommend against accessing the "PoolPart" folder directly, except in very specific circumstances. And since you already have the data off the disk.... there isn't any benefit to using the PoolPart folder for this. See #3. That's why I recommended copying the files to the Pool directly. DrivePool will take care of duplicates and such. Chances are, it may have already duplicated the necessary files, actually. Otherwise, if you get any "this file already exists", you can overwrite, if you want. As for Real Time Duplication, if you follow above, (and don't turn it off), then the Pool handles that for you. Period. Simple. I've done it myself a couple of times, and it's much less work. But yes, DrivePool is smart enough to not reduplicate the files. It checks to see how many copies it finds. in fact, if it finds "too many", it will delete a copy. Also, if the dates don't match, or the file sizes are different, it will actually prompt you about that. And it uses the same process to make additional copies. As for not trusting the disk, open the Balancer settings in DrivePool. Then open the "Balancers" tab, and find the "File Placement Limiter" balancer. From there, you can actually disable duplicated or unduplicated storage per disk. Uncheck "Unduplicated" for that disk, and it will ONLY store duplicated data on that drive. It sounds like a good idea. At least for now.

That really depends on the quality of the virus scanner, and how it's designed. Avast has had issues as long as I can remember. It was neat to have on WHSv1... but that definitely cause issues... And no, we don't need any tests with Avast. the problem should be easily reproduce-able, and the solution definitely is. And you are very welcome. And I'm glad that you didn't have to buy new parts, especially if you installed avast again, and likely experience the same issue! And glad to hear it was worth buy our products!

Check the permissions on the "root" folder of the pool. Make sure that "SYSTEM" and "Administrators" have full control. That "Authenticated Users" have everything but Full control (and special), and that "Users" has read, list and execute permissions. If that doesn't help, then make sure the same is true for the "poolpart" folders for the pool. Also, make sure that you have the latest (beta) version of DrivePool installed. If you do, then please enable file system logging and attempt to rename the pool again.

I'm sorry to hear about the disk issue. That's never a pleasant experience As for the issues you're seeing... well re-initializing the disk is probably the issue. If the data is actually still there, then the solution may be "simple", relatively speaking. If it is, then do the following: Stop the "StableBit DrivePool Service" Enable "Show Hidden Files" on the system Find the hidden "PoolPart.xxxx" folder on the disk in question Move the contents of the folder into the "root" of the disk (basically, out of that Poolpart folder) Delete the now empty PoolPart.xxxx folder Start the StableBit DrivePool Service It should complain about the missing disk, and should not be able to properly identify it. Remove the "missing" disk from the pool Add the 3TB disk to the pool. Move the contents of the disk into the newly created PoolPart folder on the drive Reset DrivePool's settings Unfortunately, it's entirely possible that it will still identify the problem volume in step 6. It shouldn't, but .... If that's the case, then you need to move the contents of the disk off of that disk and format it (and maybe re-partition it)

Yeah, the surface scan bypasses the normal access to the disk, and doesn't use NTFS permissions. However, the part that identifies the files *does*, and can cause issues if the SYSTEM account doesn't have access to the files.

Noted, and there is a dashboard tab. Just no "sub tab" for the storage section, nor the shared folder integration.

Well, I'm sorry to hear about your poor experiences with FlexRAID, and their licensing requirements. That's unfortunate. As for your server, that's a very nice setup overall, and a nice case (I've always liked Lian Li's) And I'm glad that you're loving StableBit DrivePool. If you haven't already, a feature you may want to turn on is "Network IO Boost". It's disabled by default, because it adds additional CPU overhead, but it prioritizes network traffic over local traffic. May be great for your network. And I'm sorry to hear about the WD Green drive failures. But you should definitely be happy with those Reds. Also, if you haven't checked it out already, you may want to look at StableBit Scanner, as well. (and you can get a discount on the purchase price if you have a license for DrivePool already).

Well, I'm glad I caught that bit with Avast then! I had initially, almost missed it. Good thing I didn't! And I'm glad to hear that not only has this fixed the CPU and memory usage but greatly "boosted" the disk performance as well! Great news. And yes, Avast (or any other scanner) should detect the files based on the Pool access just fine. The virtual "disk" acts like a normal disk, so there should not be any different in behavior there.

"Legacy" mode is for the Controller card's management interface. Any disk that isn't in an array or JBOD, should show up as "Legacy" instead. At least, that's how the RocketRAID 2720 works. And appears to be the same for the 2320. For the DirectIoTest app, there is an "UnsafeDirectIo" check-box at the top, make sure that this is checked. Then select one of the disks on the controller. Once you've done that, see if either DirectIO or WMI reports a green check-box next to "S.M.A.R.T. Attributes". This is the only setting that really matters. If it doesn't display these green check marks, then please report the methods used (at the bottom of the window". In the picture in the other thread, it's the "Methods: AtaPassThrough" section. That or take a screen capture of the window, and upload it here (or to a cloud storage provider and link it here). You can do that with "Snipping Tool" in windows.

Well, Scanner runs under the SYSTEM account, so it should always have permission. However, I'm not sure it uses that account to actually scan the disk. Alex will have to verify that.

Well, as both Windows and Avast both do automatically update by default... And some of the windows updates do affect the kernel... It's entirely possible that is just a "perfect storm" of issues here. Or maybe, you just hadn't noticed it before. It's hard to know for certain. As for the exclusion, the "PoolPart.xxxx" folders are where the actual files reside, and where we pull all the information from. I haven't used Avast in a while, but in theory, you *should* be able to exclude the folders from scanning. But if the disks aren't being used for anything else... then excluding the disks may be helpful. Specifically, when you read, write, list, etc files and folders from the pool, we're checking the contents of these folder. That's why there is the additional overhead, and why it should be VERY little overhead. And any issue you can walk away from with more knowledge is, well a good thing. And I definitely agree with the "satisfying" part. But I can definitely sympathize with the "frustrating" part, as well. Sometimes those really weird issues can drive you crazy. So many moving parts make it a lot more complicated to troubleshoot, sometimes. Oh, and speaking of which, what mode is the drive controller in? And are you using the Microsoft generic driver or the manufacturer's specific drivers for it? I ask, because we've recently had somebody that had high CPU usage because of the drive controller's driver. It may be a shot at the dark, but I figured it was definitely worth mentioning.

Actually, I suspected as much, but I wasn't certain. I wanted Alex to weigh in, just to be certain.

Nigel, I don't think so, .... yet. But if you notice that the last two official beta releases have both been related (the more recent being a bunch of fixes and improvements to the rules engine)... I've bugged it, so that Alex will definitely see it. https://stablebit.com/Admin/IssueAnalysis/3191

We've had a number of people with issues from Avast lately. Interfering with both StableBit DrivePool (understandable as the AV uses a file system filter which can cause issues, and is why I asked), and with StableBit Scanner (which it SHOULD. NOT. EVER. cause issues with...) Please uninstall Avast, and see if the behavior persists. If it does not,.... bingo. And looking into this interaction is on our to-do list. However, if uninstalling Avast (not just disabling it... as that does not remove the said file system filters) doesn't help, then let us know. And please get the logs and dump to us... And as for "overhead", as Alex has said, this should be minimal. I was using DrivePool on a Core 2 Duo E5200 with 4GBs of RAM (a HP MediaSmart Server EX495, actually), transcoding, downloading to, reading from, etc without any notifiable impact on the system (even with Network IO Boost, which uses more overhead), and minimal resource usage, except for when actively busy transcoding)

Actually... you're evaluation of the situation isn't quite right. First, that you have that mean bad/unreadable sectors is scary. I'm considering tossing a drive that had 700.... And it is likely that this is the same uses space. Windows has probably marked the sectors as "bad" already, and is reporting them as used. And you say you've ran CHKDSK. Did you use the "/r" option? If not, then it wouldn't have touched the bad sectors, as the "/r" switch is specifically designed to try to recover or reallocate these sectors. Just note, that if there is anything on the disk, this will make any data in these sectors unrecoverable. And by default, Windows may try to write to one of these bad sectors. This will "usually" recheck the sector, try to recover it or reallocate it to a spare section. As your write more files, it will do this more and more, depending on the location of the sectors. So you would not normally see corruption of new files on a disk. Only the existing files would be corrupted. But needless to say, this is bad and you should RMA the drive. ANd if it's out of warranty, it may indicate a physical defect, or actual damage to the disk.

The newest release beta version will contain the fix: https://stablebit.com/DrivePool/Download And if you check the changelog, it's issue #2166

First, do you have "Network IO Boost" enabled in DrivePool? If you do, that could potentially cause that behavior. Though the option is disabled by default (for just this reason, actually). Is this the release version (2.0.0.420) or is this a beta build (2.1)? Do you have any antivirus software installed? Do you have any sort of disk tools installed (such as Acronis)? What about software from ASUS for the board? Any of these can absolutely cause issues. As for the hardware... you should be fine. Actually, I have a M1115 cross-flashed to "IT Mode" (aka no RAID firmware at all, just an HBA card) in my system. I haven't had any issues with it, but it .... could. A way you could test this is to use StableBit Scanner. On the disks, there is a "Burst Test" option. This can be useful for diagnosing disk or controller issues. From the looks of it, you're running Plex, Media Center Master, and uTorrent, in addition to StableBit DrivePool. And these are the only things installed? If so, could you see able disabling them temporarily. See if it's not some interaction with one of them? Additionally, do you have any of the drivers installed for the hardware? Especially LAN and storage drivers? And what mode is the onboard storage controller using (IDE, RAID or AHCI)? If that doesn't help, could you enable file system logging and try to duplicate the issue (most likely won't catch the issue here, but just in case). http://wiki.covecube.com/StableBit_DrivePool_2.x_Log_Collection After doing that, could you see about forcing a crash dump? http://wiki.covecube.com/StableBit_DrivePool_System_Freeze

Honestly, I'd test it myself but I'm not at home right now. So I'd rather recommend the safety course of action

You should be able to install over/upgrade, but I'd recommend uninstalling it and then installing the exe version.

That would be why, I think. Alex can/will confirm. The MSI installers are meant mainly for managed installation scenarios (aka via GPO on a domain), and haven't been thoroughly tested yet. That's why they're not linked to on the front page. We recommend using the EXE versions, as the installer is much more intelligent. it "knows" when to force and upgrade, and will download .NET Framework, if the system doesn't have it installed. It may do more than just those, but those two things are still pretty big (as you've experienced). Thoroughly testing the MSI installers is on our to-do list, but for now, we recommend against using them (at least for DrivePool).

Yup, known issue, and already fixed. Download the beta build, and you should be good to go. https://stablebit.com/DrivePool/Download For details: https://stablebit.com/Admin/IssueAnalysis/101 If you are still having issues after installing the beta build, then do let us know.

Are you using the EXE installer?

Yeah, kind of a "yikes" situation there. Also, a good reason to make sure you have a good backup of the system when it's in a working state!

And more importantly, 1.X is still getting bug fixes, hence supported (if not new features). I just thought it was important to emphasize that.