Christopher (Drashna)

I'm glad to hear that you're switching. I think you'll be very happy that you did. As for DrivePool v2.x, it lacks full dashboard integration, but it does create a tab in the dashboard from which you can administer the pool from. It's just not as integrated into the dashboard. As for the Wireframes, we don't currently support that, but it's been requested in the past. We are considering it for the future though (no promises). And as for removing disks, well, both DrivePool and Scanner identify the volumes mounts (drive letter or folder path), as well as the volume labels. If that's not good enough, if you have both installed, DrivePool will add the model and serial number for the disks to the tool-tips in the GUI. Though, for ease of identifying disks, I would recommend mounting them to folder paths (such as "C:\DrivePool\i##" and "C:\DrivePool\e##"). http://wiki.covecube.com/StableBit_DrivePool_Q4822624

The normal DirectIO settings are fine as is. You should not need to change this setting. And the "UnsafeDirectIo" setting is different from the "Do not use DirectIO when querying SMART" setting. It' a list of methods that can cause issues with your controller if used. And it's off by default. Hence "unsafe". Normally, it should not be enabled, unless you know what you are doing, or support directs you to do so. The "Do not use DirectIO when querying SMART" setting is something else from this entirely. There are a couple of methods we used to query SMART information, and this gives you some control over that. But please do check out Alex's response above.

Like I said, you're definitely not using it then (it's in the "Advances Settings" config file). But when all the disks disappear like this, and even Disk Management is unresponsive, that usually indicates an issue with the Virtual Disk service. If this happens again, then definitely let us know. Also, if this is frequent, uninstall Scanner or at least disable the Scanner service and see if the issue goes away. If it does, then definitely let us know. Though, I would definitely recommend checking the SYSTEM event viewer logs for errors or warnings to see if there is something there that may indicate an issue.

Steve, Windows (Server) Backup explicitly depends on the Volume Shadowcopy Service. Without it, it cannot take a snapshot of the disk. And without this snapshot, it cannot backup. Specifically, it uses the snapshot to grab all the data, as this should never change. But because the VSS service is so well documented (note: add dripping sarcasm to that statement when you read it), it's very difficult to add support. Specifically, Microsoft has ONLY documented the commands to send to the service to do stuff. It hasn't documented how to *add* support to a file system at all. I do keep on bugging Alex about this, because VSS support (even partial) would be awesome. As for your specific error, I'm not sure. A quick search shows that a full disk check usually resolves that issue though (chkdsk /r)

Okay, glad to hear it. If it does happen again, please do let us know.

To be honest, this is more of an issue with the dashboard itself. I've seen this on clean VMs... And to take a while to switch tabs. This is the main reason I recommend SSDs and to max out your RAM. It does help with this issue... but I've seen it take minutes to load on my system. That's with a SSD, an 8 core AMD CPU and 32GBs of RAM. There should be no sluggishness, but still... It's part of the reason that Alex moved to our own in house remote control over DrivePool and Scanner. However, when this happens, if you can get a memory dump of the Dashboard process, we can take a look at it and see if it is an issue with our code. http://wiki.covecube.com/StableBit_DrivePool_Dashboard_Freeze

If i had to guess, it hit a clump of much smaller files, which can take significantly longer than a few much larger files. However, if you want to upload the logs, I can take a look and see if there was any errors that was slowing it down.

First, if the drives are not accessible to Windows Disk Management, then something "really bad" is happening. Specifically, both StableBit Scanner *and* Disk Management (and diskpart) connect to the "Virtual Disk Service" for getting information about the disks in the system. Are all of these disks on the same controller? You can "sort by controller" in Scanner to check. If they are, are you using the "UnsafeDirectIo" setting? if you're not sure, then the answer is most likely no.

The logs for the pool should tell you, but otherwise, no. Specifically, if you check "C:\ProgramData\StableBit DrivePool\Service\Logs\Service\", the text logs will tell you each and every file that it errored out on, along with a lot of other information. However, it should make the "PoolPart.xxxx" folder visible on the disk. And from there, you can see what got left behind. However, I will submit an IAR/request to Alex to more visibly acknowledge what files could not be read/moved off the pool.

That is definitely not usual. First, could you get a dump of the drive pool service? http://wiki.covecube.com/StableBit_DrivePool_Service_Memory_Dump And get the error reports? http://wiki.covecube.com/StableBit_DrivePool_2.x_Error_Reports After doing that, try restarting the server and see if it fixes the issue.

The location of the files on each drive are hidden "PoolPart.xxxx" folders. These should appear in the "Previous Versions". As for the most reliable way to access these is to use "\\PC-NAME\x$\", where "x" is the drive's letter. From there, you can right click on the folder and do "Restore Previous Versions" to see all the snapshots. Once you've opened the snapshots, you can search through it. However, depending on how things get balanced, the contents can change drastically.

Yeah, just change the shared location in the dashboard (or even use the WSS Troubleshooter to "Restore DrivePool Shares" to do this automatically) http://wiki.covecube.com/StableBit_DrivePool_Utilities If you're using anything else that uses the pool, then you may need to change that. But aside from that, there shouldn't be anything else to watch out for.

That is definitely not typical. A couple of things to try here: throttle the SMART querying. And on disk controller sensitivity, sent this to the highest sensitivity. If you are still having issues, could you install the beta for Scanner, and see if that helps?

The "mark as unchecked" doesn't fix anything. It just tells Scanner to think it hasn't been checked by it. And if there was a file system damaged on the system disk, it should show a "system reserved" partition as well (I believe). On the system disk on Windows 7, there is a 300MB partition as well as the C:\ drive, and *that* could be what triggered the error. However, scanning that is a lot more complicated.

Yeah, unfortunately we don't support Previous Versions in the pool. The requirements for doing so are a) incredibly difficult to implement and there is absolutely no documentation on how to do this. However, Previous Versions absolutely does work for the drives that make up the pool. And as for replacing it, any file based utility should work fine. If you want "versioned" sync/backup, then "FreeFileSync" may be just what you want.

That is very odd. Could you get get tracing logs from the pool? http://wiki.covecube.com/StableBit_DrivePool_2.x_Log_Collection Basically, enable this, restart the server, and open the dashboard. Once you've done that, if it's still in this state, collect the files and upload them. Then could you get a dump of the dashboard? http://wiki.covecube.com/StableBit_DrivePool_Dashboard_Freeze That, or would try out the newest beta build? http://dl.covecube.com/DrivePoolWindows/beta/download/StableBit.DrivePool_2.1.0.455_x64_BETA.exe

I can't comment about any of these from personal experience. But I am familar with the Sans Digital TowerRAID products. And IIRC, they do work very well. Though the card that comes with it is a Silicon Images based card and is basically trash.

Unfortunately, we do not support the Volume Shadowcopy Service on the pool currently. It is supported on the Pooled drives though (the disks in the pool). There are two main uses for this feature though, "Previous Versions" and "Windows (Server) Backup". Which feature is it that you are needing? Once I know that, I can recommend several courses of action. And no, there isn't a way to control file/folder placement right now. Well, there is "Ordered File Placement", which fills one disk at a time, and tries to keep the contents of each folder on the same disk.

Could you post a screen shot of what you mean? I just want to me 100% certain of what you are referring to. Also, what version of Scanner are you using?

What version of DrivePool are you using specifically? (the full version, like 2.0.0.420)

Depending on how much data you had to start with, the size of the files in question (a lot of small files take longer than a couple of large files), the speeds of the drives and controllers, and if you're doing anything else... this could take a couple of days. The reason is that we use a lower system priority so that performance is not adversely affected. However, if you want to add the "C:\ProgramData\StableBitDrivePool\Service\" folder to a zip file, and submit the zip file to http://stablebit.com/Contact, I can take a look at the contents and see if it's erroring out on anything.

That sounds about right, price-wise. Unfortunately. Windows Server 2012 (R2) Essentials is meant for small businesses and not for consumer use. And it is priced as such. Ebay, Amazon, etc may have deals on it occasionally, but that's about the price you'll have to pay for it. Sorry.

I'm glad to hear that you solved it yourself. But for reference, what did you do to solve the issue.

Unfortunately, this does happen. The reason is that sometimes Windows will bump drive letters, like you've seen. We don't really have any control over this behavior unfortunately. However, if you want (and we recommend it), you can change the drive letter for the Pool yourself. Changing it to something much farther along in the alphabet will help. Or even assigning it A: or B: would work as well (as these are almost never used anymore). http://wiki.covecube.com/StableBit_DrivePool_Q6811286

hkarpf6045: I apologize. It's been a very, very busy month for us. Not only have we had a significant increase in tickets, but we've made a lot of changes internally to help streamline support. In all of this, it seems that this got lost/forgotten. So I must apologize for that. And if you don't get a response from us within a couple of days, please contact us. Either PM me, or email me directly (christopher (at) covecube.com) and let us know. As for the logs, I've flagged them for Alex, so he should see them and respond (at least internally) to the issue.