Christopher (Drashna)

Double check the balancing settings, and that they're set to realtime. If so, then try restarting the DrivePool service, or just restart the server. But unless the pool has hit the thresholds for balancing, it won't use the new disk until then. Or you add new files. If you want all the disks to be equally filled, then you may want to check out the "Disk Space Equalizer" balancer plugin. http://stablebit.com/DrivePool/Plugins

Could you take a screenshot of the UI with the pool/s pie chart and the disks in it? And for your disks, you're not going to get 8TBs, at best, you're going to get ~7TBs of capacity.

Yes, yes it would. However, I'd be careful before doing so. Not all controllers may like the 6TB drives. Especially older RAID cards.

Which screen? The Settings page? If you're not seeing that, then something is up. That's a standard part of 1.x and should always be present. The specific tab for DrivePool (in the background) can be disabled (and right here). But if you are using v1.x of DrivePool, you should have that. If you're using 2.x, then you won't get this screen at all.

Unfortunately, without your own monitoring tools, you kinda have to rely on them to be honest and truthful. Because .... that's excessive. I don't care what you were doing but that doesn't sound right. As for the external, check out IOSafe. They make (expensive) external enclosures that are supposed to be fire and water proof. May be worth checking out, if you are concerned about that. Or if you read Home Server Show's forums, they heavily recommend the "3-2-1" method. And one of those is "off-site". So a safety deposit box may be a good idea for the really really important data. ANd yeah, that's part of the issue with Cloud storage. Syncing it is fine, but what happens when you need to get it back? Again, Home Server Show, on the forums, one of the aspects of backups that comes up is recovery. There is no point in having a backup solution who's recovery feature is completely untested. It does no good to have something backed up if you can't actually restore it (or do so "meaningfully"). I know it's too late now, but it's absolutely worth considering for the future.

@dbailey: yeah, Comcast... well, they have their own term for horribleness: "Comcastic". But in their defense, it's easier to charge more for bandwidth than it is to spend millions to actually upgrade the infrastructure. Just saying. My ISP is only slightly better than them. And they have a worst name, one that they seem to try to live up to: Cox. If you intend on using the Cloud a lot, or host a website on your connection, it may be worth looking into the business accounts. They tend to not have the bandwidth caps, don't block *any* ports (80 or 25 for example, which are HTTP and SMTP respectively) Though, for the future, you could get away with dumping the output of a dir command to a text file, and do so on a schedule.

It looks like the reason it's taking so long, and being so slow, is that it's running a lot of "duplication tasks". Namely, it's finding a lot of files that it expects to be duplicated and aren't, and a lot of files that are duplicated and it expects them not to be. Double check that you have everything that you want duplicated, well duplication enabled for. And what you don't want duplicated, disabled) I'm flagging this thread for Alex, so he can take a look as well.

DrivePool should never have a negative impact on the system. If it is (and it looks like it is)... When it's doing this, could you get a memory dump of the DrivePool.Service.exe file? http://wiki.covecube.com/StableBit_DrivePool_Dashboard_Freeze Also, is it taking an excessive amount of time to calculate? If so, could you see about resetting DrivePool's settings and see if that helps? http://wiki.covecube.com/StableBit_DrivePool_Q2299585B

If you can get a list/index of the files in the cloud backup, then you could create a list of the files in the pool as well. And then compare the two. Also, if you had duplication enable for everything, then you should be fine. But otherwise, StableBit DrivePool does not maintain a list of files at all.

If it is from an "old" pool, or otherwise removed from the pool, and this folder is *not* hidden, then it should be safe to delete it. But I'd recommend the "send to recycle bin" method, as opposed to permanently deleting the file.

Could you get the logs from DrivePool? Don't "Enable tracing", just grab the files: http://wiki.covecube.com/StableBit_DrivePool_Log_Collection But upload them to the Box.com widget on the bottom of that page, or attach them to a ticket at Also, try running the WSS Troubleshooter and using the "Reset NTFS Permissions on the pool" option. It could be that one or more of the permission entries left over from WHSv1 is causing issues. http://wiki.covecube.com/StableBit_DrivePool_Utilities

I believe the GUID is randomly generated for each disk, and needs to be different for each. However, that's not the only thing that identifies the disk as part of the pool. But basically... it's probably not a good idea to mess with the folder. Why do you ask?

Stability is definitely an important thing. No good if you have to fight with it every five minutes. Though, I'm using XBMC on Windows, using AMD APU systems. That, .... and I avoid all things Apple when I can. I'm not a fan would be an understatement. But it looks like you have a solution that works very well and that you like. And there is a lot to be said about that.

Yeah, I saw that. We'll see how well it goes. (hopefully very, as 6TB drives would be nice, if not expensive!)

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

ctopher, That's a very nice setup! One quick question (loaded as it may be): IF the Apple TV 3's are jailbroken (or at least capable of it), have you considered using XBMC on them? And maybe using mySQL on your server to sync their libraries?

Malo, Read Striping is present in DrivePool 1.3 as well. http://stablebit.com/Support/DrivePool/1.X/Manual?Section=Folder%20Duplication And here is the image of the setting: As for DrivePool 2.x, you can install that on WHS2011 right now if you wish. However, you lose the full integration that 1.3 has. Just download the Windows 7 (64-Bit) version.

JMarsh, If you updated the BIOS, that can definitely happen. The BIOS version/date is some of the information we collect to identify the system when the license is activated. So changing that information could trigger that. As for moving the license to new hardware... when you deactivate, it also disassociates the license from the hardware completely. SO you should not have any issues.

PJShots, Yeah, that would make a huge difference! The specific issue is IDE vs AHCI, IIRC. And yes, the different it can make is such as that between night and day! In fact, AHCI is required for hotswap capability. Also, I would recommend opening Device Manager, and making sure that Write Caching is enabled on each of the drives (especially the system disk). If it's not, you can see the same significant drop in performance. Also, there are usually two levels of write caching. The second one isn't recommended (and has a warning that you should definitely heed). The first one is the one you want checked. And links are absolutely allowed. We don't have an issue with that (if we did, we'd block the ability outright). Just as long as they're not spammy, or excessive.

PJShots, Thanks for uploading the logs. We'll take a look at them and see if we can isolate the issue. But let me assure you, the duplication should definitely not be that slow. It should just about as fast as a normal file copy.

The "unsafe" methods are for the controller, raid or sata. But if you don't have that config file, then you're not using those unsafe methods (as that is specifically enabled by that file).

So it's definitely not doing it when StableBit Scanner is uninstalled, right? If so, then yes, Scanner is definitely the cause, and that throttling option should definitely help.

That's definitely not typical. It should definitly transfer at faster speeds. But this could happen if it is copying a lot of small files (such as pictures). Otherwise, it should be copying at "normal" speeds. I'm assuming you're using DrivePool 2.x, right? If so, could you do this: http://wiki.covecube.com/StableBit_DrivePool_2.x_Log_Collection

It could be Scanner that is causing this behavior. On the system, open up StableBit Scanner, click on the "Scanner settings" button in the toolbar, and select "All Settings". Then head to the "S.M.A.R.T." tab. Click on the checkbox to "Throttle queries". By default, this will force it to check once an hour, and should be a lot more in line with what you want.

If you have it enabled, you'll have a "C:\Program Files (x86)\StableBit\Scanner\Scanner.Service.exe.config" file present (even after uninstall). If you do not, then you are not using this setting. If you do have this file then you *may* have this setting enabled. If you have a card that uses these unsafe methods, and Scanner is configured to allow their usage, then it can cause the instability. However, if the drive controller doesn't uses these methods at all, or it's not enabled... then this wouldn't be the cause. And unfortunately, the only system I have that has a controller that uses these unsafe methods is my server, which runs HyperV (and my testing and work VMs), and runs Server 2012... The reason I asked is because I noticed that I had not asked it before. And since the setting can cause the system to become unstable.... I'm still trying to test this out and reproduce the issue. But in the meanwhile, if you are willing to, getting that crashdump for when the system is locking up/hanging would be most useful. http://wiki.covecube.com/StableBit_DrivePool_System_Freeze