Christopher (Drashna)

I'm sorry to hear about the hardware failure, that's never fun to deal with. And depending on how old that card is, I would see about RMAing it. Worst case, so you can resell it (as new, even) and recoup some of your cost (or just add it so you have more eSATA ports, etc).

The firewall would definitely do that. But that should have been configured properly when you installed DrivePool. Unless you're using a 3rd party firewall.

dbailey, that's your choice. Though v2 is in RC, which means it's almost completely stable. One thing that v2 really does add is the remote control option.

If you mean the WHS2011 alerts, then you need to ignore it or delete the alerts, or else they tend to not go away on their own, some times. That or if it is on a client computer, refresh the alerts sometimes fixes that.

Oh, wow... that's odd. Well, glad you got it sorted. And yeah, feel free to check out the wiki pages. It's mostly used for troubleshooting issues, but it's not a bad idea to check out.

Glad to hear it.

You cannot encrypt the DrivePool drive, but you CAN encrypt the disks in the pool. The BitLocker setting that otispresley mentions is specifically for that purpose in fact. However, you will need to unlock each disk before the pool will become available. And you'll have to do this each time you reboot. And the simplest way to accomplish this is to encrypt the system drive as well. That is the only way to automatically unlock the encrypted drives. And if you don't have a TPM module on your motherboard (95% chance that you don't, they're not standard).... then you'll need to use the password/usb drive method to encrypt/unlock the system.

You're very welcome. And as for the backup server, a lower powered box dedicated for WHS2011 wouldn't be a bad idea at all. And sorry to hear about your issues with Storage Spaces.

http://wiki.covecube.com/StableBit_DrivePool_Q3017479 Could you do that, or verify that you cannot. As for the dashboard, on a client, launch the dashboard. But on the login screen, click on the "options" button, and select the "allow me to select what add-ons to load" option. Disable the DrivePool one, and see if that helps.

I do have a good idea, but I'm not sure how much of that info is for public consumption. So I'll let Alex handle this one.

Actually, there is a "Safe mode" link, that does that. It's in the start menu, under "Windows Server 2012 Essentials". That or just run "%windir%\system32\ConsoleLauncher.exe /manage". And either will bring up the dashboard with that "addin" screen.

Sorry, read striping won't. But the Network IO Boost *may*. I'm not entirely sure.

On a client machine, load the Dashboard program. Before logging in, click on the "Options" button. This will give you the option to select what add-ins to load. Then you can re-enable DrivePool. If you still have issues with it hanging, or being very laggy, could you do this: http://wiki.covecube.com/StableBit_DrivePool_Dashboard_Freeze

DrivePool will see the Storage Space as one gigantic drive. In fact, Storage Spaces works so low level, that nothing but it sees the individual drives. And yes, you'd want to move the data off of the Storage Space before breaking it. After you break it, I believe you'll have to initialize the disks (just like a brand new disk). Additionally, if you have enough spare drives (to equal the capacity of the "Space"), you may be able to add the Storage Space to a new pool, and add the additional drives to the Pool as well, then move Storage Space's content into the hidden "PoolPart.xxxx" folder. In that folder, it would be considered part of the pool, and subject to duplication and balancing. You could then duplicate the entire Pool. Once that's done, you could just break the STorage Space, which will cause a "Missing disk" error in DrivePool, which you can then just remove the now missing disk and add the individual disks into the pool.

Do you mean backing up to the pool, or backing up of the pool. If you mean "of" the pool, DrivePool does not support VSS (Volume Shadowcopy Service). That means it doesn't support Windows Backup right now. You can, however, backup the individual drives. If you mean "to" the pool, it should backup to the pool just fine.

That's absolutely your choice. And yeah, that is a nice card, so I can definitely understand wanting to keep using it. But as I said, you could use DrivePool with the RAID just fine.

Yeah, messing with stuff late at night is a recipe for disaster. And yeah, cable management can be a PITA when you need to move stuff around. That's why I tend to just jury-rig things into place. Because I like to tinker. A lot. As for my server, I think I already have. I'm not sure. But the big thing is the HighPoint RocketRAID 2720SGL card. 2x SAS cables, that break out to 8 HDDs total.

Shane, Good point. However, I have a rackmount server case (Norco 4220), that I will "eventually" fill. I just need to move my server into it's own room/area. Away from the cats.

Glad to hear that you are loving our products! And yes, FlexRAID is ... incredibly complicated for doing something that is supposedly simple. But glad you are loving our product. As for Scanner, there is a Pinned thread that you may want to check out that explains a lot of those settings. Alex (the developer) has a nice long post explaining all the settings. Worth checking out: http://community.covecube.com/index.php?/topic/48-questions-regarding-hard-drive-spindownstandby/ (and it should answer all your questions, so I'm not going to attempt to here. Basically, no, DrivePool doesn't add much to the RAID card. Sort of. You can definitely add the RAID array to the pool without any issue. But personally, I'd rather use DrivePool and Scanner over the RAID array. Namely because you should be able to get SMART data if you pass the disks through (as individual drives, though this may require enabling "UnsafeDirectIo"). The reason I use this instead (I have a HighPoint RocketRAID 2720SGL card), is that you get more disk space out of this, and having both installed will add a "Scanner" balancer for DrivePool that will evacuate data from a drive that Scanner detects as failing. As for DrivePool's disk in Disk Management, that is because we use a "virtual driver" for the drive. And as for the IO, that's because the DrivePool drive doesn't actually exist, and all IO operations are passed onto the disks directly. This means that you should get better performance.

Tallmomof2, First, let me say I'm sorry that Storage Spaces ate your data. That's never a pleasant experience. DrivePool operates very similiarly to how WHSv1's DrivePool did. In fact, that's the inspiration for our product. Though we've made a number of improvements. First, all the files are stored on normal NTFS volumes. So if you decide that you don't want to use DrivePool anymore, you can just uninstall it, and then recover all your data from the hidden "PoolPart.xxxx" folders in the root of each drive. Also, if you reinstall the OS, or decide to migrate to new hardware, you can just move the disks over. Once you reinstall DrivePool, it will immediately recognize the "old" pool, and "rebuild" it. I'm not sure if you have had to deal with a system disk failure in WHSv1, but you basically had to completely rebuild Drive Extender's storage pool by copying everything back into the pool. A very time consuming process. Like I indicated, for DrivePool, it would take seconds... just reinstall DrivePool and reattach the drives! If you decide to go with a dedicated system for WHS2011, then I'd recommend checking out StableBit Scanner as well. Namely, because it gets SMART data from the drives, as well as scans them for issues periodically. And if you have both products installed, Scanner can evacuate a DrivePool drive if it detects errors with it, to help prevent data loss.

I live in the San Deigo area, so yeah, lots of dust. That, and lots of animals. I'd be more inclined to believe it is the box it's in or maybe the controller card. That's where I'd put my money. But swapping out the cable should be trivial, and very easy/quick to test.

Okay, I wasn't sure. On the DrivePool UI, when it's measuring, it has a small "pac man" type icon in the bottom left corner of the Pie Chart area to indicate that it's still indexing. And from the sounds of it, it wasn't still indexing. If that is the case, it is possible that it got interrupted. Such as if it got rebooted, or needed to do a balancing/duplication pass.

Dust and stuff... I live in an area that everything gets dusty, so I have to clean out my server and other computers every six months. As for burning out cables... There isn't a cable type that I haven't burned out at least once. that includes SATA cables, cat5(e), and even Coax.

Scanner is definitely compatible. The underlying API that it uses has not changed. You can use either the "Windows 7" or the "Windows Home Server 2011" version. The difference is that the WHS2011 version will deploy over the network and will have a dashboard tab. As for DrivePool, that should be compatible. I know it's been extensively tested with the Preview version, and has no issues with it. And it should work fine with the RTM version.

It's possible that it's blocking that. You could check by running the stand alone app for it as well: https://bitflock.com/