Christopher (Drashna)

There is something already out there: OwnCloud. It requires PHP and mySQL, but it works. I'm not sure if the app does instant uploads yet (it didn't a year ago, IIRC), but otherwise, it works pretty darn well. And if you want detailed instructions.... We Got Served has that. The "25 Essential Projects for Windows Home Server" volume 1 covers how to isntall PHP and mySQL (.... it's as easy as installing the Web Platform Installer, and checking a few boxes). The "25 Essential Projects for WHS volume 2" covers OwnCloud though. (caveat: I co-wrote the second book, and do get revenue off of it).

If it's using USB, then it may not pass on the data properly. Alex has posted a nice utility which you can actually test the compatibility of the drives/enclosure. http://community.covecube.com/index.php?/topic/36-how-to-contribute-test-data/ One request though, if you test this out, would you mind posting the data? (a screen cap of the program would be fine, just PM it to me and I'll do the rest).

Overall Identify: Yes* SMART: Yes* *Only available when using "Legacy mode" for the drives (not in a ARRAY nor JBOB) and when the UnsafeDirectIo method (detailed here). Card Details HighPoint uses slightly different configurations for each card, but all of the 2700 series uses this chipset. However, there are some differences between the drivers and firmware for each version, so we've opted to list the basic info here, and the specifics for each card on it's own page. HighPoint RocketRAID 2760 - Link HighPoint RocketRAID 2720SGL - Link StableBit Scanner - WMI SMART Status: No SMART Attributes: No SMART Thresholds: No SMART Error Log: No Power Mode: No StableBit Scanner - Direct I/O Methods: ScsiPassthrough, ScsiPassthrough48 Identify: Yes SDD: Yes SMART Status: No SMART Attributes: Yes SMART Thresholds: Yes SMART Error Log: Yes Power Mode: No (Thanks to Doug for doing most of this point initially!)

Specifications: Speed: SAS/SATA 3 (6.0Gb/s) Ports: 2x Internal Mini SAS SFF-8087 Slot: PCI-Express 2.0 x8 Chipset: See Marvell 9485 SAS/SATA Controller Chip Firmware Firmware: 1.5AHCI compatible: No (proprietary driver required) Link: http://www.highpoint-tech.com/USA_new/CS-PCI-E_2_0_x8_Configuration.html Driver: 1.4.13.230 (03/20/2013)272x_1x.sys Link: http://www.highpoint-tech.com/USA_new/CS-PCI-E_2_0_x8_Configuration.html Performance SATA III HDDBurst: 360 MB/s Drive: Seagate ST3000DM001 OS Tested: Windows Server 2012 Essentials

You are using Windows Server 2012 Essentials, correct? If so, you MUST enable the media features, if you haven't already. After you've done that, you need to make sure that the folders in question are added to the media indexing. Check these before anything else. As for clearing the database, searching for "WHS 2011 reset media database" should come up with the right solution (or I can dig up a link if you need me to). Also... have you checked out Subsonic? It arguable works much better than the built in stuff, can be configured to integrate with the domain accounts, *and* stream over your Anywhere Access site (these can be difficult to set up if you don't know what you're doing).

@lyzanxia, If you check "C:\ProgramData\StableBit DrivePool\Service\Logs", that will generally list any problem files. May be a good point to start. As for the duplication stuff, the reason Shane mentioned "remeasuring" is because that's what scans the files to check for duplication... Worst case here, is you the "WSS Troubleshooter" tool can reset the permissions on the entire pool (can take a while). That would fix most permission issues. Also, you could run "chkdsk /f x:" (where x: is the drive letter or folder path of the drive) on each drive the pool, to check and fix any file system issues that may have occurred to "unplanned shutdowns".

The files should be fine, on the individual drives themselves. One thing I didn't notice before... where it says "create a new pool". Check the left side of that bar. If there is an arrow there, click on that, and it will take you back to your original pool, and show all the drives.

Unfortunately, no HyperV does not appear to pass along this information, even if you pass the disk through. However, it *will* still read the SMART data in the Host OS. While Scanner and DrivePool are not tested on Server Core installations, they do appear to work (on 2012 Core only though). However, if you want to get SMART info, as well as scanning of the disks.... you'd need it for both "machines".

(Yeah, the "attach" option is kinda hidden. The default posting window is actually a "quick post" box)

Try restarting the computer (well, restart the "StableBit DrivePool" service, but the easiest way to do this is to reboot the server). If the pool is still not showing up, and the drives are not available in the pool, then this would be a definitely bug. In this case, please do this: http://wiki.covecube.com/StableBit_DrivePool_Error_Reports Create a ticket at "http://stablebit.com/Contact" and attach the zip file.

Competition isn't a bad thing Though, I swear I've seen the company before (Anvil AG). Though I can't place where, for the life of me. Wish them luck.

If the folder is definitely empty, then there shouldn't be any issue.

You're welcome. Glad to have been able to help. Though, I'd recommend trying it out (30 day fully featured trial), just to make sure it works the way you want before buying it.

Yup, WS2012E requires AD. And the registry thing wasn't a "finally". It was posted before it hit RTM. In part because of the reasons you've listed, as well as others. Otherwise, the statement about not letting you run another DC is completely wrong. It must be the first DC on the network, and the primary DC. But you sure as heck can have other DCs on the network without issue. As long as they aren't WS2012E also. But this is how SBS has always worked (and make no mistake, WS2012 *is* SBS, even if MSFT wants to deny/hide that fact). But other than those issues, domains are very nice, IMO. As for subsonic. it originally started out as music only. Til somebody hacked it to play video. And then that got rolled into the official code. But the music aspect is much more developed and works much better. The Video player relies on Flash, and i'm sure you can see why I say "more developed" for the music part.... There is a hack to use HTML5, but I've had issues with that remotely (I think my bandwidth is too low to reliably play it). But subsonic does use ffmpeg to transcode the video to flash (or webm if you use the html5 hack).

I run a similar setup to what you have (including Sickbeard and sabnzbd). I've run both DrivePool and Scanner on a fairly low powered system (Intel Pentium D E5200, 2.5GHz, 4GBs DDR2), along with Subsonic (uses ffmpeg to transcode), and PHP/mySQL. I've never had an issue with this setup. Ever. So it works pretty well with a well taxed CPU. But that Core i7 should be more than up to the tasks you've outlined. As for multiple pools, only if you really want to. DrivePool supports per folder duplication, so you could disable duplication on your TV folder, but enable it for movies, and music. Or however you want. Personally, I feel that adding additional pools just adds additional, unneeded complexity for me. Also, I'm guessing that you want to run Hyper-V for development and testing. Though, if you're running website's you could use the built in web server that is in Windows Server 2012 Essentials. May make things easier, I think. Especially if you install ARR and URL Rewrite for IIS. That way you could use the WSE's website to access(reverse proxy) Sickbeard and SabNZBd's webUI remotely (and securely). And as for joining the domain.... if HyperV was also joined to the domain, it would make remote management simple. As well, as the "Folder Redirection" feature of WSE. All in all, your server sounds very very similar to what I have set up. http://community.covecube.com/index.php?/topic/5-my-rackmount-server/&do=findComment&comment=13 Though, I run WSE on bare metal, and have transitioned it to Standard, so I can have the dashboard (and other "Essentials" features) as well as have Hyper-V (and initially WSUS). Otherwise, it sounds like we have very much the same ideas about how to set up our servers.

Very nice catch then. Because those can be very expensive! Okay, good. Just wanted to make sure. Sorry to hear that you had to take a saw to it to get it to fit. But yeah, those backplanes can be a very tight fit some times!

If you are directly accessing a file (such as through a media app like XBMC), then it should only spin up the specific disk(s) as DrivePool. If you're listing disk contents though, this may not be the case. Also, there are some options in Scanner to help idle the drive (put it into "Standby").

Yeah, Scanner has a number of features that make it easier to specifically identify (and even organize) your disks. Oh, and you can use Scanner to list the Location (good for multi-disk enclosures), and the bays in that location. Just right click on a disk, and select "Disk Settings" to change that info.

Sorry, I meant to post more. I've been a bit off the last couple days (been a bit sick), so my mind hasn't been 100%. But part of the reason I posted the link, is that it does a brilliant job of illustrating and demonstrating the UI. Which I figured would be helpful. Apparently, preemptively helpful too. Okay, one thing here: Balancing != Duplicating. Even if you have balancing off or disabled, it will still be duplicate the files. Or de-duplicate them as needed. Balancing controls *where* the files go, not how many copies there are. I just want to make sure that is clear (it can be a confusing difference). As for why it apparently removed the duplication, I'm not sure. It should detect the duplicates. I'd have to double check to see if it will set them to duplicated, but I beleive that it won't by default. And that would definitely cause the behavior that you saw.

Here is a good post to check out the balancing information: http://blog.covecube.com/2012/08/stablebit-drivepool-1-2-beta/ But basically, it shows the current layout in bars, and shows arrows on those bars for what it wants to balance it to. As for WHSv1. It depends on the system. If you had an "RTM" install, it did enable snapshots (shadow copies) of the pool, but the "PP1" install disk disabled that as it would sometimes have issues, and wasn't reliable. But if you installed the RTM version and updated, it didn't necessarily disable this setting (and it definitely didn't purge the existing ones.

The link has a pretty good explanation of this actually. Much more eloquently that I could put it. Duplication Space Optimizer Example Consider that you have 1 hard drive part of the pool, a 1 TB drive: You fill it up to capacity. Then you decide to add another hard drive to the pool, a 2 TB drive: Now that you have a 3 TB pool with 2 drives you decide to store some duplicated files on it. But in fact, with the current file distribution, you can only store 10 GB worth of duplicated files on the pool. That’s because every duplicated file needs to be on 2 separate physical hard drives, but there is only 10 GB free of the first drive. The solution is to move all the pooled files from the first drive onto the second drive. Which would end up looking like this: Now you can store 1 TB of duplicated files on the pool. This particular file placement optimization is the job of the Duplication Space Optimizer. DrivePool 1.2 – Duplication Space Optimizer It has no settings to tweak because it’s fully automatic. It calculates if your current file distribution is not the optimal layout for duplicated files, and figures out which files need to get moved where in order to optimize the pool for duplicated file placement. The duplication space optimizer handles the above scenario and many more that are much more complicated. It uses some proprietary algorithms to examine any number of hard drives with any combination of duplicated, un-duplicated and un-pooled files on them in order to compute an optimal balancing model. It balances files only when needed and only what’s needed. But basically, it's space that the pool can't or won't use, based on the rules enabled for the balancers, and the space available on the drives.

@Lee1978: Very nice setup. That Chenbro expander looks very nice. As for attaching images, use the "More Reply Options". It gives a much more "full" editor, and is easier to attach images.

It depends on the file distribution, how much free space each hard drive has, and the balancer settings for the pool. And the specific section that Doug is referring to is this: (from the http://blog.covecube.com/2012/08/stablebit-drivepool-1-2-beta/ post)

It is possible that it removed the duplicated files. You should be able to check that in the Dashboard. And you should be able to check the duplication status there as well. Another possibility (and more likely) is that Windows dumped the previous "Shadow Copies" (what runs "Previous Versions") from the drive, freeing up a good chunk of data.

It's originally meant for the dashboard (WHS2011, DrivePool v1.x), but it should apply here as well: http://wiki.covecube.com/StableBit_DrivePool_Dashboard_Freeze But yeah, a few people have complained about issues with the UI recently. The dump there will help Alex pinpoint the potential causes so he can fix them.