Christopher (Drashna)

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.

"Ping" works as Shane describes. But "Burst Test" also works, though it keeps the activity constant until you stop the test. Either are a great way to identify disks. (And burst test is a good way to test your controller, and to see what the max speed on that disk/controller is too).

@Dane: I'm jealous! I really do need to get a rack for my hardware. And that looks very nice. Though, considering I don't really have a huge budget at the moment, I may end up getting some "ikea racks". Though, alex still needs to post his UPS battery hack. @DrParis: That's a very nice case for airflow, and a lot of HDD space. I have a couple of friends with the older versions of that case. Oh, and I'd recommend getting some backplanes later no for that case. So you can cram more drives in. Such as these: http://www.icydock.com/goods.php?id=48

@danfer and @airshark: The "CoveFs_OpenByFileId" is enabled by default on the 1.3.x RC version, but disabled by default on the 2.x beta version. @airshark: if you restarted the server, that would be what fixed it. Though, I suspect that restarting the service for DrivePool would work as well. So out of curiosity, which did you do? And there isn't a firm release date yet. Alex would rather have it stable, and all the bugs (or as many as he can find) squashed before putting the "Stable" label on to any version of the product. However, the driver for both hasn't changed significantly in a while (IIRC), so that part should be good.

Personally, I use the "Disk Space Equalizer" setting. I don't mind my disks being spun up all the time. Namely because my server is fairly active (I download a lot and share my collection with friends via Subsonic). As for the Ordered File Placement plug-in, it will fill each disk to the threshold (90% by default), and then move on to the next disk. If you have duplication enabled, it will fill that second disk as well, in the same way. And Yes, if one fills, it would skip the next disk (as it won't let you have two copies of the same file on the same disk).

@Danfer: the setting required for NFS isn't enabled by default in DrivePool v2. You'll need to manually enable that. Set the "CoveFs_OpenByFileId" value to true: http://wiki.covecube.com/StableBit_DrivePool_Advanced_Settings Then it should work. Airshark: Try rebooting the system. In my VM, sometimes "something" would crash or happen and DrivePool would lose the NFS sharing tab. Until I rebooted. If you reboot and that still doesn't work, let us know.

It doesn't immediately remeasure data, so it can take a bit, unless you start it manually. To start it manually, hit the little arrow near the pool's pie charge (bottom right corner of that section), and there is a "Re-measure" entry. Hit that. It may take a while depending on what is in the pool, but after that, it should get it.

You mean like iSCSI volume support? Or like network shares?

If that's the case, then it would definitely be a gfx card issue (at least for my issue). Thanks.

I think it's missing some other feature in the CPUs architecture. Other than that, I can't really find any information about that it either. It is frustrating.

"Other" stuff can be stuff on those HDDs that are outside of the pool. As well as "Shadow Copies" (which are invisible but are counted): From Alex's recent blog post