Christopher (Drashna)

16i, 16e, "close enough".   
The big part being the number of ports. 
And checking the page: https://www.broadcom.com/products/storage/host-bus-adapters/sas-9202-16e#specifications
Yeah, it'st he same controller (LSI SAS 2008).
So it may be a good idea to use the P19 firmware then.

Quick update:
I went with the LSI 16e that you suggested @nauip, so thanks for that.  Couldn't find any other options that were as robust or had as much capacity without taking a large leap in cost (more than double).  The card already arrived (OEM version), and was in immaculate condition - clearly never opened or handled.  It's shiny, new, properly flashed and humming along in the server now.  Having seen it myself, I'm less worried about manufacture date.
Mini-SAS cables are on the way, and I've already picked up the 7x8TB drives (in USB enclosures) for shucking later.  The drives are being tested by Stablebit Scanner as we speak (of course!).  Go figure - the very first unit ended up having controller/sector issues, so that's being returned today.
Small side note on the USB enclosures:  they have horrible heat dissipation characteristics.  Stablebit Scanner was able to push them to 50c within 20 minutes, at which point it suspended surface tests to throttle heat (as it should).  The drives sat forever and didn't cool off more than 2c, until I put them on top of case fans blowing up.  After that, I was able to resume the surface scans at full speed, with a temp range of ~30-38c thereafter.  I'm absolutely certain this is why they have lower warranty periods, simply because the drives in off-the-shelf USB enclosures are going to run hotter, and even thermally throttle on large jobs (which I never even suspected).  The catch-22 is that they are 8TB drives, and typically would handle larger jobs...  so they are poorly engineered, and should come with internal fans.
I think I'm going to try to setup the new Pool drives on the old server and transfer data across locally between the two pools, then build the WSE 2016 server on top of a bare-metal Hyper-V 2016 install before adding the new Pool back in.  The thought of transferring >10TB of data on a 1Gbit network makes my skin crawl.  

Indeed, that was my typo, guess I should not ask questions after my shift until I've had a java recharge.
Thanks for all the information. I'm a regular user of rclone and know that it can be used with multiple devices at the same time, encryption or no, and was just surprised that CloudDrive is not the same way. I wonder if I can add a rclone mount to a DrivePool scheme, guess it is time to google-fu.

From what I've seen, no, it hasn't.  Had a ticket about this recently, actually. P19 or P15 seem to be the go to firmware versions for stability.

Mostly just ask.  
 

Mostly just ask.  
 

Windows 7 shouldn't be natively creating the thumbs.db files though.  The last Windows OS to do that and rely on them was Windows XP.  A bunch of helpful information on thumbnails in Windows is here:  https://www.ghacks.net/2014/03/12/thumbnail-cache-files-windows/  Starting with Vista, they were moved to a central location for Windows management:  %userprofile%\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows\Explorer\thumbcache_xxx.db
If they are being re-created on your system PetaBytes, I'm not sure why.  I triple-checked my Windows 7 Ultimate x64 media server, and none of the movie/picture folders have the files in them (visible OR hidden).
This procedure (and a reboot after) might help your issue:  https://www.sitepoint.com/switch-off-thumbs-db-in-windows/
I still maintain a 3rd party utility like Icaros will help the most.  What it does (in a nutshell) is maintain it's own cache of thumbnails, so that *if* Windows loses them for a folder, Icaros will supply them back to Windows instead of it having to re-generate them slowly.

SAS2 is EOL, actually.  That's why we're seeing a lot of SAS2 hardware for super cheap.  SAS3 is the current standard, and the SFF connectors are not compatible. 

Well, I'd still recommend those cards.   Between one of them and the motherboard, that should get you 10-12 ports that you can use. 
And while I know that you don't want to dump a bunch of money into it.... keep in mind that if you get a cheap consumer card .... you may end up doing so anyways, as they may have issues and you may end up getting something like this ANYWAYS. 
As for SAS Expanders ... wow, they've dropped in price:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0042NLUVE/
 

Sorry to be negative, but I doubt if 3198 fixed it. I uninstalled 3191, copied my previous folders for 3062 back in place and reinstalled 3062:  all disk settings and data were then back to normal. Then I went directly to 3204, since that has the new settings backup and restore feature, bypassing 3198. The result was that no settings were retained (except for 1 of 11 disks, oddly) and all disks needed to be scanned for the first time.
(This time, however, I did a printscreen of my names & locations, and re-entered everything into 3204. I'll let Scanner rescan everything and just move on to the future.)

...just to chime in here...remember that expanders have firmware too.
I am running 1x M1015 + 1x RES2SV240 in my 24bay rig for 5+ years now....I remember that there was a firmware update for my expander that improved stability with S-ATA drives (which is the standard usecase for the majority of the semi-pro users here, I think).
Upgrading the firmware could be done with the same utility as for the HBA, as far as I remember...instructions were in the firmware readme
Edit: here's a linbk for a howto: https://lime-technology.com/forums/topic/24075-solved-flashing-firmware-to-an-intel-res2xxxxx-expander-with-your-9211-8i-hba/?tab=comments#comment-218471
regards,
Fred

I think that this has been asked for before. 
 
But just in case:
https://stablebit.com/Admin/IssueAnalysis/27889
And extending the "Disk Usage Limiter" balancer would be an easy option, I think. 
 
Also, are you experienced with C# programming?  If not, no worries.  If so, let me know, as there is source for building balancer plugins. 

Also, you may want to check out the newest beta.
http://dl.covecube.com/ScannerWindows/beta/download/StableBit.Scanner_2.5.4.3204_BETA.exe
 

Also, you may want to check out the newest beta.
http://dl.covecube.com/ScannerWindows/beta/download/StableBit.Scanner_2.5.4.3204_BETA.exe
 

Thank you for the kind words! 
And we're glad to hear it! 
And every customer (and potential customer) should be valued!  They are why we are successful! 

Yeah. But there are always variations on how the files are placed, and such.  As well as metadata that you don't see. 
Also .... if you're using reparse points, and a LOT of them, .... that may be why too. 
Depends on the usage, but yeah, it can help with I/O load, as it may spread it out between the disks better. 
And the Read Striping feature helps to optimize the reads, too. 
Duplicated data is written out to all destination disks.  So if you're using the SSD Optimizer balancer, and duplication, then you need two SSDs, or the second copy is written out to an "archive" drive, and may/will slow down the write speeds.    having 2x SSDs, (or ... a number of SSDs equal to the highest level of duplication that you're using) means that both/all copies are written out to the SSD drives, and not the archive drives. 
Real time duplication can be disabled, but that means that new files won't be protected by duplication for up to 24 hours! 

Either would be fine, actually.
I've used both configurations, and neither has any issues. 
 
If you go this way, you only need to hook up a single cable to the expander.  You don't need both cables connected.
You mean HighPoint card?  *shudders*.  No.
 
 
My personally recommendation is to go with the single controller and the SAS expander.  It will get you the most drives connected. 

I think you'd need to format the volume, unfortunately. 

You'll want to use File Placement Rules on folders to ensure they stay on specific drives.  Balancing settings, File Placement tab, Folders tab.
https://stablebit.com/Support/DrivePool/2.X/Manual?Section=File Placement
If your files are currently spread out over multiple disks (per folder) you will want to setup the desired rules, then initiate a re-balance to have it move them into place.

Suggestion:  pick up a copy of PingPlotter, enter in googleapis.com, set it for 5 or 10 second resolution, then run it.  You get 14 days on the Standard/Pro edition to collect unlimited samples, and can switch to the free edition after that.  See what kind of reliability you get over 24/48 hours, and what kind of pings you get on each hop.  It might indicate any problems along the route, or if your connection drops out entirely.  Attached a sample plot on my VPN connection to this post so you can see the kind of info you get from it.
You can always just run a ping test from a command prompt, but lose detail on each hop that way.
I used this method when proving to my ISP that there were connection issues.  It helped me to successfully get the FCC involved and force the ISP to fix their hardware.
Edit:  I left mine running a little while after making this post, and the IP resolution changed on-the-fly.  That's DNS and/or Google doing it, not me.  Really nice info you can get on packets and hops this way.
 

This may be relevant:
But basically, the "size" and "size on disk" are often not the same.
If you have a lot of small files on the disk, then this can happen. Especially if you formatted the disks with different "allocation unit" sizes.
 

Okay, good news everyone.
Alex was able to reproduce this issue, and we may have a fix.  
http://dl.covecube.com/ScannerWindows/beta/download/StableBit.Scanner_2.5.4.3198_BETA.exe
 

Okay, good news everyone.
Alex was able to reproduce this issue, and we may have a fix.  
http://dl.covecube.com/ScannerWindows/beta/download/StableBit.Scanner_2.5.4.3198_BETA.exe
 

Jaga is correct here. 
And if it's not storing the settings at all, then there is another issue here, and ... resetting the settings manually may fix the issue:
http://wiki.covecube.com/StableBit_Scanner_Q4200749
Eg, delete the entire "C:\ProgramData\StableBit Scanner" folder, and restart the service.

I checked one more way with your link. Here is what I found out.
Thank you for letting me know about this.