Christopher (Drashna)

Couple of thoughts -
Multiple NICs are great if you know how to use them and don't buy crap. Intel PRO NICs never failed me, in hundreds of servers where I worked. Other brands may work OK, but the off-load from the CPU as implemented by Intel is very impressive. I never regret paying a little more for Intel. I have had some good luck at work with HP & Dell rebranded NICs, but easier to source drivers etc and know what I am getting with Intel at home.
 
The HP workstation [dual XEON] I use for my archives has a LSI controller on board, 8 ports. Beside 8 standard SATA ports. Great stuff.
 
 I left WHS due to single CPU support, and I was finding it restraining rather than liberating. The main reason I used it was for backups and drive pooling, once drivepool came out and I found it usable, I ditched WHS.
For me, the perfect OS is Windows 7, I don't have to fiddle with it, it just works, streaming without issues. No features I don't need. I'm using W7 Ultimate N on my archive server and W7 U on my current server, all x64.
When the archive server dies of old age I will evaluate the market, but right now I see some impressive small form factor motherboard / cpu combos that can do what very expensive hardware was needed to do five years ago. The electricity savings, lower CPU wattage [heat] mean modernizing could save a lot of money. Fans and air conditioning cost a lot of money to run 24 - 7.
 
  Just moving a large part of my "rarely accessed" storage to the archive server saved me a ton of money, if I'm not using it I turn it off. I have further sub-divided the archive into two pools on that server, archives and offliine, I have offline on a individual surge protector, it holds long term storage that I am not likely to need more than once or twice a month. The creation of an archive server was well worth having two drivepool and scanner licenses, they paid for themselves long ago. In a sense, it is a poor man's tiered storage, I got the idea when we were being ptiched new SAN units EMC, Dell etc. The big point was tiering your storage and using fast drives for current workload and data migrating to slow cheap drives when it wasn't be accessed anymore on a regular basis. The difference is I migrate manually.
 
Here are my current stats, not the impressive over 246 TB that other guy has, but right now 107TB [formatted] with 14.3 TB of free space across all three pools, if I got my math right.
 

 

 


As for "management" I just use RDP, built in and just works. If I had to manage hundreds of servers like I did at work, that's another story. The less cables the better for me. I don't live in a McMansion, pretty easy to walk over and see what's up if there is a problem. I don't run my server headless, I have a monitor and keyboard/trackball hooked up [monitor powered off] for local access.

What would be amazing would for you to create some software that can Create a drivepool using Stablebit clouddrive.
 
Just imagine
 
Gdrive
Amazon
dropbox
 
etc...
 
 
all pooled into one virtual drive...
 
 
drools

You are very welcome.
 
And we do apologize for not being able to get to this. However, we are a very small company, so getting to everything is impossible. We'd love to add the feature (though ReFS really shines with Storage Spaces, unfortunately), but there aren't enough hours in the day. 
 
And just FYI, I did bump this, as I've talked to Alex about this recently, and adding the ability to use the ReFS drives may work (though it will need extensive testing, which Alex doesn't have time for at the moment)

Oh wow Thank you.
 
I had totally forgotten about the ability to manually type in rules. That's definitely what I'm looking for.  Because my movie collection is much larger than the single 8TB hard drive I had hoped for example as a starting point to just have movies starting with  #-H
 
So in effect all movies from "2 Fast 2 Furious" through to "Fury" Not necessarily an all in one rule but perhaps something like (in my case)
\SERVERFOLDERS\COUCHPOTATO MOVIES\A*
\SERVERFOLDERS\COUCHPOTATO MOVIES\B*
Would this work and are those rules correct for movies beginning with A & B?
 
As for deleting stuff it never ever happens (I have some amazingly bad movies in my collection)
The nearest I get to deleting is when SickRage replaces a season of web-downloads with a Blu-Ray release that It finds or I  purchase.
This is the very reason that shows will not go on the archive drives at least until a show is ended/cancelled and the quality is at optimum. This way the archive drives will hopefully be "write once" which as you imply are their intended purpose.
 
I cannot believe I forgot about the ability to write rules.... I tend to see a feature in programs think to myself "I will never use it" and then forget it exists.​
 
Anyway thanks for the help as always Chris... If you could confirm (or correct) the rules above It would be appreciated.

Thanks for checking.
And yes, I read the changelog. You know me, I give every version a try 

I'm liking the netgear Nighthawk X6 triband (R8000)

The default files are there, because the install creates them.  They're sample files, basically.  
 
Though, if you do double check the link, we do explicitly mention removing the "default" from the file name.
http://wiki.covecube.com/StableBit_DrivePool_2.x_Advanced_Settings
 
But regardless, I'm glad to hear it's working properly now.

Okay, I've pinged Alex directly. 
 
As for the re-attaching issue, the latest build should fix that. (1.0.0.332)

Re long names.  Luckily the culprits were in one folder so I simply moved the folder to the root, renamed the offending files and moved the folder back again.
 
Yeah WinDirStat is one of the tools in my toolbox. Simple, clean, fast.
 
Re Windows 10.  I have a Win10 new bare metal install already done, just waiting for you guys to give the green light and I will move my data drives over (thus replacing the WHS11 instance I have been using for ages).
 
Edward

I use Emby on my local/wired devices and Plex on my tablets, phones, and when remote.
 
One of the things I like about Plex is the ability to "Sync". What this does is pre-transcode the file, then place the file locally on my tablet. I have a 64GB MicroSD card in my tablet, and if I select low quality, I can get a BUNCH of movies and TV shows on the tablet. And, great thing is, on a 7" tablet, the low setting looks perfect. 
 
You can install both Plex and Emby server applications on your server with no issues.

As Chris said, I use the USB port in the middle of my motherboard for the boot drive for ESXi. I use a 16gb drive, which is kind of overkill, but it was on the HCL. 

Windows 7 USB DVD Tool.
http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/windows-usb-dvd-download-tool
Select the ISO in question, and it will prep and copy the contents over for you. 
 
But yeah, once you've made it bootable, it's just a matter of copying the files over. 
 
 
And honestly, I'd recommend disabling the option in the boot order in BIOS/UEFI, if possible, and only using the boot menu to select it when needed. That way, it doesn't try booting from it when you don't want it to.

Thanks for the feedback Christopher.  As always great feedback and good transparency.  A model that other businesses could well emulate and benefit from.
 
My state of play now is that my pool is smaller (due to the pulled drive) and everything looks clean with all folders etc duplicated (save for some annoying long name files which I can't even kill or rename in DOS).
 
New WD Red 6tb drive is currently being scanned and once it comes up clean overnight I will add to the pool. Thanks for your tip about possible infant mortality.
 
I'm interested to see how the duplication balancing works out given the significant difference in drive sizes (pool will be comprised of 2*2tb, 1*3tb and 1*6tb). The pool will need to survive the 6tb drive going south.
 
One good thing about all of this is I discovered an old temporary backup of something which was about 900gb which I no longer need and once I killed that my pool free space increased by 1.8tb. The not needed files were lurking deep in a folder somewhere. <oops>.
 
 
 
Edward

I'd put it this way, if you don't know why you need multiple NICs, then you probably don't need them.

Anyone seeing this issue, please try the latest beta build:
  http://dl.covecube.com/CloudDriveWindows/beta/download/StableBit.CloudDrive_1.0.0.325_x64_BETA.exe http://dl.covecube.com/CloudDriveWindows/beta/download/StableBit.CloudDrive_1.0.0.325_x86_BETA.exe     Alex (the developer) has significantly overhauled the caching system, and it should work much better now. Additionally, when the cache drive is running out of space, it will throttle reads and writes, (and block rights if it gets too slow).   There are some other fixes (including to Amazon Cloud Drive handling of throttling codes, but it may have issues due to authorization issues).     However, we do recommend uninstalling the current version of CloudDrive, deleting the contents of "C:\Program Files\StableBit\CloudDrive" and then installing the new version (due to an installer issue we've identified recently). 

Duplication is the priority. The code regarding it tries to respect the balancing setttings (including file placement rules), but will disregard them if it's not able to find a valid drive to place the files.
This is intential, as duplication is literally the most important feature here. As it should be.
 
 
 
As for the drives, Yes, StableBit DrivePool is "aware" of the physical disks.  It will ACTIVELY avoid placing duplicated data on the same physical disk, if you have two partitions on the same drive added to the pool.  This way, you don't lose data because we "did something stupid" basically (what's the point of duplicating the data if both copies are on the same disk!!). 
This is also why we don't support Dynamic Disks. It makes the detection significantly more complex, and would adversely affect performance.  That's coupled with the wierd and random issues that Dynamic disks have, especially when moving to other systems (the "import foreign disks" thing can fail, and I've had it happen to me .... it's not fun, as you've basically just lost your data because of this). 
 
 
 
And hopefully, everything stays stable and sane! And it definitely sounds like the failing drives were the issue.

https://www.arqbackup.com/
 
 
ARQ going to the bottomless amazon drive, encrypted, compressed, deduped.  its not fancy at all, but it works very well with drivepool. and its got a 30 day trial. $70, but its not limited up to the trial end.
 
my only experience on advice is if you define a backup set, it goes through the motions, but doesnt actually do anything (assuming theres something to backup, there will be a total to do), delete the backup and make it again.  it simply may not work from the start, so you wont be any worse for it. do a small test first... I've only used it with the amazon cloud drive, and files arnt online emediatly after upload all the time.. so if you do a backup test, wait a while before you do the restore test.

Funny, all this time I had mine on 4GB because I thought that was the limit. I guess it was for WHS v1.
 
I have 6 NICs in my server, and currently 5 of them are in use. The 6th one will be soon, and another one (at least) within the next few months. Pretty easy with a 4 port NIC.
 
To go over these:
pfSense Firewall - one port for internet side and one for home side
Windows Server Essentials - One port for the home network, one for video surveillance cameras
Windows 7 - One port for home network
 
All "machines" in VMWare.
 
Soon I'll be spinning off a DMZ with a dedicated web server and some other junk, I need to hook up the management port for the motherboard, and I want to separate out the management port for VMWare. So that's 3 more NICs.

I did 2 drives with drive benders 'remove' drive.. a week later, changed the whole set in one go and am currently moving from the drivebender subdirectories on each drive into the drivepool in a propper file copy.
It will still take a week to do, but importing the full disks into drivebender had many file protection problems, and probably long name problems, the copying, so far, hasnt. i'm getting about 2 TB a day this way.
 
I am impressed how robust drivepool is, in my fidling with usb lines I've knocked drives off a few times and it put itself back in working shape very quickly.
 
win 7, 7 drives, 12 TB.

The local cache uses "sparse files".  These files can take up a very large space, or none at all, and they'll still report the same size.
This is how part of how we keep track of what chunks are used where, etc.
 
And if you right click on the file/folder, and check properties, you'll notice that it will report the size and size on disk, and these should be very different values. In fact, the "size on disk" should be closer to the local cache size.
 
However, the cache size isn't a hard limit for what can be stored on the disk.  We grow past that in the case that the cache is filled up completely.  
 
And if the cache is 'overfilled', as it uploads the data, it will reduce the size down until it hits the specified cache size. 
 
 
 
As for the deadlock issue, we are looking into this issue, as it is definitely a serious one. However, it is a very complicated issue, so we don't have a quick fix (we want to fix it properly, rather than half-assing it).

Just done exactly this. ​
 
Remove (disconnect) the pool drives.
 
Install the New OS
 
Install Drivepool
 
Connect the disks
 
Like Magic the pool will be there for you.
 
It really is this simple.

Upgrade complete. So far so good, drivepool is working.

Sounds good standing by to stand by for win 10 action

Yes.
 
I've done this on several production machines already (my NVR/blueiris box, specifically), and have had no issues with it, at all. 
 
Windows 10 is supposed to be really good about driver support, so there may not be any issues. But compiling with the Windows 10 SDK means that we can be sure of that, and it may reduce the driver's resource usage on Windows 10, and could make it faster when dealing with files.  There may also be new API's to use that are better.  
 
 
You're probably safe, but I'd still hold off just in case.  Besides, we have a full year to perform the upgrade. So there is no rush.

You are very welcome.
 
 
"As soon as possible".
 
Unfortunately, the SDK didn't "drop" until today as well, so we've not been able to do anything, with regards to supporting Windows 10.