Christopher (Drashna)

I also do the fly by the seat of my pants method..Everything ctitical is backed up three fold or more... If its a few TB of movies then c'est la vie.
This approach may change though when the 8TB drives come down in price a little more.
 
As for DrivePool itself... well (as another Plex user), the best endorsement I can give is that I have been using it since the very early beta stages. 
As someone who used to be extremely active on here I just don't have the time any more. BUT I don't need to be because it just works!!!
Im well over two years of not having touched my server (windows updates aside) in fact I actually feel guilty that I guess I just take DrivePool for granted. It sits there silently in the notification area doing its stuff. 

Hi all,
 
Just wondering if anyone is using the new Seagate Archive drives yet?
 
The 8TB options are extremely competitively priced here in Aus (were down to 35c/GB other day). The drives certainly have their limitations however, mainly that their sustained write speeds are horrendous. They have a cache which will work very well up to 20GB, then slowly degrade till ~80GB or so where it becomes atrociously slow; this is just the nature of the SMR technology being used in a consumer grade product. I personally have no qualms with this. Yes, it will take forever to copy to initially, and would be quite frustrating for RAID due to the rebuild times.
 
However for someone who typically does a one time write and multiple read (ie WORM), they are fantastic value drives and aside from the initial population this issue would likely rarely occur. I usually only copy over batches of 10-20GB files at a time, normally batches off the DSLR.
 
Looking at grabbing 2-3, but currently only have the currency for 1, so looking to combine with my existing WD greens for the time being.
 
What I am wondering though, is would any of this interact strangely with Drivepool? Are there any limitations I should be aware of or need to address? In particular mixing the archive and green drives in a pool? I pressume the green drives will be limited somewhat by the archive drives if I chew through the archive drives cache.
 
Anyways, any opinions welcome, just works out a crapload cheaper than purchasing WD red drives here in Aus.
 
 
Cheers,
Luke

Hey Guys -- Sorry to bail on this thread so long ago. After I read it Mr. Drashna got me thinking.... 
 
Let's say this:  It appears that it's a bad idea to have every piece of network hardware in the house(s) on battery back-ups --particularly when it's cheap hardware.   
 
The power in the neighborhood hasn't gone out for a significant amount of time which meant I had several "junk/dumb" GB switches (meaning Trendnet, TP-Link and the like.) that haven't been power cycled in many, many months.  
 
So.....I'm not sure which switch/router was the problem but after power cycling all of them (and doing nothing else) everything basically matches your guesstimates above.
 
So with this system now up, running & stable I'm about to begin a 4224 build.  Once that's up and running I can revisit the 4220 box and clean up a few loose ends that are bugging me..but at this point it's 100% stable.
 
With my new 4224 build (Meant to separate my media server from my storage server)  I can do things a bit more slowly and concentrate on a few key points. 
 
Originally I was just going to upgrade the motherboard in the 4220 and call it a day but at this point I can't afford any significant downtime and wanted to spend time tweaking (specifically the network side of things) so I decided a totally new build was in order and began collecting all the pieces which have mostly arrived.
 
I'm sure you don't remember me Drashna but you came to my rescue a couple times (On two separate Sundays no less) during the 4220 build which was my first "serious" experience with DrivePool & Highpoint controllers... I sincerely appreciate it.
 
~RF
 
 

RFOneWatt,
 
I just have to know.  What are you using all that space for??  Video?

I'd like to start by saying I've been using DrivePool+Scanner for a while now, and they are seriously awesome. Everything WHS should have been. So much thanks for that.
 
I only use it for home use but the one thing I'm currently lacking is an offsite backup. That's where CloudDrive comes into play for me. Being able to use multiple cloud providers with DrivePool is really powerful. Before now I wouldn't have considered it as I don't want to trust the cloud with my private files, but the encryption part of CloudDrive fixes that.
 
So basically my use case is to pool as many providers as possible, and backup only the most essential data. Speed isn't important to me.
 
On to my first experience. I installed CloudDrive and hooked up dropbox, amazon and hit a wall with microsoft onedrive. I eventually found the forum post (grateful it was stickied) and enabled it. I realise that their service is poop, but would be nice to be able to enable in the UI with appropriate warnings.
 
I put about 10mb of test data in all of the providers and found that they all generated lots of errors and didn't seem to get anything uploaded. Eventually worked out by reading through the forums that it's probably because my connection isn't fast enough (8mbit down, <1mbit up). After massively increasing most of the timeouts, reducing the threads to 1 and destroying/re-creating the drives with 128k chunks instead of the default 1mb I managed to get it stable.
 
What would be cool is if you had a benchmarking feature in the app, a bit like scanner's burst test. Then you could potentially have an "autodetect" settings feature, as finding and editing a config isn't the most user friendly first experience. You could also warn the user that their connection is less than optimal.
 
The only other thing I messed up was that I assumed that CloudDrive was encrypted by default. Would I be right in thinking that with encryption unticked, the chunks in the cloud would be readable somehow? I couldn't find a way to enable encryption on my cloud drives after I had made them, so in the end deleted them and created them again.
 
It would definitely be cool to have an overview panel of all of the connected drives. At the moment you have to hop through all the tabs to see what, if anything, is going on.
 
Anyway hope this feedback is helpful, keep up the fantastic work.
 
 
Max

Here is my configuration along with a custom built rack.
 
Server
iStarUSA D-412S3-MATX 4U Rackmount microATX Server Chassis
Intel Core i7-3770K Ivy Bridge 3.5GHz (3.9GHz Turbo) LGA 1155 77W Quad-Core
Intel Media DQ77MK Desktop MB, Intel Q77 Express Chipset, w/TPM
Corsair Vengeance LP 32GB (4 x 8GB) 240-Pin SDRAM DDR3 1600 (PC3 12800)
Intel 80GB 330 Series Maple Crest SSD
Antec EarthWatts Green EA-380D, 380W
Noctua Ultra Silent CPU Cooler Cooling NH-U9B SE2
3x Noctua NF-R8 PWM 80mm Case Fan
LSI 9200-8e SASController Card, 2 x SFF-8088 mini-SAS External Connectors, JBOD only
Windows Server Essentials 2012 R2
Stablebit DrivePool v2.1.1.561
Stablebit Scanner v2.5.1.3062
IHomeServer v3.1.76.0 (iTunes 12.1.2.27) feeding 2x AppleTV 3
Crashplan
 
 
Array
NORCO DS-24E 24-3.5" JBOD Enclosure
 
Pooled Drives - 59.2TB
2x 8TB Seagate Archive HDD
1x 6.0TB WD Red
1x 4.0TB WD Red
7x 3.0TB WD Red
5x 2.0TB WD Green
1x 2.5TB WD Green
3x 1.5TB Seagate
1x 1TB WD Green
Non-Pooled drive
1x 1TB WD Green - OS Backup drive
 
UTM
ARK IPC-1.5U1525 Black 1U Rackmount Server Case
Intel S1200KP Mini ITX Server Motherboard LGA 1155 Intel C206 BIOS
Intel Core i3-2120T Sandy Bridge 2.6GHz, 35W Dual-Core
Stock Intel cooler
Noctua 60x25mm A-Series Blades with AAO Frame, SSO2 Bearing Premium Fan
G.SKILL Ripjaws X Series 16GB (2 x 8GB) 240-Pin SDRAM DDR3 1600 (PC3 12800)
Intel 60GB 330 Series Maple Crest SSD
100gb 2.5 HD
Intel Dual Port Pro 1000 PCIe NIC
picoPSU-160-XT, 160w output, 12v input DC-DC Power Supply
Ubiquiti Networks Unifi UAP-Pro Enterprise Dual Band AP
Untangle v11.2
 
Dell PowerConnect 2824 24port GB managed switch
Dell PowerConnect 2724 24port GB managed switch
 
VMware ESXi 5.5 Home Lab server
ARK 1U125 Black 1U Rackmount server case
Supermicro A1SAi-2750 mini ITX MB
Supermicro PWS-203-1h 200W 80 Plus Gold
Intel Atom C2750 2.4GHz Avoton 8 core CPU
32gb Kingston DDR3 1600 ECC memory
LeefSupra 16gb USB 3.0 flash drive
1x 480gb Intel S3500 SSD
2x 240gb Seagate 600 Pro SSD (200gb)
1x 128gb Samsung 810 SSD (cache)
1x 64gb Intel 330 SSD (cache)
 
APC Smart UPS SMT1500RM2U 1000W 2U rackmount
 
 
Ctopher

Someone has to have it, right?
 
How about we start with the largest pool of the members that participate here?
 
I'm taking an uneducated guess that theoretically Drivepool should scale indefinitely (or to some insane limitation imposed by the O/S, hardware or something else) however we all know the real world is where it's at, yes?
 
I'm sure I'm nowhere near the largest but I've maxed out my Norco 4220, and then some.
 
It's NOW time to start building the successor! 
 

 
 
 
Would love to see what everybody else has going on!
 
~RF
 
 

im definitely buying five

Well I'm in europe... and the Euromillions lottery is up to £95m this week...  and thats lump sum and tax free

The "File Placement Rules" feature can do this, actually. 
It may require extensive micromanagement, depending on how your pool is setup, but the UI should allow you to easily do this.
http://stablebit.com/Support/DrivePool/2.X/Manual?Section=File%20Placement
 
As for fragmentation, you can defragment the disks in the pool, without any issues.
 
 
 
So that is a drive does fail, you can be certain that you have all of the contents of a particular folder (or none at all). 
 
 
I've been there (not blue ray rips, but re-encoded files), and it sucks.  It may be worth investing in enough drives to duplicate everything.

I would be very interested in a product called "Stablebit Filesafe" !

Thank you, Christopher!  The 'shotgun' effect is exactly what I was trying to describe.  
 
Again, it's amazing the level of support and "don't feel like you're looking down" on people that you all provide here.  On the FreeNAS forums and some other places, it's really very hostile.  That alone gives you a huge leg-up, plus having a really polished product.  I'll be ordering the combo-pack tomorrow!
 
Mike

We're definitely using the new API.
However, in regards to throttling, but API's seem to be throttled.
 
And i you want to see just how badly, check out the dev site:
https://dev.onedrive.com/README.htm
Check the bottom part out, where it says "Throttling".
It delays you for 3600 seconds (one hour)! That's..... horrendous. 

Christopher,
Alex found that software (not sure what) was overwriting the GPT.  Alex ultimately made the physical disk read only so that it will not be overwritten.  Currently, the pool is functioning as designed.  Therefore, the issue appears to be resolved.
 
 
Thanks,
Todd

I ordered the motherboard and CPU yesterday. I decided to bump up the CPU to a Xeon E5-2620V3 2.4ghz processor $430.00. It has hyper threading and a few other goodies that the 1.9ghz Xeon does not have. Stupid CPU costs more than the motherboard! Newegg was out of memory, so I'll have to get it elsewhere. While I'm at it I might as well get a SATA III SSD because I have a 256gig SATA II SSD for the OS drive now. What I paid for my current SSD I can get one with double the capacity and faster for a little less money then what I originally paid!
 
Sigh... :-)

Honestly, it depends on how you want to do it.
 
If you have the space available, you can remove the drive you want to replace first. 
 
But you could absolutely add the new drive, and then remove the smaller drive from the pool afterwards.
 
 
 
However, what I recommend here:
Remove the drive from the pool. Use the "Duplicate files later" option. This will remove the drive quickly, as it's leaving the duplicates on the drive. After the disk is removed, it will recheck the duplication status of the pool, and reduplicate files as needed.
Before it starts doing that, physically remove the "old" drive, and connect the larger drive.
This way, when it starts duplicating the data, it will use the new drive most likely. This will minimize the reshuffling of the files on the pool.

Well, PCI-X is still pretty darn fast, so either way, you should be fine!
 
And to make sure, I recommend the IR (RAID) firmware over the IT (passthrough/HBA) firmware. Both can do passthrough, but the IR seems to behave better. Besides, extra options are great.
 
 
As for Intel SAS Expander card, great catch! And yeah, I've only been able to find them for $200 or so. So finding one for $60 is fantastic! (if you see another, link me!)
 
 
As for the BSOD, it indicates a CLOCK_WATCHDOG_TIMEOUT bug check. This indicates that an expected clock interrupt on a secondary processor, in a multi-processor system, was not received within the allocated interval.
https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff557211(VS.85).aspx
As for the hotfix, it may be OS specific. And hotfixes aren't usually pushed through Windows Update. They're usually option installs offered to fix specific issues.
This is the hotfix you're referring to:
https://support2.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;975530
And if you check lower down on the page, there are a couple of registry tweaks that you can try, and see if it works.
 
 
 
If it happens again, set the dump to us:
http://wiki.covecube.com/StableBit_DrivePool_System_Crashes

Well, if it is an educational excersize only then I would opt for the WS10 Tech release. I have that installed on an old machine for that purpose as preperation for the migration from WHS2011 sometime in the early 2020's

Yes it is for WHS 2011. Thanks for the link. I'll save that for future refernce. Everything is back up and running now. I was able to recreate the shares through the dash board. All the shares are where they where before WHS freaked out. I also ordered some AOC-SAT2-MV8 cards for spares. I found a great deal on them on EBay. $35 each for two new cards.
 
Well I'm happy that things are back to normal. I need to pick up some more 6TB drives over the next couple of weeks. Gotta replace one 2TB drive that has a some bad blocks and a couple other 2TB drives that Scanner says I should consider replacing. Funny thing is I've had the most problems with WD 2TB drives. The WD 1TB drives I have installed in the pool I've never had a problem with and they are older drives.
 
At least I have access to my music and movies and performance is snappy.

Yep, it really is magical.

I believe my wife thinks we are running a data center sometimes. I've made a lot of changes recently and everything is a mess, but I have it on my list of things to do to clean up the closet this weekend. When I do, I'll get some pictures and put them up. 

pclausen, would you be willing to detail out your hardware?  I'm just curious about how you have that many drives connected, cards/connectivity type used, if you'd do things differently a second time around, etc.
 
Thanks in advance
 

Which would not help you against a number of things. I would recommend offsite backups for important data (all data actually to the extent possible).

For what it's worth, I run BI on the same "server" as the rest of my stuff. But, what I've done is set up ESXi, and BI is on a separate VM, and each of my VMs have a dedicated NIC. I've only given it two cores and 4GB of RAM, and works just fine at about 50% utilization under full load. Also, it stores to a separate pair of drives than the rest of my machines. This way, no matter what BI does, it never affects the rest of my system. This will keep you from needing to have a separate system just for BI. I'm sure it work just fine under HyperV if you wanted to go that way.
 
My BI implementation utilizes 7 3MP cameras and two 1.2MP cameras. The 7 3MP are hardwired using PoE, the two 1.2's are wifi, all configured for direct to disk. All cameras come into a different switch on a different IP range, and as I said a separate dedicated NIC. The other VMs I have truly have no clue that the BI machine is even there. The same server is running WSE2012, so it backs up my workstations on the local LAN NIC, and it is also my IIS server for a few websites.
 
I just checked power consumption on my server - 77 watts. 6 hard drives, Xeon E3-1246v3, Intel server motherboard, etc. I am using a Seasonic gold plus power supply, that may help a little bit.

Another advantage of Drivepool is that if you have a specific folder that you want extra protection for, like pictures, you can set it to duplicate across more than just two drives. So you could have three copies if you wanted.