dsteinschneider

I used Veeam endpoint protection to restore the Win7 image. The motherboard broadcom 57XX gigabit ethernet on the motherboard would only run at 10MB for some reason on Win10. The AsMedia based SIL3132 driver was wonky. File transfers took a minute before the file would start to copy. One of the rare times the Windows 10 upgrade was horrible. Nothing but DrivePool and Scanner run on the machine so I'm going to stick with W7 until I hear about a solid Win10 compatible mutliplex capable SATA PCIe card.

I had a bunch of 1.5TB greens fail on me. They had the head parking issue which I figured out mid way. Haven't had a red fail yet. My drives are all installed in MediaSonic Probox's that have the fan set full time. Temperature is the enemy of HDD's. If you don't have Scanner you should check it out. It's gives a lot of helpful info on the drives and tests them regularly. I feel with Scanner running and DrivePool that I have a reliable JBOD storage system

Can anyone recommend a port mutliplier SATA PCIe card that works reliably with Windows 10 1903?

I put a new TP Link 1gb network card in just to eliminate that as a potential cause. It's something related to DrivePool. I copied a 5GB file to a share on the boot drive which has no DrivePool related folders. That file immediately copied at the speed expected. It's files on the DrivePool drive that take almost a minute to start copying. StableBit Scanner says all drives are healthy. Shoud I reinstall DrivePool? Thanks EDIT1: I'm realizing that it could be the MediaSonic HP1-SS3 Sata card drivers as the Pool drives are operating off two ProBoxes connected to it. EDIT2: Updated to MediaSonic 3.3.2.0 - didn't help EDIT3: The recent Amazon reviews of the HP1-SS3 are complaining about issues with Windows 10. On Windowss 7 this card solved all kinds of headaches I was having with Rosewill two port multiplex capable pcie card. I think I'm going to back to Windows 7

Apologize that I haven't begun researching this before asking the question but figured perhaps someone here might have encountered what is happening. I made an image backup of my DrivePool dedicated storage server computer running on Windows 7 and then ran the Windows 10 upgrade assistant just to see what would happen. The upgrade appeared to go fine and Drive Pool seems to be operating fine. The issue we're encountering is very slow transfer speeds from that machine to other computers on the network. Hopefully it's just the network driver Win10 used but wanted to see if this happened to anyone else? Would be very easy to revert to Win7 - should I?

Some type of permissions solution would logically be the right solution. With duplicated folders and scanner doing it's thing I'm not worried about hardware failure. It would be great if there was some way to make folders read-only even to the ransomware running with admin level permission.

I do small business IT support. I've seen my share of ransomware and was just thinking it would be hard to recover all the Austin City Limits I've recorded on WMC7. My main remedy for ransomware is backup but I don't really want to backup 20TB of things recorded from TV. I do have them duplicated so hardware failure is unlikely to be an issue. User error is possible though as is ransomware encryption. I was thinking that it would be neat if the duplicated copy in DrivePool was hidden from the copy that shows up in shares so it can't be encrypted by ransomware. What are people using for backing up large data stores like this? Thanks,

Thanks for the link - that would work fine - agree - who needs drive letters! Just a comment on drive "naming". I use a Brother label printer for each HDD. I name them WDC_8TB_01, WDC_8TB_02, SEA_8TB_01, SAM_4TB_01 etc. I also use the rename drive in Windows with the same name. That way I'm never in doubt what physical drive is the one, for instance, I'm removing.

The Probox just arrived. I had it out of the box and up and running with 4 drives in 10 minutes. It's amazing how simple it is to setup the second unit. I took out the Rosewill RC-219 eSATA card and installed the second Mediasonic eSATA card. The RC-219 can only multiplex one of the two ports so isn't the right card for a DrivePool box. Before I had the Mediasonic eSATA card I thought I would be limited to two external SATA enclosures (the Vostro 430 I'm using for DrivePool only has two PCIe slots). Now I can easily add another ProBox each time I need to add storage. As 8TB drives work (have one so far) I will be able to add 64 TB more without swapping out existing drives. (EDIT - that will be the max as I will run out of drive letters after 16 more drives!) This opens up the possibility of 4K movies. I figure using 64TB with duplication will be able to store well over 1000 4k movies using H265 mkv's at a bitrate that looks good on a 4k projector to a 110 inch screen viewed from 12 ft. Currently 1080 looks better than the local cineplex so I wouldn't go to 4k until prices are way down for the projectors and the media itself.

eSATA port multiplex question: I went ahead and ordered a second Mediasonic HF2-SU3S2 ProBox 4 Bay Hard Drive Enclosure with USB 3.0 & eSATA. I also ordered a second Mediasonic ProBox 2 Port External SATA 3 / III 6.0 card because I'm under the impression that only one of the two eSATA ports on these cards can be used for multiplex. It's only a $14 extra and I wouldn't mind having a spare on hand but will a single card multiplex both eSATA ports? (edit to answer my own question - apparently both ports can multiplex - card supports up to 8 drives)

Hi Gavin, I bought the Mediasonic 2 Port External SATA card back in April after you confirmed Drashna's original recommendation but never put it in until about 3 weeks ago (July). My 3 year old ProBox has been running flawlessly since - I'm just about to order a second one along with another Mediasonic card. I need a few of the drive docks I've been using for a backup project so I'm swapping those out. I find the drives run cooler in the ProBox (have the fan set to stay on the middle speed) than in drive docks. Doug

The Probox hasn't dropped off for two days but I ordered the Mediasonic eSATA card anyway

Thanks for confirming card and the thread. I just updated my Rosewill RC-219 64 bit driver to 15.0.6 from 15.03 and the conversions have been reading off it for over 24 hours so perhaps I've solved the issue.

Thanks for sharing your experience. Hopefully the right card will fix this issue. Is this the correct card?: Mediasonic ProBox 2 Port External SATA 3 / III 6.0 Gbps PCI Express Card HP1-SS3

I'm looking for recommendations for a PCIe eSATA card and 4 or 8 bay enclosure. Maybe someone might know why I'm having the issues described below: Back story: I have a Rosewill RC-219 connected to a MediaSonic Probox 4 drive enclosure. For 3 years I ran this card and enclosure in an Optiplex GX-620 running WHS 2011 and DrivePool. After about a year and a half of solid performance the Probox started to occasionally disappear. If I cycled its power it would come back without doing anything else. I replaced the Optiplex GX-620 with a Dell Vostro 430 running Windows 7 Pro 64. I also replaced the RC-219 with a new identical card. The Probox would disappear on the new setup a few times a week but I found if I rebooted every night the problem stopped with our normal use. Recently I started converting all our WTV mpeg2 recorded TV to h.264 MKV on a second machine that reads the movies from this box but saves them on its own drive. Under this use the Probox has been disappearing several times a day. I get an Event ID 9. I saw someone online who running WHS-2011 with the same PCIe SATA card who flashed a certain BIOS and driver and the above behavior stopped - I can't replicate their experience because the drivers they used are 32bit. BTW The 4 drives are 4 year old WD30 EZRX-00MMMB0 (Green 3TB). I ran wdidle3 to stop the heads from parking but a couple of the drives already had 250K plus load cycles before I figured that out.

Hi Chris, Thanks for reply. I am currently running WHS2011 on an old Pentium D 3.4Ghz Dell Optiplex 520 SFF (circa 2005) machine with a PCI gigabit NIC that delivers only half the speed of newer onboard NIC's When I play MKV files over 8GB on machines running WMC they stutter. The same MKV's play fine when placed on local drive of WMC machines. If you pause the movie for 10 seconds it will then play for about 10 minutes before it stutters again. The DrivePool drives are all 6GB WD Reds. I'm hoping the same eSATA docks and MediaSonic ProBox HF2-SU2S2 connected via PCIe eSATA cards running on an i5 based Optiplex will alleviate the bottleneck enough for the files to play smoothly. Doug

Two years later I'm ready to build a new "DrivePool server". Someone gave me a box that has mutliple PCIe slots, I5 processor and tons of RAM. As an MS action pack subscriber I can use any OS they make. I'm not backing up workstations and don't use the media streamer. I just need reliable, duplicated storage for WMC - movie folders, MKV's and photo files. I actually have a powerful Hyper-V server running lot's of VM's for domain server, SQL etc. From re-reading Chris' posts I'm inclined to install 2.x on a reinstall of WHS2011 (will be migrating from 1.3) The box already has Windows 7 Pro running on it. Perhaps I should just install 2.x onto it? Does it run better on Windows 8? It would only take a few minutes to install that. I don't worry too much about MS OS EOL but having a newer OS might have other benefits. Thanks, Doug

Agree, its great to be able turn a Windows 7 box into a JBOD storage server that's so easy to manage and performs so well

Hi Blueman, You've convinced me to upgrade from 1.x to 2 (along with Drashna's remark that 2.x is where the new developments will happen). You reminded me of something - I actually hate the slowness of the WHS dashboard. Plus it's Friday afternoon - what could be more fun than upgrading Drivepool? Doug

To britgeezer, I would just stay with 2.x. The fact that 1.x was a WHS plugin doesn't have any advantage except that the install is streamlined. The mechanics of Drive Pool are the same. I'm staying with 1.3 because it's stable and I wouldn't use the 2.x features. I will definitely go to 2.x or whatever DrivePool is current when I retire this WHS server in the future.

Yes I meant 2.1.1.561 of Drive Pool. I do have 2.5 Scanner installed also. I think I'll just hang with 1.3 until I upgrade hardware. Hate to send this thread in another direction but it does tie in - what's the most popular OS for DrivePool 2.x now that it's not tied to WHS?

Hello all. I'm running WHS 2011 with DrivePool 1.3.1.7541. It has an Sil 3114 connected to 4 external SATA docks and an Sil 3132 connected to a MediaSonic ProBox 4 bay. Everything is running great, the only changes I make are WHS2011 updates and occasionally I replace smaller capacity drives. Lately I've replaced several WD Greens with WD Red drives of higher capacity. I'm interested in any opinions on whether I should upgrade to 2.5. Will it still show up in the Home Server 2011 Dashboard or will I monitor from its own console? Thanks, Doug