JCMarsh

Nah, not worried about unraid eating my data. Bit-rot is a real problem with most storage technologies and systems, not just unraid. There are various ways to guard agains bit-rot. Keeping multiple copies is one way, IF those copies are regularly compared. I appreciated the data availaibility that drivepool provided. I kept everything pool duplicated x2, and never "lost" any files that I know of, but I did still have file corruption happen, ruining several photos (that I know of). That said, it still didn't protect me from bit-rot. I can appreciate the protection that parity provides, as well. It'll be a long game to figure out which one wins, but I'm bettting Microsoft breaks off and falls into the pacific ocean before I lose data due to array trouble...... The new setup is running well. Today I installed a new 12TB red plus, which is settling in as the data disk now paired with the 12TB DC520 as parity disk. Rebuild should be done sometime tonight. After this, I will keep it as a 2-drive, 12TB array behind a 2-disk, 1TB cache pool. I don't qualify as a data hoarder, as I have barely more than 2TB on-hand after years of collecting music and movies, and I don't even use any "arrrs", so this 2-disk setup should serve us well. The vast majority of data on my array is media, so it's replaceable, really. All "can't lose" files are replicated with syncthing between my laptops and desktop, as well as an archive of the same on the array. Wow, people move from unraid to windows? I can't imagine it. Years ago when I was still using Windows Home Server 2011 I ran a trial of unraid and really liked it. I didn't need it then but figured I'd move to that with my next homeserver build. I never did. When Windows 7 (and server 08r2, whs2011) support ended, I lazily rolled right on over to Windows 10. It worked okay like that, so I let 'er eat until recently, when it seemed the dang thing was starting to implode. Windows' UI was getting slow, DrivePool might open in a minute, syncthing required some manual tending here and there, Plex wasn't the reliable stalwart it had always been... it's health wasn't looking good. In years past I'd have DBAN'd the boot disk and start fresh with a clean install, but I just couldn't put myself through that again. I'll give unraid a fair shake and if I have to leave unraid for any reason I will definitely be on a GNU/Linux system. If it gets bad I guess I'll have to learn ceph and configure my own storage solution.

Removed the DC520 today, that went fine. Then it dropped the same disk (M1EG), but it came back after a reboot. I don't know what the issue is, but apparently DP is giving a two-fer deal on removing 1 drive from the pool. Well, sort of... It's absolutely amazing that ANYTHING has ever functioned on windows, but I can't continue to use a storage system and OS that are threatening my data. I left windows for ubuntu last year on my desktop and laptop, and the homeserver was my last windows machine. Once my array is up I'm moving everything over to unraid and have a few beers while I DBAN the old windows boot disk...

I did open a support ticket. Drashna suggested the drivepool troubleshooter and reset drivepool to defaults. I also marked the nvme boot drive dirty and rebooted. After that, Disk Manager showed all three disks correctly, but DrivePool showed one pool disk as a non-pooled disk. DrivePool eventually finished duplication this morning, and I started re-enabling services after removing and making a new L2 cache. It's working now as a 2-disk pool. I'm going to wait until BackBlaze is finished before doing anything else with DrivePool, but may re-add the excluded disk when it's done. At least I have the pulled WD80EFZZ drives if I need to replicate everything before burning the homeserver down and starting over....

My DrivePool was: 1x DC520 12TB 2x WD80EFBX 8TB (0BUK and MIEG) 1x WD80EFZZ 8TB (HDRK) One disk (HDRK) was slower than the others and I wanted to repurpose it in another machine, so last night I removed it from the pool. This should have left me a pool consisting of the two WD80EFBX and the DC520. It didn't turn out that way this morning.... This morning I verified there was no disk activity, and DrivePool showed the old disk (HDRK) was available to add, so I shut down and removed the old disk. Boot back up and now DrivePool is complaining that a disk (0BUK) that hasn't been removed is missing. Funny thing is, it shows said disk TWICE, but only one instance of it as missing. Another disk (MIEG) which is part of this same pool, is still installed, but DrivePool doesn't show it at all, and doesn't appear to be complaining that it's missing. It also doesn't show it as available to add to the pool. In Windows the disk is shown as offline due to collision. Minus what's been backed up in the last week, this pool houses all of my data. Right now, Windows and DrivePool only correctly identify ONE of my three pool disks, with the other two apparently identified as the same disk. How do I proceed?

I'm a PrimoCache + DrivePool user, but I don't have 16 volumes to start with, but... That 16 volume limit *may* be on a per-cache-task basis. One way to find out would be to make two cache tasks in PrimoCache, assigning half of your unpartitioned SSD space and half your drives to each cache task. Now, that might not be optimal, depending on whether you're running a single Pool or many. In my setup I'm only running a single pool, have all my platters in that pool, and setup a single cache task which uses the 650GB or so of unpartitioned space I left on my 1TB NVMe boot drive. As for what settings to apply to your Pool(s) and Cache Task(s) beyond a vanilla setup, I haven't really messed with it a whole lot. Mine is probably nowhere near optimized for my use (Plex & UrBackup), but I'd be interested to hear from anyone else using the DrivePool + PrimoCache combo. Perhaps someone can compare this to using DrivePool with SSD Optimizer.

That was simple enough. Thanks Chris. Spot-on as always.

Okay, so my dashboard had gotten so that I could not open it at all. On a whim, I decided to uninstall SBDP version 1.3.7585, but had to do so through Control Panel>Add/Remove Programs because of the borked Dashboard. It uninstalled, and so I uninstalled the Dashboard Fix as well. Not thinking about it, I got the SBDP 2.x installer and ran it. Yay, SBDP is working and so is my Dashboard! But there's a hitch... The Add-Ins tab on Dashboard shows version 1.3.x is installed. What do I need to do to fix it? Or, should I even worry about it? It seems to be working fine, so I don't want to have to wipe and reinstall WHS2011. I did that once when the Dashboard wouldn't run, and after reinstalling SBDP 1.X I was back right where I started. Thanks in advance for your guidance. Jason

Wait a sec...I just looked, and the website shows the latest 1.x version as 1.3.5.7572! What gives?

I didn't run out of room on my OS disk, but I didn't see a point to having the boot disk partitioned that way. Since I wasn't storing anything on the extra volume I deleted it and grew volume C: to take up the whole disk. Copy any data you want to keep from the volume to another location. You can use the dashboard to move shared folders to another disk. Then go to Server Management console > Storage > Disk Management to manage the partitions/volumes. Instructions from MS here I'm surprised to see the system volume so full, though. You might be able to use WinDirStat to see what's burning up all your space and adjust your system configuration as necessary. As for keeping things tidy, I have a batch file I run periodically to clean things up on the system disk. I'd provide a link, but I've recently switched registrars and dns providers and Dyn doesn't seem to want to let go. WTH, Tucows?

Drashna, Thanks for the info. That looks like a rather minimal little utility, but that makes sense. It just does what you want; manage shares. Will keep that in mind next time I need to do so. As for WSUS, I blew it out already, and I'm not looking back this time. Part of me wants to run a transparent, caching proxy between my network and the outside world, and that would effectively become a replacement for WSUS, but I already have too many machines on 24/7. I'm starting to think there should be a 12-step program for geeks/nerds. Is 17 "screens" too many for two people?

Odd thing is, that even though I didn't put the WSUS folder in /ServerFolders, after adding WSUS I have a trio of WSUS folders that show up as network shares. Looking into the /ServerFolders directory on C: (OS) and D: (pool), there are no such folders. My pool disks contain only the poolpart folders. Having issues with my Win7 desktop right now, I may just have to shift focus to that and abandon WSUS altogether. I've already put Lubuntu on four of my BOINC boxes, and will do the same with the remaining XP machine soon, which leaves 1 Vista and 1 Win7 machine, so updates for those shouldn't really be putting much of a hurt on my bandwidth. Yup, I think I will. Time to blow out WSUS again, and then wipe+reload my Win7 box. I better get to work, then...

My WHS2011 box is once again giving me fits. A while back I was running low on space and removed the WSUS role as an interim measure. Since then, I've upgraded the storage in my WHS2011 box to a pair of 3TB WD green's. Now that I've got ample storage space again, I wanted to add the WSUS role. No dice. I went to add the WSUS role, but this time around it wouldn't let me put the WSUS folder on the pool. It said the drive was not formatted as NTFS. Since first installing DrivePool and enabling the WSUS role this past spring, I've updated DrivePool a couple of times, and it's currently at version 1.3.5.7572. I'm not sure why I can't put the folder on the pool. I assumed that the OS saw the pool as NTFS, but apparently I was wrong. I put the WSUS folder on the OS drive to get it going, but I'd rather not keep it there. Can this be fixed, or should I just give up on WSUS?

Good to hear that! Thanks so much for your help.

Tonight I updated the BIOS/Firmware on my WHS2011 box, and upon reboot I went to check everything out to make sure all was still good to go. I went to the dashboard and to the DrivePool tab, where I found a notice that I must transfer my license to the new hardware. Is this going to come back to bite me later if I actually choose to upgrade to new hardware? I am considering doing so due to the fact that I have only 4 SATA ports and they're all consumed now. I know I could use a port multiplier or an add-on SATA controller, but then I wouldn't have "old" hardware to make another BOINC box. Not that this is about my BOINC habit, just sayin.. So, I know this is written somewhere in plain English for me to read, but since it's pertinent to the issue I just found, how many times can I transfer the license to new hardware/firmware?

Fixed!!! Thanks so much for your help with my problems, guys! It's working perfectly now. Charts and all. I set indexing for all of the folders on my pool, clicky rebuild, and hours later everything is just as it was meant to be. I don't want to fix it any further if it isn't broke, but should I also add the pool disks in the indexing options page, or is it enough that the pool is indexed?

Wow, that's got to be it. From Start > Indexing Options the only folder indexed was the Public folder. So, should I Modify and add the other folders from the Pool, or will they automagically be added with Advanced > Rebuild ?

Wouldn't you know it! I'm away for a few days dealing with other things and I'm too late to catch the logs from the date in question. Oh well, it's working fine for the most part. I'm over the leftover files as the copies in the pool are fine and the scheduled backups are good to go. The one thing that bugs me somewhat but is unrelated to the leftover files issue I originally brought up is that the dashboard is out of kilter. On the SBDP page, the Overview tab doesn't display the folder sizes or overall total correctly. Three folders consistently display correctly, and the rest show zero bytes. This puts the total usage displayed at about half of what it really is. Have a look at the screen grab with annotations. Please tell me I'm not the only one who has been getting this. It wasn't always so, but just started after upgrading to the latest stable and replacing the 1TB drive with a 3TB unit. I feel fairly safe about my data not disappearing, but it's still disconcerting to look at sometimes. All folders in my pool are set for duplication by SBDP, shadow copy off in OS, and permissions are the same for all folders except the client computer backups folder.

I see. Well, it was off for one pool disk and the pool. I don't recall having made that change myself, but I've just switched it on for both pool disks and the pool itself. I had noticed that my W7 box had been slow to show folder contents when browsing the Server Folders over the network. They're both on the same GbE switch. Writes to them were kind of iffy, sometimes getting speeds commensurate with GbE, sometimes slower than writes to my NSLU2 which is on the 100Mbit segment of my network. I really should migrate the content from the Public folder on the NSLU2 to my WHS, but I hadn't had any luck keeping remote access for WHS working until we recently got an upgrade to 10Mb DSL. I still use the NSLU2 for things I want to share with family and friends because it just plain works. I miss my old cable ISP so much now

Otis: The drive was used only for SBDP, and all folders in the pool were configured for duplication. I didn't select any options when removing. I actually just clicked through, accepting the defaults as I went. What I didn't mention is that the files were left behind were all set as Read-only, but the corresponding files (on the other pool drives) were not. I thought that was kind of odd, but Shane's response makes sense. That also brings up a good question, too; should one have Indexing enabled on a Pool or a member disk?

Today I set out to upgrade my WHS2011 box by adding a second 3TB drive to the SBDP pool. Mostly, everything was fine, except... I "removed" the 1TB drive that was part of the pool so that I could re-use it in another machine. After SBDP was done with the "Remove" process, though, there's still close to 2GB of data left on the drive. It's all in a PoolPart folder, but that folder isn't hidden. The harmless stuff that was left (videos, music) I just copied over to the pool. The files were already there, and file attributes matched, so no harm, no foul there. That took care of most of the nearly 2GB. What does concern me somewhat is the remnants of the Client Computer Backups folder that were left on the "removed" drive. If these files are missing from the pool, or if I re-copy them to the pool, whether they are already extant there or not, will I hose my backups? I'm in no big hurry, as the build I was going to put the now-spare 1TB drive into will be a Christmas gift. I guess my question is, "Should I fiddle with the leftover files, or go ahead and yank the drive out?" General characterization of the box; WHS2011, Intel H61-based mobo, Pentium G860, 8GB RAM, SBDP v1.3.7563. Used for household PC backup, media library backup, (Plex) Media Serving, and was running WSUS before I started running out of room. Don't know if I'll bring WSUS back unless I really, really want to keep XP machines alive. EDIT-- I should note that all of the Server Folders , including the Client Computer Backups directory, were on the drive pool, not outside of it on the bare disks.