Shane

Quoting from the description for current pending sector counts in Scanner, "If an unstable sector is subsequently written or read successfully, this value is decreased and the sector is not remapped." So I'd guess that between Scanner detecting the event and you opening it, the drive has been able to successfully re-read the sector on its own and taken it off the list.

1. DrivePool not waiting long enough for the drives. You can increase how long DrivePool waits for drives after booting by editing some or all of the following entries in its advanced settings file: CoveFs_WaitForVolumesOnMountMs CoveFs_WaitForKnownPoolPartsOnMountMs CoveFs_WaitForPoolsAndPoolPartsAfterMountMs 2. DrivePool appears to be scanning all drives in all pools, not just the drives in a particular pool, when checking metadata for file(s) in that particular pool. ... Assuming I'm understanding correctly that the above is what's happening, I don't know why that's happening. If it's instead that you've got a pool consisting of nvme and hdd drives and it's checking the hdd drives even though you yourself know the file(s) involved are only on the nvme drives, that would be because DrivePool does not keep its own records of directory contents across drives so it checks all the drives in the pool when looking for files. If you have the RAM space and the need is sufficient, perhaps consider dedicated disk caching software (e.g. I've heard from other DrivePool users that PrimoCache is very good at this task but have not tried it myself)? 3. DrivePool reporting files being duplicated that aren't set to be duplicated. I suspect this is DrivePool checking whether each folder needs to be duplicated or not, not actually duplicating them. If an affected pool is supposed to have no duplication at all, check that Manage Pool -> File protection -> Pool file duplication is actually unticked for that pool? You could also try editing FileDuplication_NoConsistencyCheckOnNewPool to True in the advanced settings file to completely turn off duplication consistency checking when pools connect but note that this will affect all pools and only applies on connection.

If it's largely set at defaults, I've noticed it doesn't usually try to get the distribution across drives "perfect" just simply "good enough"? Attempting a "perfect" distribution can mean more inter-drive movement which means more activity/wear. In your case this might in part be due to the emptying limit on the Prevent Drive Overfill balancer? If that's enabled and involved, lowering the emptying limit might allow it to shift more data around.

Hi Thranx, I think this might be better sent to Stablebit directly via the Contact form, as it could be an undiscovered bug in the UI? Please let us know how it goes though, that's a big shark pool and I hope you don't end up needing a bigger boat! (if it does turn out to be a UI issue on max drives per pool that can't be fixed quickly, perhaps you could try a pool of pools, with the underlayer of pools being made from the drives in each bay?)

I think you can leave the StableBit DrivePool Shutdown service as Automatic. Re (un)mounting the drives, it's a reference to making sure the drives don't have anything remaining in the write cache before being physically turned off (e.g. via choosing the Eject option in the Windows system tray before physically pulling out a drive from the USB socket). I don't have such a script handy to do so, though.

Uh, yes, I'd agree, it's not a task for DrivePool - because it doesn't do that. DrivePool just pools files, the specific content of those files is irrelevant to it. Post screenshot (redact specifics if necessary)?

Hmm. Perhaps CrystalDiskMark? You can choose to select a folder as well as drives, so you could test drives mounted as folders that way. It won't scan them all at once, you'd have to record the results from each drive and compare them yourself.

If on that PC you only use DrivePool with those drives - perhaps you could try changing the DrivePool service from Automatic to Manual, then only turn it on after you turn on the drives and turn it off before you turn off the drives. That way the service should never notice the drives are "missing" (because it wouldn't be while the service is running). Maybe put a pair of shortcuts on your desktop to start and stop the service (maybe also to mount and dismount the drives) respectively?

It isn't (yet?) mentioned in the changelog, but it apparently has been added in the recent beta: I also suggest reading through the rest of the linked thread in case any of the other posts in it are relevant to your situation.

If a disk in the pool goes missing then the pool should automatically change to read-only until the disk returns; we can test for that with a simple batch file. For example if the app was "c:\bin\monitor.exe" and your pool's drive letter was "p" then you could create an empty file called "testreadable.txt" in the root folder of your pool and create a batch file (e.g. "launchapp.bat") containing one line: COPY /Y p:\testreadable.txt p:\testwritable.txt && "c:\bin\monitor.exe" Launching that batch file would only result in launching the app if the file p:\testreadable.txt could be copied over to p:\testwritable.txt - which would indicate the pool was writable (all disks are present). Note that this doesn't help if a drive goes missing while the app is already running. You'd need something more for that.

Correct. And: Try "resmon" (aka the Windows Resource Monitor) to see files that are currently being read/written. Open it, click on the "Disk" tab, find the "Disk Activity" section; you can click on a column header to sort (and toggle ascending/descending). You can also click the checkboxes in the "Processes with Disk Activity" section to filter by process. Try "everything" (made by voidtools.com) to quickly see all files that are on any letter-mounted physical NTFS volume on a machine (amongst other tricks). And you could for example type in "Acme\EpisodeOne" and it would immediately show you which disks in the pool (so long as those disks have drive letters) have files that match that string.

Having done some looking it does appear that BypassIO is planned to be used for storage performance in general instead of just gaming (which is the main end-user impetus for it currently) and that it will eventually be expanded to interfaces beyond NVMe, with Microsoft pushing for drivers to at minimum be updated to respond to the (Windows 11) OS whether they do or do not support it. So I'd imagine Stablebit would want to add it, it'd just be a matter of priorities as to when. For anyone curious, you can check whether any drivers are preventing or only partially supporting BypassIO for a given drive/path via the command fsutil bypassio state path (e.g. "c:\"). Note that it might only tell you about one driver being an issue even if other drivers are also an issue. If you get "bypassio is an invalid parameter" then you're on an older version of Windows that doesn't have BypassIO.

I have no idea whether it will fix whatever the problem is, but if you try it then I'd suggest checking that the config store folder is actually removed when the program is uninstalled before you reinstall?

Correct. The rules are checked against the full path of files, which includes their folder(s). For example a rule of \TV-Shows\A* would match both \TV-Shows\Allshowslist.txt and \TV-Shows\AcmeShow\EpisodeOne.mp4 and place them accordingly. If you wanted to match the latter but not the former then you would instead use a rule of \TV-Shows\A*\* to do so.

As far as I know, DrivePool only has basic wildcard support (asterisk and question mark), it doesn't have regular expression support. You'd need to make a feature request.

Note that your linked site notes the feature isn't actually enabled yet in Diablo 4 - so it can't take advantage of DirectStorage even if you do install the game outside the pool - and the game still runs fine without it. So right now "an increasing number of PC games" appears to be... one game instead of zero? With just a handful in development, and we don't know whether any of those will require it to work? It is a nice tech though, if you have the high-end hardware to support it.

Here's a FAQ on what Other etc is, with a followup post where Alex goes into more detail on Other; in your case I'd suggest it's the metadata, directory entries and slack space. For whatever vague comparison it's worth, my 39.1TB pool with 4KB clusters has 18.0GB of Other. Note that (64/4)x(8.4/39.1)x18 ≈ 62GB, so by those factors your pool appears to have proportionately less "Other" than mine... and as a fraction of total capacity your Other is consuming less than 0.65% of your pool. I wouldn't worry about it!

Short answer: There's no one true answer. Long answer: If you want maximum performance while you're working, you want it to not (have to) balance during those times. If you want maximum longevity, you want it to move files as little as possible. But it might have to balance more often if you're dealing with sufficiently large files compared to the available space on your drives. For example: you might set DrivePool to only balance at midnight, to prefer to keep files within pooldrive:\work-in-progress\ duplicated on drives A and B, and to prefer to keep files within pooldrive:\completed-projects\ duplicated on any two of drives C, D, E and F; basically this would mean A and B wear faster but C, D, E and F last much longer. I'd also suggest getting StableBit Scanner (if you haven't already) as it can be used to keep an eye on the remaing life of your SSDs, be set to notify/email about issues, etc, and in conjunction with DrivePool it can automatically evacuate files on unhealthy drives to good ones.

Duplication measurement is the total used space; e.g. if you had a 1MB file duplicated across drive A and drive B, the Duplicated measurement would be 2MB. For finding the Other, I suggest a program like JAM TreeSize which (when run elevated) should be able to accurately report the consumption of a drive including system folders.

Uninstalling the DrivePool software will just make your pooling unavailable until it is reinstalled; the content of the pool is still there in the poolpart folder on each drive, and those poolpart folders will be found and re-used by DrivePool when it is reinstalled. I believe Repair just checks to see if any needed files are missing and replaces them; I don't know if it would (or how well it would) detect damaged configurations/files. You could certainly try uninstalling and reinstalling to see if that does better than a repair in solving the problem; it won't harm your pool.

If uninstalling and reinstalling DrivePool hasn't brought back the GUI, then I would open a support ticket with Stablebit to investigate what's gone wrong.

Could be a file permissions issue? Maybe check if other balancers are also not keeping changes? The config folder is "C:\ProgramData\StableBit DrivePool\Service\Store\Json" If you're unable to spot anything different, I'd suggest opening a ticket to report it.

Correct.

Ah, okay, you've got multiple google drives in the pool; with default settings that makes the default removal method non-viable because normally DrivePool will remove files from the drive being removed to the remaining drive(s) with the most free space - i.e. most of the time it'll be going to be your other google drives... that you also want to remove. So we'll need to use a different method. Are the "Google Drive #" disks each on separate accounts each with a 5TB limit or all on one account with one 5TB limit? Is the "Cloud Media" the NAS or is it also a google drive? How fast is your average download speed from google drive directly? via CloudDrive? Is your speed high enough to empty or copy the google drives before google switches them to read-only? If it's fast enough (allow a margin of error), you could add your NAS to the pool and then use the Drive Usage Limiter balancer to empty the google drives into it. If it's not fast enough, I'd recommend switching your cloud drives to read-only now (by manually "breaking" - this is reversible - the pool if necessary) and then begin copying the cloud drives / pool parts to your NAS. If you'd prefer to set up a chat (e.g. discord/teams/zoom/whatever) instead of going back and forth day(s) at a time feel free to Message me (rest the cursor over my user icon, should show an option to send a Message) with your preferred chat details/time(zone)s.

When you remove a drive from a pool, (normally) the data in that drive is removed to the rest of the pool first, which is limited by the speed of the connection. If you're using duplication, you can make it quicker by ticking the "Duplicate files later" checkbox at the beginning of the removal process. Edit: If you've got multiple drives in the cloud that are all part of the same pool, it could become even slower if it's moving data from the drive in the cloud that is being removed to the other drives that are in the cloud. To avoid that you'd need to set a balancing rule that would ensure the data was moved to only your local drives. ... When you say "remove a pool", do you literally mean "remove a pool" or do you mean to say "remove a drive from a pool"?