Shane

Weird. Your account had been flagged, but I can't see any reason for it. Should be fixed now.

If you uninstall DrivePool, any existing pools will retain their content and be automatically re-detected when you reinstall DrivePool. Their duplication levels should be kept, but you may need to recreate any custom balancing/rules you had for them.

No need to worry, Drivepool is not affected by changing which bay any of its drives is in. So long as it can see the drives locally, you're good.

Nice catch. I'm guessing the large difference in the example screenshots is because you have NTFS compression enabled?

Generally well-developed. Scanner will also still report - as you found - that the drive itself is flagging a problem even if Scanner can't recognise exactly what the problem is.

The problem is that SMART is not a strictly formalised standard; every manufacturer has their own implementation (sometimes differing even between models) using different scales and ranges and formats. Manufacturer A might use values between 100 and 199 at location 235 to measure an aspect of their drives while Manufacturer B might use values between 0 and 65535 at location 482 for that same aspect; and those values may not even be in the same scale (e.g. celsius vs kelvin vs fahrenheit for temperature). And so on ad nauseum. This means that if the particular SMART software you're using doesn't have a translation of whatever proprietary implementation it encounters sufficient to know that A=B means "bad" (and also track stuff like "not bad yet but it is getting worse"), it then has to rely entirely on whether (and when) the drive itself flags the results as "bad".

Hmm. Tricky. I've done some testing; the SSD Optimizer balancer conflicts with the requirement to keep certain files on the SSDs because the Optimizer wants to flush the cache disks despite the File Placement rules (even if it does not do so on the first balancing run, it will do so on a subsequent run) regardless of the File Placement Settings in the Settings tab. I'm not sure if that's a bug or if it is working as intended... though I suspect maybe the former. I'll play around with it some more and see what I can come up with. EDIT: @Christopher (Drashna) is it possible to get the SSD Optimizer balancer to play nice with the File Placement rules? I've tried the various permutations possible in the Manage Pool -> Balancing -> Settings -> File placement settings section but even when it respects them on the first subsequent balancing pass it fails to do so on later balancing passes, i.e: I set up a pool with the SSDs marked as SSDs in the SSD Optimizer balancing plug-plugin. I create a "SSD" folder and set up a File Placement rule that any file in that folder should be kept on the SSDs. In File placement settings I tick "Balancing plug-ins respect the file placement rules". I copy files to the pool; they go into the SSD drives per the real-time requirement of the SSD Optimizer. I start a balancing pass; the File Placement rules are respected and the matching files stay on the SSDs while the rest are moved to the HDDs. I start another balancing pass; the File Placement rules are ignored and SSD Optimizer flushes all files on the SSDs to the HDDs. #6 shouldn't be happening? Doesn't seem to matter whether the other File placement settings are ticked or unticked.

Something like "If user rate limit exceeded, defer uploads for ____ minutes" (and another for downloads) ?

Perhaps submit a feature request for a daily upload limit option in Clouddrive, and in the meantime maybe set the upload throttling speed to about 80 Mbps to avoid hitting the provider's daily quota limit?

I'm on the latest stable release (2.2.5.1237) for my backup machine and the latest beta release (2.3.0.1244) for my main server; haven't encountered any problems with either.

That's another odd thing since Scanner's burst test shouldn't have anything to do with DrivePool at all.

I use FreeFileSync to nightly mirror the content of my file server (an 8-bay tower PC) to my backup server (another 8-bay tower PC) via a read-only network share on the former, using FreeFileSync's Versioning feature to keep old versions and deleted files for a couple of weeks. If I was getting into serious amounts of video footage/editing I'd probably have hunted for a second-hand pair of the server rack chassis Christopher described rather than my two tower PCs; some research would definitely be required.

Are you running third-party antivirus (e.g. norton/avast/whatever), and does it make any difference if you uninstall it (not just set it to whatever it claims is "off", but actually uninstalled)? Have you run a memtest? (yeah I know very unlikely to be the problem, but hey) In addition to Scanner's burst testing, do you have any HDD benchmarking software? If you uninstall drivepool, is there any difference? When you disconnect enough disks that it starts working properly, does it matter which disks are disconnected?

Hmm. With a really large number of files, the MFT might have become fragmented - if it gets truly bad enough, you can get effects like taking ages to list directories, access files and so on. Do you have a defragmenter than works on the MFT? UltraDefrag is free and can do so (highlight the physical - not virtual - disks to defrag, click Action menu then Optimize MFT).

Just checking: if you reinstalled the OS, did you remember to re-activate the DrivePool license after you reinstalled DrivePool? Maybe check that it's activated anyway (DrivePool GUI, cog icon, Manage License, should have your key displayed). If it's indeed a permissions issue, then this (linked) is what I use when the usual MS-supplied tools don't work. If that doesn't work... something is well and truly hosed.

Drives being used as part of a pool can still be used for storing non-pool content; the part of the drive that's used by the pool is simply a hidden folder. So that should not be causing the problem. (E.g. if you have a D: drive that's part of a Z: pool, you can totally create D:\MoreStuff and D:\OtherStuff folders and put content in them, they're just not part of the pool because they're not in the hidden D:\PoolPart.StringOfLettersAndNumbers folder.) But how are you pointing D:\OneDrive\Photos to Z:\Photos? Because a quick search suggests that OneDrive doesn't support (or doesn't properly support) symbolic links, and I think I recall DrivePool does not either. So you might be "crossing the streams" here. Option 1: if you don't mind just tossing drive space at it, you could set up an automatic sync (one way or both ways) of Z:\Photos to D:\OneDrive\Photos by some means or another (e.g. Task Scheduler, robocopy, FreeFileSync, etc)? Option 2: as #1, but mount your OneDrive storage as a network drive so that it's not taking up space on your hard drive(s).

If you've never edited the config file (which involves renaming the default template file and then editing it in something like notepad) then you don't need to back it up, because it won't exist. See https://wiki.covecube.com/StableBit_DrivePool_Advanced_Settings if you want more information on that. Basically, if the file "C:\Program Files\StableBit\DrivePool\DrivePool.Service.exe.config" does not exist on your PC, then you don't need to back it up. Otherwise, yes, you've got it right.

Saphir is correct; so long as you avoid formatting any of the disks that form your pool(s), they will automatically be detected when you reinstall DrivePool. If you have manually edited DrivePool's config file, you will need to backup that file and restore it afterwards to keep your edits.

Only current way I can think of to disable the automatic remeasuring would be to disable the DrivePool service itself (or set its start to manual), which would also disable background balancing, background duplication, GUI access, etc, but existing pools should still be readable and writable? Then just enable/start it when you get around to checking it. Otherwise perhaps submit a feature request, whether for a GUI option or at least a "please add a DrivePool_AutoMeasure (default:true) option in the config file to control whether DrivePool automatically remeasures a pool when one of its drives is temporarily offline or fails to connect on boot"?

Would it help if you increased the time DrivePool waits for the drives to connect on boot? https://wiki.covecube.com/StableBit_DrivePool_Advanced_Settings My explanation of the relevant settings: https://community.covecube.com/index.php?/topic/5868-delay-time-for-volumes-to-mounting-questions/&do=findComment&comment=34809

Ah, I see. Sorry, it's not possible with the current balancers. If it helps, Snapraid does allow having multiple parity disks.

A quick test with a pool of two drives shows that Christopher's suggestion has merit. For example if you create a File Placement Rule of pattern "\*\*\a*\*" -> drive K:\ then any new file whose path matches \a*\ at the 3rd folder level will be put on K:\ drive. You will need to balance the pool (manually or automatically) to move existing files as well. So you would use "\*\*\*\*" to match ALL files that are three or more folders deep; one "\*" for each folder level and a final "\*" for all content within it. E.g. it would match P:\level1\level2\level3\somefile and it would match P:\level1\level2\level3\somefolder and it would also match any files, folders and subfolders within P:\level1\level2\level3\somefolder.

I haven't had that issue; balancing/duplication should not affect file timestamps. Do you have Allwaysync set up to backup the pool drive or to backup the drives that make up the pool? The setup I have: Main file server runs DrivePool, drives pooled as P:\ with a read-only password-protected hidden network share for use by the backup file server laptops and desktops access the pool via normal writable password-protected network shares Backup file server runs DrivePool; drives pooled as K:\ and the main file server's pool mapped as P:\ via the above read-only share backup file server has NO network shares of its own FreeFileSync with versioning makes nightly backups of P:\ to K:\ current/new files kept in K:\backup\new\ previous versions and deleted files kept in K:\backup\old\timestamp\ changelogs kept in K:\backup\log\

@gtaus I was replying to Saphir, and meant "confusing DrivePool" in relation to a combination where SSD Optimizer and File Placement have conflicting rules as to where a new file should go when only one drive is marked as a SSD and duplication is enabled; as you note, you aren't using File Placement.

Hmm. Reviewing your earlier posts, if you're using duplication but have only one drive set as a "SSD" cache then that could be confusing DrivePool. If not... can you post a screenshot of your Balancers tab showing the priority and settings of your SSD Optimizer, and of your File Placement tab showing the Rules sub-tab?