Shane

From what I can figure out from trawling the manual and changelogs: CoveFs_WaitForVolumesOnMountMs (Default: "10000") - How long to wait for all the volumes to arrive in MS. This is usually for older pools (pools that don't initially know how many poolparts they should be waiting for). DrivePool will wait at most this long between detecting the first poolpart folder and mounting the corresponding pool drive. CoveFs_WaitForKnownPoolPartsOnMountMs (Default: "10000") - (Newer pools may be aware of it's parts) If a pool is aware of how many pool parts it's made of, at mount time, it will wait for all of those pool parts to arrive before allowing the OS to finish mounting the pool. This is usually for newer pools (pools that do initially know how many poolparts they should be waiting for). DrivePool will wait at most this long for those poolparts to finish being detected before mounting the corresponding pool drive. CoveFs_WaitForPoolsAndPoolPartsAfterMountMs (Default: "10000") - How long the service will wait for all of the detected pools to finish mounting, and then for all of the known pool parts to get recognized on those pools. This is for all pools, and is how long DrivePool will wait at most for all pools to complete mounting and all known poolparts to be recognised before starting other DrivePool processes such as missing disk detection, file duplication, balancing, user notifications, etc. Appparently this also particularly helps with Bitlocker drives. So in your case I think maybe increase the first two to something a little larger and the last one to at least as large as the first two? E.g. 15000, 15000, 15000, or maybe 20000, 20000, 30000? The minimums will depend on your system.

I think I see what you're getting at; you need to take advantage of DrivePool's ability to nest pools. I.e. you would create a Pool A using your local drive(s), a Pool B using your cloud drive(s), create a third Pool C using Pools A and B as "drives" and turn on duplication for all of Pool C. The result is that anything stored in Pool C will always have at least one copy locally (kept in a hidden folder in Pool A) and one copy in the cloud (kept in a hidden folder in Pool B). If you also wanted to have multiple copies locally you would then turn on duplication for Pool A, or at least for the Pool C's hidden folder in Pool A. And so on and so forth.

Hmm. DrivePool reporting the wrong size (which it retrieves from Windows) shouldn't affect SnapRaid (which also gets it from Windows) unless Windows itself is giving the wrong size to both? In the Windows Disk Management utility, can you set View->Top->Disk and View->Bottom->Graphical then screenshot it so we can see all of the relevant data for those disks? Particularly the Disk Number, Capacity, Unallocated Space and Partition Style in the top section versus the Disk Number, Disk Size, Volume Label/Letter and Volume Size in the bottom section.

It's not due to DrivePool. Notice that the "Capacity" column in Windows Disk Management is still reporting 3071.98 GB; the volume's file system was not properly updated by the utility that resized the partition. Assuming that's all that it didn't do properly (if not, hopefully you have backups) you can try the following fix: Open a Command Prompt as an Administrator Enter the command "DISKPART" Enter the command "LIST VOLUME" Enter the command "SELECT VOLUME #" where "#" is replaced with the relevant volume number Enter the command "EXTEND FILESYSTEM" Enter the command "EXIT" Close the Command Prompt. You might then need to restart/remeasure DrivePool for it to see the corrected file system.

If the drive is still in the pool and it's just not recognising the new size, have you tried "Manage Pool" -> "Re-measure..." ?

Short answer is that - so long as you're disconnecting ALL of the drives in a pool - yes you can and it shouldn't cause any problems as far as DrivePool itself is concerned. Slightly longer answer is that you would stop the StableBit DrivePool Service* while disconnecting/reconnecting, to avoid DrivePool briefly** complaining about missing drives and to avoid it potentially re-scanning the entire pool when the drives are reconnected, but the software is designed to "fail safely" so even that wouldn't be strictly necessary if you were ever in a rush. Do make sure that all drives in the pool are set for "Quick removal": this should be the default for USB HDDs, and can be found in Windows Disk Management; right-click each disk in the pool - e.g. you'd click where it says "Disk 9" and not where it says "volume label xyz (drive letter)" - and then select Properties and then select the Policies tab. *DrivePool basically operates on three layers: the file system driver (handles the low-level code that makes the pool visible as a drive to Windows), the drivepool service (handles all the balancing and maintenance), and the drivepool gui (lets the user see what's going on and create/configure/remove pools). **if you disconnect all drives that form a pool, DrivePool will no longer know that pool exists until you reconnect at least one of those drives.

If you hover the mouse curse over the Pool Organization bar, does it show a tooltip indicating what is currently doing? E.g. moving files or building bucket lists? (and yes, sometimes when it decides to build bucket lists it can take AGES to finish and get back to moving files; you can either let it do its thing, try fiddling with the balancing settings and restarting the balancing, or move the files yourself manually)

The intended purpose of the "SSD" drives in both balancers is use as a temporary cache, not as a permanent storage area; when the "Automatic balancing" is triggered for this cache, it WILL attempt to move ALL files off the "SSD" drives to the "Archive" drives to free up space for the caching of new incoming files. If what you actually want is to keep duplicated files on specific drives and unduplicated files on specific other drives, then I'd suggest you should be marking all of those drives as "Archive" and then using the following: the "Folders" tab under the "File Placement" tab to select which drives each folder should be using (since duplication can be set per-folder) OR "Ordered placement options" to assign priority to the drives accordingly (un-ticking "Same order as duplicated" and telling it which drives you want prioritised for un-duplicated vs which drives for duplicated files). You could even use both if you wanted especially fine-grained control, e.g. if you wanted folder A to use drives X, Y and Z in that priority, but it could end up being fiddly to manage.

Good to hear. Once everything else is sorted out, if you still can't find the source of the "Other" files then feel free to post here and we'll follow up.

Hi, yes, x1 means no duplication. Welcome to DrivePool, hope you enjoy using it!

A1: I'm not familiar with the Pace 5268A (or any other AT&T routers), sorry. Different country! In theory, generally, it should be possible to have router "A" handling internet traffic while router "B" handles local traffic without them fighting about it; in practice some routers are (much) less capable than others and some ISPs also lock down the functionality of routers they provide / mandate. For whatever it's worth, here's an example very basic setup: Internet <-> [WAN port] Router A [LAN port] <-> [LAN port] Router B [LAN port(s) and Wifi] <-> Local devices Router A (WAN DHCP on + LAN DHCP off) is configured to receive the necessary WAN addresses from the ISP but to not manage the local devices. Router B (WAN DHCP off + LAN DHCP on) is configured to deliver the necessary IP configurations so local devices use Router A as the internet gateway. Obviously this is a simplified summary and you'd need to get all the fiddly parts lined up, but that's my day job not my forum job. A2: As a general rule of thumb you want to minimise the number of wifi devices (including stations) operating in any given area, and another is that you want all devices operating on any given channel to support the same wifi standards (e.g. if a gen 1 device and a gen 2 device are sharing the same channel, you may end up with the gen 2 device limited to gen 1 capability). That said, if your plan is to have Router A handling wired traffic while Router B handles wireless traffic, that might work for you. A3: The new Beta functionality mostly relates to supporting Stablebit Cloud connectivity, but the changelog indicates there was work done on DrivePool functionality too. The great thing is you can install the Beta and if it doesn't help you can uninstall it and reinstall the Stable release without losing anything. Resource Manager is built into Windows and can be used to monitor a variety of metrics including file access/throughput.

I'd just happened to check the forum and saw your post before going to bed, that's all. 1. Your screenshot indicates that DrivePool is stating the following about the folder you've named "Duplicated": Its files may be placed on E, F or G drives. E currently has 698 GB free. F currently has 856 GB free. G currently has 856 GB free. 18.7 GB of files are currently placed on E. 18.7 GB of files are currently placed on F. Nothing in the folder is placed on G (when nothing relevant is placed on a drive, that drive won't be shown in the "how much is placed where" section of File placement) If the size of your Duplicated folder is also 18.7 GB according to Windows Explorer, then I'd presume DrivePool is correctly measuring the size (since 18.7 x 2 = default x2 duplication). With the amount of free space it is reporting on all drives being so much larger than the amount of duplicated content, I would believe DrivePool simply hasn't seen a need to use G yet. However, you might also want to check the settings in the Drive Usage Limiter balancer (since you have it enabled) to ensure that it is allowing use of G for duplicated content. 2. That's the Manage Pool triangle, not the Pool Organization bar triangle. There's a screenshot and further information in the manual here (link).

1. Curious. It could just be that it's kept picking the first two drives available simply because they've had enough free space to use? Do you have any other Balancers active (e.g. Duplication Space Optimizer)? 2. I have the same version (2.2.5.1237) of DrivePool; as with previous versions the manual Re-balance button should be available from the small upright triangle to the right of the Pool Organization bar. Though if DrivePool's happy with the current amount of balancing it may not do much/anything. 3. I've reproduced this on my own installation and have reported it to Stablebit. Thankyou! Yes. It should start automatically moving the files (as in, each file being copied to the new drive then removed from the old drive) across if you do that. If you're worried due to the SMART errors on E, you could also tick "Verify after copy" via the DrivePool main GUI -> Cog icon -> Troubleshooting.

Hmm. I've had problems with flaky Seagate external USB HDD enclosures before, so I'd be curious whether you could run everything else if you left the Seagate Expansion unplugged.

@Christopher (Drashna) is this a bug, or are there situations (other than "real-time" placement) where the Pool Organization bar not reacting to (presumed) balancer activity is considered working as intended?

@Christopher (Drashna) Does rebuilding take an unpredictable time, or would it be possible for CloudDrive to provide some sort of progress indicator so that users know it's actually making headway? E.g. "Processing chunk x of y, est time to next chunk is z, est time to finish based on chunks so far is t"?

I'm not quite sure what you've done (possibly merging the partitions has confused DrivePool?) but if you want to start over, you could try: stopping the service manually renaming all of the poolpart folders (hidden or not hidden) to have an 'x' in front of them (e.g. 'd:\poolpart.blah' -> 'd:\xpoolpart.blah') restarting the service (it should now show NO pools) creating a new pool with the settings you want stopping the service moving the content you want from the old (renamed) poolparts into the new poolparts restarting the service select Manage Pool -> Re-measure... to tell DrivePool that it should re-examine the content of the pool after that finishes, select Cog icon -> Troubleshooting -> Recheck duplication... to tell DrivePool that it should re-check all files to have the duplication you want them to have.

Hi @stangbass08 with the System Volume Information folder involved and false drives showing up, I'd recommend opening a support ticket with Stablebit so that they can fix it properly.

If the activity bar is green and not moving, the DrivePool service is not performing any scheduled/requested tasks such as remeasures, balancing runs, consistency/duplication checks, etc. (This is not the same as whether other apps are reading/writing the pool - that's indicated by the Performance section). The fact is DrivePool's read performance simply can't match Storage Spaces because the former merges the logical volumes file-by-file while the latter stripes the physical disks block-by-block; you just cannot beat that kind of "bare metal" approach for raw read speed and low latency, though DrivePool tries its best. The tradeoff as you can see with your own benchmarks is write speed (as well as reliability; if Storage Spaces goes bad, it tends to REALLY go bad). All that said: You're still getting pretty good read speeds out of DrivePool? If you're streaming music or video, most reads should be sequential anyway (assuming that your disk data isn't fragmented*; you might want to check the individual drives in the pool with a utility like UltraDefrag, which is also capable of defragging the MFT of your volumes) and your sequential reads are multiple times faster than needed to feed even wired gigabit while your random 4K Q1T1 is still managing 22.46 MB/s which should be enough for 4K video streaming. Which if you're still getting problems with (e.g.) stuttering in your streams... leads me to think the problem is latency/buffering, whether DrivePool's (which can't "cheat" like Storage Spaces can), your drives (if fragmented as above) or that of your streamer and/or wifi and/or receiver. On DrivePool's end, try Manage Pool -> Performance and ticking "Network I/O boost" and/or "Bypass file system filters" to see if that makes any difference to your situation (please read: link to documentation). For your streamer and receiver, see if they have options to increase their buffering (if you're using VLC, there's a bunch of advanced settings, some may do nothing, some may help a lot). For your wifi network, see if you get better results on a different channel or frequency (if your wifi is fancy enough, it may even offer QoS options for streaming), or whether it's being limited by less-capable devices sharing the connection. LATE EDIT: *Note: SSDs shouldn't be defragged (though it may be worth using the manufacturer's diagnostic software to check if they need anything else done). However, sometimes they can suffer significant performance hits if their free space is too low (anywhere from 10% to 25% depending on model).

DrivePool GUI, cog icon, Notifications; tick both "Notify on missing disk" and "Notify by email..."

I've occasionally had problems with using Windows own built-in security tab to fix pools where (very) long paths are involved and/or where the permissions have broken in a way that isn't repaired by the tab. And when the usual power combo of takeown+icacls didn't fix them either (and wow finding out "why not?" was a trip down a rabbit hole), that's when I went hunting and thankfully found SetACL (which is why I've finally gotten around to creating this thread). I have however now edited my second post above to mention the wiki article at the top.

I've occasionally had problems with using Windows own built-in security tab to fix pools where (very) long paths are involved and/or where the permissions have broken in a way that isn't shown by the tab. And when the usual power combo of takeown+icacls didn't fix them either (and wow finding out "why not?" was a trip down a rabbit hole), that's when I went hunting and thankfully found SetACL.

Um. Given your earlier troubles, I'm beginning to wonder if there is something rather wrong somewhere with your computer. Bad cable, bad controller, bad something.

Which balancers do you have enabled and (if changed from the defaults) what are their settings?

To possibly go here: default permissions and howtofix for the System Volume Information and Recycle Bin folders, FAQ, anything else appropriate.