Shane

Hmm. If the "Drive Usage Limiter" balancer is not a real-time plugin, then for what you're wanting I'd suggest trying either (1) un-ticking "Not more often than..." in the Balancing Settings, if it's okay for the file to be briefly on that drive before getting moved away, or (2) use the "SSD Optimizer" balancer plugin and set all the drives except DP6a as "SSD" so that files will only be moved to it during balancing (at which point it won't move any un-duplicated files to it)?

When you format it manually, does it show up as only having one volume in Windows Disk Management, with all four of the following: Simple, Basic, NTFS, Healthy (Primary Partition)? After being manually formatted, does it successully pass a command-line check for bad sectors: chkdsk driveletter: /r /v e.g. if it's formatted as d:\ drive, then "chksk d: /r /v" from an administrator command prompt.

If you've got Stablebit Scanner installed, hovering the mouse cursor over each drive in the DrivePool GUI will tell you the model and serial of that drive. Does that help?

If your backup software is saying it's finished, and you have write caching off, it should indeed be finished.

This does sound like a bug (file is opened but not read?), so I'd suggest opening a support ticket via the Contact form?

I'd definitely recommend opening a Support ticket for this problem via the Contact form.

In the Manage Pool -> Balancing -> Settings menu, ensure "Balancing plug-ins respect file placement rules" is ticked. And if "File placement rules respect real-time file placement limits set by the balancing plug-ins" is ticked, the settings in the balancers (e.g. SSD Optimizer) may be taking priority. It can be tricky to find the right combination.

Umfriend is correct. The service should be stopped to prevent any chance of balancing occurring during the migration when using that method. And that method is fine so long as your existing arrangement is compatible with DrivePool's pooling structure. E.g. if you have: drive D:\FolderA\FileB moved to D:\PoolPart.someguid\FolderA\FileB drive E:\FolderA\FileB moved to E:\PoolPart.someguid\FolderA\FileB drive F:\FolderA\FileC moved to F:\PoolPart.someguid\FolderA\FileC then your drivepool drive (in this example P: drive) will show: P:\FolderA\FileB P:\FolderA\FileC as DrivePool will presume that FileB is the same file duplicated on two drives. As Umfriend has warned, when it next performs consistency checking DrivePool will create/remove copies as necessary to match your chosen settings (e.g. "I want all files in FolderA to exist on three drives"), and will warn if it finds a "duplicated" file that does not match its duplicate(s) on the other drives. As to Snapraid, I'd follow Umfriend's advice there too.

As a belated followup to this: yes, there was a SMR drive involved. If you're looking at buying new drives, check the manufacturer specs very closely for SMR showing up instead of CMR or PMR, as it might not be mentioned by the seller.

You could use Disk Management in Windows to mount the drives as folders on another drive instead of having their own letters. Everything could then still automatically find and scan the drives. Pick (empty) folders with names that will let you easily identify the corresponding drives. I've verified this works on my own server. For example, create a folder on your C: drive called Disks, then create empty sub-folders under Disks for each of your pooled drives, e.g. d0, d1, d2, d3, then mount those drives to those sub-folders. All done. Keep in mind that if you removed the drive letters for other reasons (e.g. to prevent them being scanned directly by AV or whatever) then you may want to consider whether you can exclude the mounted folder(s) from whatever it is you want to avoid.

It could be due to files on that drive being locked by another program, or by physical problems with that drive? You could also try to "cancel" by restarting the computer, that won't harm the pool.

Did you use the Contact form? That's the preferred way as it's easier for Stablebit to track support tickets that way.

I'd suggest a tool called Everything, by Voidtools. It'll scan the disks (defaults to all NTFS volumes) then just type in a string (e.g. "exam 2020" or ".od3") and it shows all files (you can also set it to search folder names as well) that have that string in the name, with the complete path. Also useful for "I can't remember what I called that file or where I saved it, but I know I saved it on the 15th..." problems.

Only on the drives that make up the pool.

Perhaps options in the Throttling menu?

I'm stumped. There's just been a new stable release (2.2.4.1162) of DrivePool; if that doesn't fix it, might be worth opening a Support ticket as something's going on that literally doesn't add up.

Hmm. Might be a file/NTFS permissions issue. Try a utility called TreeSize Free as administrator? It lacks the shiny pincushion map, but it handles permissions a bit better and might help you track down the file(s) so you can check that. Edit: might also want to run a chkdsk on the drive.

You could try resetting DrivePool via the cog icon, Troubleshooting -> Reset all settings... Also, if you're on Windows 10 that recently updated to build 2004, check that you are running the latest stable release of DrivePool. It should be version 2.2.3.1019.

1. Are the drives that you used to form the pool still showing up in Windows Explorer / Disk Management? 2. When entering the activation ID, did you include the curly braces {} ? Though even in trial mode, your pool should still be visible.

That's not expected behaviour.

Yeah, it shouldn't be doing that. Are D: and G: drives used for any non-pool files? Maybe take a look at D: and G: drives with a program like WinDirStat (running as administrator, with Show Free Space and Show Unknown checked in Options)?

Are you saying that the pools are showing up in DrivePool but not in Explorer? Can you provide a screenshot showing the problem?

It should be possible to write a balancer that controls real time file placement, since that's what the SSD Optimizer and the Ordered File Placement balancer plugins do. DP defaults to writing to the disk with the most free space in bytes rather than by percentage to minimize the possibility of running out of space on the destination disk during writing, because it is not possible to guarantee the size of the write in advance (for example, a 1 TB GB disk with 10% free space has only a fifth of the space available of a 10 TB disk with 5% free space).

I'm kind of following, I think... what would your preferred strategy be? (for example, "I want new files to go to X, then Y, then Z.... and I want it to balance old files at 1am to Y, Z and J so X is freed up again.")

There shouldn't be any corrupted files, as DrivePool does not "split" a file across drives. If duplication was enabled for any files that might have been on that drive, you shouldn't have lost any files. DrivePool will automatically re-duplicate those files given enough free space in the pool. If duplication was NOT enabled for any files that were on that drive... the short answer is "not via DrivePool". DrivePool doesn't keep a database of your files. You would have to compare your pool against your own backups (if any). If you "quick"-formatted your drive (and have not re-used that drive since then) there are third-party tools that can (attempt to) "unformat" it. However, this can also result in files that you deliberately deleted also being restored, which may be a factor in whether or not you want to do this.