Shane

I've suggested being able to prioritise reading from SSDs to Stablebit. It seems like it could be a useful feature if it's feasible to implement.

1. Add the replacement drive to the pool then tell DrivePool to remove the faulty drive from the pool. If you can't or don't want to wait for the replacement drive then you can tell DrivePool to remove the faulty drive from the pool immediately; if there's enough free space on the remaining drives it will move the files to the other drives. Either way, once you've done that, you may want to compare your pool against your backup to check that no files were damaged by the faulty drive. Note that if you have Stablebit Scanner, then DrivePool can be set to automatically evacuate a drive that Scanner detects is failing (useful if a drive decides to start dying just after you've gone to work, sleep, whatever). 2. Yes. Plug in the USB disks and create a pool that contains only those disks. The pool will only appear when one or more of those disks are plugged in. Caveat: keep in mind that if you don't (dis)connect all of the disks simultaneously, that pool will be set read-only until all of the disks are connected and DrivePool will want to verify the pool (which can take a long time if you have a lot of files) once all the disks are reconnected. You may want to temporarily stop the "StableBit DrivePool Service" service while you are (dis)connecting the disks to avoid this: stop DP service (dis)connect all of the disks in the pool from the computer start DP service

Missing disk notifications should show up in the daily service logs, "%PROGRAMDATA%\StableBit DrivePool\Service\Logs\Service" folder. E.g. you could search the logs for "Lost existing pool part" and then look at the identifying string (e.g. 26C04868...) to find the disk containing that poolpart. You can also view the last ??? minutes of the current day's log via DrivePool's {Cog icon} > Troubleshooting > Service Log menu option if you want to watch its activity in real time, and you can also use that to modify its tracing levels (none/errors/warnings/information/verbose) for various areas. For example manually disabling a disk via Disk Management displays this in the Service Log view (in the Service Log files it is formatted differently): 11:46:51.1: Warning: 0 : [PoolPartUpdates] Lost existing pool part 26C04868-CC94-4051-B68A-B9ABB6B16E5B (isCloudDrive=False, isOtherPool=False) You can also get DrivePool to email you about any missing disks: {Cog icon} > Notifications > Notify On Missing Disk (checked) and Notify By Email (filled with your email address). It should contain a description of the missing disk (volume label and drive letter, or model and serial). For seeing what files are open, I sometimes use OpenedFilesView (freeware from nirsoft.net). In this case with View > Use Quick Filter enabled, "poolpart" as the search string (without the quotes). You can either manually refresh or you can use the Auto Refresh under options if you want it to monitor changes. If the Process Name is "System Process" then it's Windows or a driver, if it's "svchost.exe" then it's a Service (probably also a Windows one but may be something else).

I'm not aware of any controls for specifying which drive(s) a pool should prefer for reading files. However, do you see any favorable difference if the Manage Pool > Performance > Read Striping menu option is turned off (it's enabled by default, and will thus be trying to read from both drives for any file above a certain size that is on both drives)?

I'd consider that to be normal and expected; user345678 is correct that DrivePool's features require processing time. It's just more noticeable with SSDs because they're so much quicker than HDDs, and read striping doesn't work well (or at all) with small files. But as Christopher pointed out, increasing performance isn't what DrivePool was really designed for (edit: IMO it's impressive how well it manages to avoid the opposite happening).

Disclaimer: Not a DrivePool dev. @AlanO I suspect the problem with "identifying the size of the file being transferred" is that DrivePool presents itself as a standard NTFS-formatted single-volume drive to the Windows file system interface, which (I presume) means it has to deal with the fact that Windows expects to be able to create files of undefined length whenever it wants. TLDR while Windows may first ask "how much free space do you have", when it goes "I'm going to start writing a file, I'll tell you when I'm done" then the only choice a NTFS drive - physical or virtual - has is to go "yes boss, I'll tell you if I run into any problems". The drive does not get to ask questions.

Glad to hear you've been able to recover (most of) the data so far. From past and painful experience I would not buy "external USB" HDD for any long-term use let alone storage; would rather buy a bare HDD and a decent enclosure separately. If you're looking for new drives, you might find this article of interest: https://www.anandtech.com/show/12075/best-consumer-hdds - it also compares enterprise tier drives. Possibly you might also be interested in the Data Hoarder subforum on reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/ - quite a busy place. I looked at using Blu-Ray instead of DVD or HDD but if you go that route make sure you don't get any discs that mention LTH - that's organic dye and you do not want that for archiving. Also not to be confused with HTL which is non-organic and is apparently 25+ years if done right. Honestly I think your plan of "planned HDD replacement" is probably the best KISS approach for a small number of drives. Since you mentioned using pairs of drives I'd suggest each drive being same size but a different brand (e.g. one brand X + one brand Y).

I'm hoping for another remote session. After further reading I suspect the (main) issue may be the use of SMR drives (horribly slow during long sequential writes involving used sectors) but I'd like to confirm exactly what's going on. And if we seed the pool at least we can work around that problem for the time being.

That... looks like a .NET framework issue? In order I would try: uninstalling DrivePool checking Windows Update for any .NET related updates running Microsoft's .NET Framework repair tool running Microsoft's system file checker (from command prompt, sfc /scannow) reinstalling DrivePool If that doesn't help, I would consider opening a Support ticket.

If you've got time now, I can help you out via remote support (I'm on lunch break). I'll message you a link.

It looks like you've got only one physical disk currently in your pool? Are you "moving" your files from a folder on that physical disk to a folder in your pool? If so that'll lead to Windows not realising it's still the same drive "physically" and it'll be bottlenecking itself by doing copy-delete-copy-delete-copy-delete when it could just be doing move-move-move... Just saw your latest post as I was typing the above; looks like that's what's happening? There's a MUCH faster way if so...

A properly manufactured HDD should not degrade in that short a time if kept well (e.g. dry, cool, dark). However, the magnetic patterns that store the data do slowly decay - whether the drive is in use or in storage - so good practice is to "refresh" hard drives every two or three years (i.e. check & re-write the contents). So your idea works well in that regard. You might also wish to look at MultiPar which can create parity files that can be used to check and repair file damage of individual files/folders, and SnapRAID which does the same thing for entire/multiple drives - I know some DrivePool users rely on the latter for guarding their pools against "bit rot".

In my experience Resource Monitor's reporting of read and write rates can lag behind what's actually happening, making it look like it's transferring more files at any given point than it really is - but that transfer graph is definitely a sign of hitting some kind of bottleneck. It's the sort of thing I'd expect to see from a large number of small files, a network drive over wireless, or a USB flash drive. Can you tell us more about what version of DrivePool you're using (the latest "stable" release is 2.2.3.1019), what drives are involved (HDD, SSD, other), how they're hooked up (SATA, USB, other) and if you've made any changes to the Manage Pool -> Performance options (default is to have only Read striping and Real-time duplication ticked)? Examining the Performance indicators of DrivePool (to see it, maximise the DrivePool UI and click the right-pointing triangle to the left of the word Performance) and the Performance tab of Task Manager when the bottlenecking is happening might also be useful. Hmm. You might also want to try something other than the built-in Windows copier to see if that helps, e.g. FastCopy ?

Hi Larry, if you were able to create a pool then it sounds like your problem is different? What was the message you were getting? Also if chkdsk is finding problems to fix, you might also want to try Stablebit Scanner or another utility that checks the SMART status of your drives to see if they're in good condition or going bad.

The hidden PoolPart.* folders should still be on the physical drives that form the pool, so your data should still be intact. Also your version is out of date; try upgrading to version 2.2.3.1019 of DrivePool, I have it working fine on Windows 10 build 2004.

Can't imagine it'd be the trial status. I'm thinking it's a bug too (whether DP or something else). I'd suggest opening a support ticket via https://stablebit.com/contact to report it so that Stablebit can investigate (opening a ticket makes it easier for them to track and followup with you).

So basically you want to be having CloudDrive sync things "downwards" rather than "upwards", so to speak? It sounds like something you might be able to do yourself by renting a VPS (Virtual Private Server). Do an internet search for "VPS hosting"?

If I had to guess, it might relate to the Windows API that handles thread priority adjustment: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/procthread/scheduling-priorities So I would assume that -15 to +15 covers the availability priorities below/above a "normal" of 16 for the task (since "0" is exclusive to a special system thread). In any case I'd be very careful about increasing it, Windows doesn't always handle "overclocking" processes well and you might want to be ready to deal with a non-responsive OS.

That's bizarre! I'd suggest the following: uninstall DrivePool. delete the PoolPart.* folders on each drive (since you haven't used them yet, and since they're also not showing up in DrivePool, those folders should be safe to delete) reinstall DrivePool. "Add" your first drive. If it works properly, the "Create a New Pool" should switch to displaying your first pool and that pool's new drive letter, and the drive you added should move from the "Non-Pooled" section to the "Pooled" section. When you created your first pool on the computer, you should also have had a "Congratulations!" window pop up with a few tips; if that didn't show up last time, it should show up now, but it only shows up once. If you're still having problems, let us know.

Can you attach a screenshot of the drivepool window?

Sorry, I'd forgotten that DP doesn't allow dynamic disks (it's been years since I've had to deal with them). I did find answers here and here as to why in another thread; the TLDR is apparently dynamic disks aren't supported because they (the Windows API) make it difficult and thus slow for DrivePool to ensure any duplicate files are actually on separate physical disks, and customers don't like slow: to quote, "if your product is dirt slow, people will move on. ESPECIALLY when it comes to storage." Re converting dynamic disks to basic disks there are some third-party partition managers that can do it without having to erase the content, so you might find a trial version to do the job as a one-off? Of course I'd make sure to have current backups just in case.

Hi, do you still need a hand with this?

Check "Manage Balancing -> Settings", that options such as "Balance immediately" and "Allow balancing plug-ins to force immediate balancing" are ticked?

Do you still need help with this?

File duplication and balancing settings are handled on a per-pool basis. So if Pool P used drives D and E, set to x2 dupe, and Pool Q used drives F and G, set to x1 (no) dupe, and you created a Pool R that used pools P and Q, set to x2 dupe, any files placed in Pool R would be effectively x3 dupe (x2 + x1) while any files placed in Pool P would still be x2 and any files placed in Pool Q would still be x1 (no) dupe. So there would not be any balancing "between" Pools P and Q immediately following Pool R's creation, because there wouldn't yet be any files in Pool R to balance between them. (And if you did later put a file in Pool R, you would not see it in Pool P or Q unless you turned on viewing of hidden items and looked inside P or Q for R's hidden PoolPart.* folders.) Hope this makes sense and answers your question.