Shane

It's a combination of drive, controller/motherboard and operating system. In theory, if you have a SATA drive with AHCI enabled for it on the motherboard and you are running Vista or later, you should be able to hot-swap the drives - typically via the "Safely Remove/Eject" tray icon. If you can't see your drive in the icon's list, it isn't in a hot-swappable configuration. Warning: if your Windows boot drive is set to IDE, changing it to AHCI without editing the registry first will cause it to BSOD: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/922976 (not that you can hotswap the Windows boot drive anyway, but some motherboards don't allow you to change IDE/AHCI settings just for the non-boot drives).

This is unfortunately a Windows problem - sometimes it will "bump" a drive letter to a different letter when you add a drive while the system is powered down or a drive is/was missing (e.g. you have C, D, E, F; F is your pool; you shut down the OS to add a new drive, but rather than call it G, Windows may decide to call it F and bump the previous F drive to the next available letter). I recommend setting the drive letter(s) of your pool(s) close to the end of the alphabet (e.g. P, Q, etc) to reduce the risk of this happening.

That would be http://stablebit.com/ (mod note: topic moved to DrivePool forum)

Yes, you can do this. Be mindful of the quality of the SSD you plan to use - most(?) have greatly improved, but the lifespan of an SSD is still ultimately proportional to the number of write/erase cycles, and feeder disk activity is basically a daily series of write/erase events. And since the SSD will also have your OS on it, if your SSD's manufacturer has software that allows you to monitor the projected remaining life of the disk (e.g. Intel's Toolbox and Samsung's Magician software), I'd strongly recommend using it.

Does DrivePool remember the drive letter of an "absent" pool, or would that have to be manually corrected if/as needed?

And then there's taking a fourth option! Create a second pool. Add the 4TB array to it. On one of your drives (other than your pool drive), create and share a folder called "MetaPool" (or whatever). Under it, create a folder for each of your pools, e.g. "Pool 1", "Pool 2". Use the Disk Management utility to add each as a mount path for its corresponding pool. Congratulations, you now have multiple pools all under one shared folder. Pros: files in the array's pool can benefit from DrivePool features. cons: the capacity of the 4TB array can't be shared with your first pool since multiple pools can't share space on a physical drive.

Short answer: not currently. Longer answer: some very bright spark needs to write a DP plug-in that enables this. Taking a third option: Let's call your 4TB RAID 5 array "F:" and your two 3TB drives "G:" and "H:", and your pool "P:"... Open up Explorer. Create and share a folder that we'll call "F:\MetaPool", and underneath that create two more folders. The first we'll call "F:\MetaPool\The Folder You Want". The second we'll call "F:\MetaPool\The Pool You Have". Open up Disk Management. Find "P:" and right click, choose "Change Drive Letter...", choose "Add...", choose "Mount...", and browse to "The Pool You Have" that you created on "F:". Click okay until you get back Disk Management. Congratulations, you now have a shared folder called "MetaPool" that contains both "The Pool You Have" and "The Folder You Want". Yes, it's true that "The Folder You Want" isn't actually _in_ your pool, but since you only want the files in that folder to be on the array.... Disadvantages: files in "The Folder You Want" can't benefit from the features of DrivePool, such as feeder disks and duplication.

Pools are independent of each other, so there should be no issues (other than, of course, DrivePool warning you that one of your pools is missing all of its drives). Edit: See Drashna's post below!

Hi revnull, you can remove drive letters from existing drives in a pool without affecting access to the pool itself. You can also use Windows's Disk Management to mount drive volumes as if they were folders in another drive (e.g. c:\mounts\g -> g:\).

What should happen is this: Files written to the pool land on the feeder disk(s); at least two feeder disks are required if duplication is enabled. The files remain on the feeder disk(s) and the pool condition is reduced below 100% until the next scheduled balancing run. Incidentally, this does indeed mean the feeder disk(s) act like a cache for recent files. The balancing run moves any files it finds on the feeder disk(s) to the archive disk(s) and the pool condition should return to 100%. If it's not happening like this, it's not working as intended, and like Salty says hopefully we can fix it. For whatever it may be worth, the "notes" for the Archive Optimizer plugin do suggest it should be used by itself (i.e., try turning off any other balancers you might be using, in case they are conflicting).

So, basically, you want a non-balancing read-only pool, to which you manually add new files via the poolpart folders on the individual disks? Hmm. That's pretty much how the pool behaves when it detects a missing disk. I'd suggest making a feature request via http://stablebit.com/contact - it might be feasible to adapt that to your needs.

While I don't understand why you'd want to do things that way - I can only presume your work involves creating lots of read-only data that never gets renamed, edited or deleted, and that you don't have the budget for both backups and duplication - I think you would need to at least implement the following: select "do not balance automatically" (so that DrivePool does not move files around the disks without your knowledge) untick "allow balancing plug-ins to force immediate balancing" (ditto) untick all balancers except "ordered file placement" arrange the list of drives and fill limits in "ordered file placement" to your liking And yes, if a disk in the pool corrupted/died and you replaced it with your robocopied backup disk, DrivePool should recognise the hidden poolpart folder. Although, you might have to be careful about preventing DrivePool from seeing both the original and backup at the same time in case it gets confused - perhaps robocopy the original into a subfolder, e.g X:\poolpart to Y:\backup\poolpart where X: is the original disk and Y: is the backup disk, and thus when replacing a bad original you would move the poolpart out of the backup folder into the root folder as the last step - don't know if this is necessary, but prevention is better than cure here. Another thing to be aware of would be in case of moving the pool to a new machine, making sure the anti-balancing configuration was in place. Hmm. Might need to ask Alex/Drashna about where the balancing configuration is stored.

Note that DrivePool must be told to "remove" the drives - which means it moves the pool content off those drives onto the remaining drives - before you actually physically remove the drives. If you add your external drives to the pool (a good idea), don't worry about letting it rebalance before removing the faulty drives, let DrivePool take care of it during/afterward. The priority should be getting rid of the bad drives. I can't see any attachment to your last post; I'd guess that means the pool has either run out of space to keep everything duplicated or it's detected it's lost/losing duplication integrity (i.e. files) on the faulty drives.

That's quite a stumper. Unless anyone here pops up with a solution, I'd suggest opening a ticket via http://stablebit.com/contact and ask Alex for help directly.

Um... antivirus/firewall settings? What size does Windows report for the files that have been copied across but still won't open locally?

Silly question time: after moving the slider, did you click the "Save" button? Excerpting from Alex's response to my ticket on another issue with the OFP balancer, with emphasis mine, "So if you add more than one new drive to the pool, all of those new drives will be added to the bottom of the existing list that you've Saved, but sorted by percent used. And more importantly, if this is a new pool and you've never clicked Save to commit your drive order, then there really is no order that you've defined for the balancer and the list is just built by percent used." Alex went on to say that the drive order issue will be fixed in a new build, but when I tested with Save-ing the order to see the difference, I also tested your slider issue and noticed that, while the main status screen did not alter its markers to anything other than 0% or 90%, clicking Save did change those markers from 90% to 0% or vice versa corresponding to whether the changes in the OFP list should affect the balancing for those drives!

It's third-party, but you can use "Everything" by VoidTools to quickly see which disks a duplicated file resides on. When duplication is set to real-time, it is supposed to be immediate, though you won't see the pool condition change to "Duplicating" when copying a file into the pool since it's happening simultaneously with the copying. If it's not actually duplicating in real-time when it's set to do so, and you can confirm this independently (e.g. with "Everything"), then that's a critical bug and please report it to Stablebit. For example, when I have duplication on and real-time, and I copy a 10GB project file to P:\work (where P is the pool drive), "Everything" should (and does, for me) show something like: G:\PoolPart.string\work\project.dat K:\PoolPart.string\work\project.dat where G and K are drives in the pool.

Tested my install (v2.0.0.320), exhibits same behaviour as yours. Please do submit the ticket. I have a ticket open concerning a different behaviour of that plugin (new disks not always being added to the bottom of the OFP's drive list as claimed by its info tip).

The default is that all the data gets read and written (move-via-copy) rather than a straight move operation, as Windows sees the pool drive as being a different disk. Like drashna says though, you can take advantage of the hidden PoolPart folder on the same drive to do a straight move operation.

Under 1.3, the Dashboard addon currently does not provide a way to set/view which sub-folders have custom duplication settings. You use the shell command to set/view the count on sub-folders. Under 2.0, the GUI allows you to set/view which sub-folders have custom duplication settings (Pool Options, File Protection, Folder Duplication), and in that menu you can expand the entire tree by highlighting the root of the drive and tapping the asterisk key.

Protip: installing unofficial betas without the developer giving you the go-ahead is a quick way to end up in the scary end of "big red button" territory. Try this link for DrivePool removal instructions: http://wiki.covecube.com/StableBit_DrivePool_Q8964978 Note that it is for the 1.x version, but it can be applied to the 2.x version as well (just ignore the Remote Desktop and Dashboard references).

Yes, that is (or should be) the default behaviour if you turn off all the plug-ins.

Try using a fully qualified file name (e.g. "c:\myfolder\myfile.txt") as the value instead of "true".

Is this also why VHDs aren't visible (1.3.x) or can't be added (2.0) to DrivePool? Are there any plans to make TC and/or VHD disks poolable?

After you unplug the disk, you should tell DrivePool to remove the missing disk from the pool. It will check for and reduplicate any files that are supposed to be duplicated.