Shane

Great to hear. However, be aware that currently FileID does not behave as expected on pools, so software that assumes FileID is perfect may break badly after a reboot. Link. Currently there is no ETA on a fix from StableBit. In summary, generally a FileID is presumed by apps that use it to be unique and persistent on a given volume that reports itself as NTFS (collisions are actually possible albeit astronomically unlikely), however DrivePool's implementation is such that collisions after a reboot are effectively guaranteed on a given pool. Affected software is that which decides that historical file A (pre-reboot) is current file B (post-reboot) because they have the same FileID and proceeds to read or write the wrong file. TLDR, if you're not using such apps (so far some backup/sync tools, e.g. OneDrive, some have also reported FreeFileSync) you're unaffected, if you are then you should be careful not to use them with anything you keep on a pool.

"I have 4x 2TB nvme SSDs and 1x 4TB SATA SSD in one pool. Ideally, I'd like all my files to be balanced evenly across the 4x nvme disks, and the duplicates stored on the SATA SSD. Eventually, I plan to add another 1x 4TB SATA SSD to equal the total volume of the 4x nvme disks, but for now that's not necessary for the amount of storage my files are taking up." Hi GoreMaker! If this is the goal I would be recommending a multi-pool arrangement, not the SSD Optimizer - the latter is intended for using faster disks as cache rather than as storage and will want to empty the NVMe disks to fill the SATA disk(s). Example #1 (let drivepool handle the duplication and the deciding of whether user IO will be to/from your NVMe or your SATA disks): Create a pool (let's call it N) and add your 4 NVMe disks to it. Set this pool's balancing to evenly distribute via the Disk Space Equalizer plugin. Create a pool (let's call it S) and add your 1 SATA disk (and later, the second SATA disk) to it. Set it as above. Create a pool (let's call it P) and add your pools N and S to it. Set it to x2 duplication. You can now put files on P and they will be evenly distributed across your NVMe disks with their duplicates distributed on your SATA disk(s). Example #2 (you decide whether user IO will be to/from your NVMe or SATA disks): Create a pool (let's call it N) and add your 4 NVMe disks to it. Set this pool's balancing to evenly distribute via the Disk Space Equalizer plugin. Create a pool (let's call it S) and add your 1 SATA disk (and later, the second SATA disk) to it. Set it as above. Set up a scheduled task or similar to mirror the content of your N pool to your S pool (e.g. robocopy N:\ S:\ /mir /dcopy:dat /xa:s). You can now put files on N and they will be mirrored on S whenever the task runs. Or you could set up a two-way sync via third-party utility if you wished to have N and S synchronising bidirectionally.

Hi Dalmus! Yes, pretty much what you're thinking: power down, replace the drive, power back up, tell DrivePool to remove the missing bad drive and to add the new good one, it will handle the rest. If you had any drive-specific rules (e.g. file placement) you would have to update those.

Moved thread to CloudDrive General. Glad to hear you were able to get it going, quite a strange error.

Hi Mesonto, it's not possible within a single pool. If the requirement is just to avoid having to change shares on the LAN you could consider using nested pools (e.g. E and F supporting D)? Issues to consider would be 1, as the drives are already in use for D it would involve either a lot of background time adding/removing drives or some delicate manual work migrating/reseeding the pool structures, and 2, if you have any exceedingly deep path lengths (over 32 thousand characters!) in your existing pool you may not be able to nest it.

1. @Alex does the GUI or JSON take precedence in a conflict? 2. I agree there's a couple of parts of the docs that need updating. 3. DrivePool operates on three levels, driver (handles direct file operations) and service (handles balancing, consistency and other scheduled tasks) and GUI (handles the user actions like adding disks, creating pools, etc). The GUI relies on the service which relies on the driver. There's also a command line tool (dpcmd, must be run as administrator) that can talk to the driver (but can only do a small subset of things the GUI can do plus a few others). 4. The advantage of using DrivePool's duplication if you're using SnapRAID is that your entire pool would remain readable during one or more disk failures (depending on how you've organised your disks) without needing to rebuild from the latter's parity, and you can resume writing as soon as you drop the bad disk. The disadvantage of doing so is of course any additional parity computation overhead (depending, ditto) and the additional storage consumption (since every file will take up twice as much - or whatver duplication multiplier you've set - of the available space in the pool, assuming a basic implementation).

Hi surfercool, it's unfortunate that you've had no response to your ticket since there seems to have been a small rash of BSOD issues with ~2.3.11. You mention 2.3.9.1612 does not crash on your system, is there any reason not to stick with it? That you're getting such poor rates and constant crashes, and that DrivePool is being triggered to constantly perform balancing operations (I might suggest you turn off automatic balancing to see if that helps), does have me curious as to what hardware you're running DrivePool on and what software you're running alongside it. Is it something really heavy in terms of disk IO?

Hi denywinarto, it's not possible to shrink the DrivePool disk/volume. You can only reduce the reported capacity (but not the reported 2TB "physical" size) only by removing disks from the pool.

Hi Ian, the short answer is I'd recommend keeping Pool A and Pool B separate and using a clickable or scheduled script/task to do the backup (e.g. via robocopy, FreeFileSync or similar).

Hi, you'll need to open a support ticket.

Hmm. Should be working, so I'd guess something about the files needing to be moved is confusing DrivePool's process. For DriveV try changing it to "Allow files to be placed on other disks" to see if that has any effect? You could also try temporarily removing the DriveV rule so that the Ordered File Placement balancer can arrange the content to its liking then put the rule back to see if it stays un-confused. Beyond that I think I'd be out of ideas other than manually moving some of files between the poolpart disks and then forcing a remeasure.

Are you still getting the warning in the File Placement section?

"Okay - yes, I think so. The big area where I'm confused is the cloud drive that is created on my NAS. Because that creates a file system that's wholly inaccessible to my NAS, correct? At least not directly, correct? So is there any way to do that, or is there a way to ensure that the cloud drive is expandable without creating issues on my NAS for storage." Correct: you connect Cloud Drive to a shared folder on your NAS, and then create a cloud drive that exists as a folder of files inside that shared folder, and doing that effectively mounts the cloud drive on your PC. You can expand (or shrink) the size of the cloud drive, and that's how much space its folder of files uses up of the share on your NAS (so if the share had 5 TB available then you could expand the cloud drive up to 5 TB, etc). "I'm wondering if the better solution is to leave my Synology NAS alone and any of the "extra" drives that I can't fit into my physical PC I'll put in a secondary NAS and be done with things. Ideally, I would prefer to have one "whole" drive, rather than it split even between 2 different devices, but it doesn't seem like that's going to be a solvable problem with my setup, right?" Yes, if you don't want to be splitting your storage over multiple devices then you'd have to get a bigger NAS or PC with room for extra drives (internally or via an external drive dock attached via USB or eSATA or whatever). E.g. I'm using an old eight-bay tower PC as my home server. "Also, what other settings should I configure on that share, ALSO (also) I removed the connection to the file share, but it doesn't seem possible to remove the file system I created? So I'm left a little.... lost there." As far as your NAS is concerned it's just another folder of files inside the shared folder, so you could use the Synology's File Station to delete that folder of files like any other (though if it's currently attached in CloudDrive you can "destroy" it there on the PC and it will clean itself up on the NAS as well). "Just to confirm, I can't select an existing folder with data to use within Drivepool, can I?" Correct: unfortunately DrivePool can only add local basic disks (that are formatted as NTFS or ReFS volumes) to a pool; CloudDrive's virtual drives use the SCSI interface to indistinguishably emulate such a local basic disk, so you'd need something that could do the same. "Is it even possible to use a LUN/iSCSI on my Synology to do so? That is definitely above my paygrade!"" Turns out it's apparently surprisingly easy (first link is a short no-frills how-to, second link has someone explaining more about how it all works) but I don't currently have a Synology NAS to play with it to see if DrivePool will recognise the resulting volume as a poolable disk. If you're willing please give it a try! I believe however that you'd still be unable to directly move data between your NAS share and your NAS LUN - you'd still have to move them via the PC that's mounting the drive on the LUN?

Basically if you have a NAS and a PC and you'd like to pool them via CloudDrive and DrivePool, it would go like this: install DrivePool and CloudDrive on the PC use CloudDrive to "connect" to a File Share on the NAS (or via FTP or other method applicable to your NAS) use CloudDrive to "create" a cloud drive using the above connection (the size you choose here can be changed later) it will create a folder in that share to store the virtual drive's data (basically CloudDrive's equivalent of a VHDX image file, if that helps) use DrivePool to create a new pool when you add drives, it creates a folder on that drive to store that drive's portion of the pool (if you're familiar with linux file systems then DrivePool is similar to mergerfs and unionfs, in that it logically "joins" the folders of existing drives and presents them as "one" drive, instead of being block-based like zfs etc). use DrivePool to add the PC's physical drives to the pool use DrivePool to add the NAS's cloud drive to the pool you can now move files into the pool you can create network shares to it just like to a normal drive, so other devices in your network can access the content / move content into it. Does that help?

I think you get temperature in the tooltip if you've also got StableBit Scanner installed? Though even then some drives still don't report temperature (I've got three external Toshiba drives that are supposedly identical models and only one of them reports temperature, its serial number is quite different to the other two so I suspect an internal chip change).

With the settings as above it shouldn't be moving existing files to new drives at all.

I've left it open for days (and occasionally weeks) between remote sessions and not run into any issues. Only consideration I'd give is that I wouldn't necessarily trust Windows itself to keep behaving properly if not rebooted at least once a month, but that depends a lot on version, bloat, load, hardware, etc.

I suspect the warnings are because the Ordered File Placement balancer is conflicting with the File Placement rules. If you want the rules for DriveV to have priority, try un-ticking "File placement rules respect real-time file placement limits set by the balancing plug-ins" in Settings.

Since the pool is at least showing up in read-only mode when the disk is connected, you could save the output of a dir /s/b of the pool with and without the disk connected, e.g. from the command line "dir p:\ /s /b > c:\withdisk.txt" and "dir p:\ /s /b > c:\withoutdisk.txt" where p is the pool drive and then compare the two outputs (e.g. using the winmerge app); files missing from the withoutdisk.txt should be the non-duplicated files on that disk.

It's possible the damage on the disk involves the pool metadata area, which could interfere with loading the UI etc. I'd power down the machine and pull the disk to see if the UI can load without it. IMO with a pending sector count that high I would be ditching that disk altogether or at the very least not trusting it in a pool.

Do you have any rules set in Manage Pool -> Balancing -> File Placement -> Rules that could be conflicting with the Ordered File Placement balancer plug-in?

Does a Manage Pool -> Re-measure, followed by attempting a manual Re-balance, have any effect?

Manage Pool -> Balancing -> Settings: Automatic balancing -> however often you want it to check that files are where they should be or even "Do not balance automatically". Automatic balancing - Triggers -> slider at default 90% and tick "Or if at least this much data needs to be moved" and set your preference. Optionally, tick "Allow balancing plug-ins to force immediate balancing" (mainly relevant if you want to use Scanner) Optionally, tick "File placement rules respect real-time file placement limits set by the balancing plug-ins" (mainly relevant for Scanner, SSD Optimizer, Drive Usage Limiter and Ordered File Placement plug-ins). Tick "Balancing plug-ins respect file placement rules" (very important) and optionally tick "Unless the drive is being emptied" (important if using Scanner or SSD Optimizer). (note: the above ticks are the defaults) Manage Pool -> Balancing -> Balancers: Un-tick everything except (optionally) Scanner and/or SSD Optimizer if you use them. Make sure you didn't miss anything at the bottom of the scroll. If you're using SSD Optimizer, make sure its Ordered placement tabs are both un-ticked. Note: if all plug-ins in the Balancers section are un-ticked then the only thing that should be affecting the location of existing files are the File Placement rules, regardless of what's ticked or un-ticked in Settings. Manage Pool -> Balancing -> File Placement: Folders: organise according to your preferences. Rules: if you add additional rules here keep in mind their order affects priority (e.g. any custom rule placed above the Folders-generated rules will supercede the latter). if files are still being moved to excluded drives, try selecting "Never allow files to be placed on any other disks". if files are still being moved to excluded drives (and not being moved back), try removing all rules, saving, then recreating them (clicking on Save again when done).

If you've only got two drives and the whole pool is set to real-time duplication then it shouldn't matter, there should be little if anything for Balancing to actually do; nightly is totally fine (certain balancers such as Scanner will still force immediate balancing anyway if they detect a problem, unless you've turned that option off). If duplication is scheduled rather than real-time and you're wanting essentially RAID 1 behaviour from the pool then (unless you have a particular reason not to) you should be enabling the latter; Manage Pool -> Performance -> Real-Time Duplication should show a tick. If you had (or get) more drives than your duplication level then the answer would be "it depends". Do you use the pool only during the day, have plenty of free space and don't cache via the SSD Optimizer balancer? Probably balance nightly. The more of those where the reverse applies, the more you could consider moving towards higher-frequency balancing.

You might want adjacent pools for things like backups (e.g. pool A is shared and pool B holds versioned backups of pool A in case someone deletes or overwrites the wrong file). You might want nested pools for certain balancing or hardware tricks that are difficult to do with a single pool (e.g. pool A could be made from pools B and C, where B is all internal SSD and C is all external HDD, or B is your newest drives and C is your oldest drives, or B is local drives and C is cloud drives, or some other circumstance). Re your backup question, it depends greatly on how your online backup works.