Dave Hobson

Hey Christopher. I tend to Micro-manage my media in Drivepool and I have a lot of media. I seem to be having issues here with the various placement rules I have Set. After balancing i get the message at the bottom saying along the lines of "x amount of media cannot be moved to respect file placement rules". What I'm wondering is if there is anywhere in the logs or similar, that gives more info on the files that cannot be moved according to the rules I have set? Clearly I have something wrong somewhere despite no drive having less than 500GB of space free and the offending files amount to only around 234GB. No worries if there isn't I will trawl though and see if I can find the offending files/rules that way. Thanks in advance.

Hey thanks for that... However I really should have just created a "small" test ReFS drive. I have no idea why but every movie or show has severe lip sync issues since I changed to ReFS... Copying the files back to an NTFS drive and the issue is gone. That coupled with only just discovering that I could have achieved my desired parity with SnapRaid and WITHOUT interfering will the existing files. So right now I'm moving my 30TB+ back to NTFS. I really should have looked into it more when you first mentioned SnapRaid but you live and learn . Anyway one more question on a new balancing strategy I plan to adopt. In the past I have always balanced the free space however I'm looking to cascade the drives BUT still try to keep file placement rules if that makes sense. With the "ordered file placement" plugin... Or indeed what seems to be the same option embedded in the SSD optimizer. Does this cascade the filling of disks regardless of the type of media or can it be fine tuned. I did actually set the order that I wanted to fill the disks HOWEVER, I also hoped it would still honour the placement rules. For example Movies on Disks 1,2 & 3 ... Filling Disk 1 to Capacity first Current TV Shows on Disks 4 & 5 ... Filling Disk 4 to Capacity first Archived TV Shows on Disks 6 & 7 ...Filling Disk 6 to Capacity first However It just seemed to start throwing all media types on Disk 1. So that's either because its not achievable OR probably because I have the tick boxes for the "file placement settings" set wrong... It wouldn't be the first time. No big deal. I only have three major libraries and am currently getting round it with a different pool for each library. It would have been nice to feed the SSD'(s) then have the SSD feed each media type to the relevant disks. With my current setup I guess I would need an SSD for each pool.

True enough for any RECENT "pooling" converts. Sadly ReFS isn't supported ...having just finished converting the whole 30-40TB on my system. Nor is it, it seems in FlexRaid (which I know I bought a licence for way back when....) Ok... Well I have been monitoring things as I moved the File System... Definitely haven't seen anything out of the ordinary. Well I'm on Enterprise so hopefully covered... I'm jus a little baffled that at one point it seemed that MS were attempting to actively push ReFS to the masses. Now it seems they are using it as a further revenue source ?

Ahh indeed... More licences.... I cant believe I hadn't thought of that. As for Storage Spaces, I have no idea how I fell for it. As someone who has never had any confidence in Raid purely because I feel more comfortable knowing that I can take any drive out of any system and read it on any other system. From what I saw in my failed tests, Storage Spaces offers nothing beyond what DrivePool has offered over the last few years...Well apart from the ability to lose 35TB of data if you go down the parity route. On the plus side... It did actually give me an excuse to switch to ReFS as I restore my data. Although I do wonder what the future holds now MS are pulling the ability to create a ReFS drive in W10 other than in Enterprise or the new Pro Workstations edition.

And I know where you are coming from... Here's my scenario. I'm a DrivePool user since the days of concept.(The WGS/WHSv1 days) I'm also a data hoarder albeit on a budget so literally no local resilience. Despite the "seat of the pants" approach I have had one minor scare but no actual data loss. until.... Only a week ago I decided to make some drastic changes as my birthdays pass by and the concept of the inevitable disaster seems more daunting. So away I went... ReFS, Storage Spaces & Parity. A "several weeks" undertaking (with my amount of data) but well worth it in the end...or so I thought. Four days later when my storage space said goodbye in the middle of the migration to SS. It didn't actually vacate, more locked me out. Fortunately I hadn't deleted much of the source data so it wasn't the end of the world. So after three SOLID days of trying to restore the SS and discovering there isn't to much support from MS even after all these years, I'm back after less than a week.(I'm staying with ReFS tho) And that's what got me thinking... I paid what? $25 maybe... some 6 or 7 years ago. Back when sterling was stronger that was probably £10-£15. For a lifetime... Really??? I'm expected to pay £20-£50 a year for AV updates... same again for Malwarebytes, G-Suite, Amazon , PlexPass etc... Meanwhile that one payment way back has given me piece of mind for more than half a decade already. Just wow!!! And now having done a reinstall after the SS experiment shambles I just noticed you cured my one major gripe. The "check all" & "uncheck others." Despite the limited budget I do try to keep my system lean by reinstalling the OS at least twice a year. With a large amount of HDD's and a large amount of libraries (that must strictly stay where on the drives that I specify) this is pretty life changing, cos it was a real PITA before. 30 minutes to reinstall the OS & Programs... and two hours ticking various boxes in Drivepool . So I get that Alex and yourself have morals and that you don't want to charge for support or yearly subscriptions. But honestly.. if there was a "donate" button somewhere, I for one would be hitting it at least once a year. I guess we cannot force you to accept our money, but I still think it would be a great option... You would be staying "humble" and not feeling you are over charging, but still giving options for those of us who really do appreciate the Value for Money that you provide.