IanT

Got it!! As I said much earlier, this is a 'nice to have', I don't actually need to do it as I have enough spare SSD;s to cover the minimum need. So in fact I have lots of time to run a variety of experiments, and may even choose to not bother (probably not what you hoped for given how much thought you've put into this). Ian

'Whew' indeed!!! First of all, I cannot believe that you went to that amount of trouble! Secondly, it will take me a while to "process" this 😄. I have to say that in the 'simple' approach above, I actually do have symbolic links, and some NTFS 'clever stuff', and then in the 'alternate' way, I'm still wrapping my head around step 6.2, especially the phrase "you should see pool H "under" pool B". I'll need to perform some experiments before this all drops into place for me. Nevertheless, thankyou, thankyou, thankyou for confirming in my mind that this may well be the most impressive software I own, and that this group of users (and volunteers) is without doubt the best!

I have a question about hierarchical pools. I have an existing Pool containing 9 disks, with a variety of duplication on various folders. I also have available several SSD's which I would like to use as accelerators for the pool, but I would prefer to avoid 'wasting' space on these by duplicating. So, thinking hierarchical pools could solve this I set out to build the following set of pools ..... Pool H (new pool, the root of my hierarchy) / \ / \ Pool A (new SSDs) Pool B (existing pool 9 disks) Pool H would not be duplicated, but would mark Pool A as being an SSD drive, and Pool B as being an Archive drive. When I did this and opened a file browser on Pool H, there was nothing showing!! However when I browse Pool B, all my data is there. The question is how do I "populate" Pool H with the data from Pool B?? and if this involves physically moving files on Pool B, how do I retain the replication behavior on Pool B? Any hints? Or am I completely misunderstanding how hierarchical pools work?

So now I just did something stupid, and I need help ..... allow me to explain 1) I have some existing pools, and was trying to do some re-organization. 2) I have an existing pool, lets call it PoolA, it consists of 9 drives, and is 49TB in size. It has a variety of data, replicated either 2 or 3 times, depending on the data type. 3) I have a pair of SSD's that I combined into a pool (unduplicated) called PoolB. 4) I created a new pool (PoolC) which consists of PoolB and PoolA, and I tagged PoolB as an SSD, and PoolA as an Archive When I looked at the resulting pool (PoolC) in Windows Explorer, there was nothing there, although if I look at PoolB or PoolA separately, the data is all there!!! What am I doing wrong?? I'm being very cautious with this because the data in PoolA is live data, and I do NOT have independent backups of it. HELP!!

Thanks Drashna, I hoped this was the case, but despite years of using your software, and no real problems ever, I'm still nervous about file systems 🙂 Ian T

I should have explained better, I simply updated the DrivePool software, I've had the same configuration running for years, and had the SSD Optimizer configured on this same pool for at least 3 years. These red double arrows were never present until the most recent update. There were NO changes to the balancers, limits, or placement rules. Nor indeed to any of the settings. My question remains -- what are they trying to tell me, and why are they red?

Just recently updated drivepool to the latest build, 2.3.4.152, and I'm seeing some markers that I've never seen before. Ive attached a 'snip' of the pool window to illustrate. Can anyone tell me a) what they mean and b) why did they suddenly appear?