gd2246

You're welcome, I'm glad you got it working. I hope you'll report back here with the results, so future people that run into this will know if they just need to reinstall or downgrade.

Sorry guys I wish I could help. It's been years since I made that post, and hitting the arrows button has always worked for me. There are only two things I can think of that may help. One is that someone above said they've tried hitting the button "100x times". But it is a toggle, meaning that it is either on or off, so you only need to press it once, then wait. It can take a few minutes to have an effect, so don't press it again or you'll be turning it off. The other thing is that every time I get a notification to update drivepool, I click on it but it fails for some reason. I don't remember the exact error message and I've never cared enough to figure out why because it works just fine, but what I'm getting at is that I'm running an older version of it, version 2.2.5.1237. Perhaps this is a problem introduced in newer versions. If it's neither of those things, then I can't think of anything else. I hope you figure it out.

Hey you got it right so you knew more than I did, lol. And yeah I know it's not really a backup but it's a nice balance between buying double the amount of drives I have and nothing at all. I've got two parity drives which would mean I'd have to lose 3 at the same time to experience any data loss. Except of course as you said fire, theft, etc. And also not to nitpick but it does protect against accidental deletions, as long as you realize what you did right away you can get those files back. But I know you're right. It's just that there's a reason my drives got so full this time, I was waiting for a sale! This gets really expensive & there's no way I could afford a true backup. Besides, what I'm hoarding can all be replaced, it would just take a year or two, lol. But all my irreplaceable stuff like family photos & videos have both offline & offsite backups. Thanks for your concern though, and again of course for your help!

OMG, that was it! Thank you so much! I'm kicking myself for not seeing it. Not true, you nailed it! About moving the files without stopping DrivePool, I did notice that after each move the data I moved showed up as "Other", rather than part of the pool. A quick Re-measure got it to see it as part of the pool again though. Not sure if that's what you meant or if it could have been something more serious, but thanks for the heads up. And yeah I know Drivepool will work fine while it balances, but it's my SnapRAID parity files I'm worried about. When I do these re-balances, it renders the parity files invalid. Some say that having more than one parity drive increases your chances to recover if the files are on different disks, but I don't want to test that. Plus I would add a lot of data in almost 2 months, and with it constantly moving from the balancing, I wouldn't even be able to do another scan. Well I could if I paused it but the parity info would be useless once I started it back up again. Normally I don't use the balance feature for that reason, because it creates a window where I have no backups. I only do it when I add new drives. Actually not even always then, I only did it this time because I waited too long to buy new ones and the rest of my drives were over 90% full, which from what I understand isn't good for them. Anyway you really helped me out here, thanks again!

Thank you for your reply, I didn't even notice those arrows. I hope it will help. I'll try it as soon as my latest manual move is completed. Since no one replied till now and I couldn't think of anything else, all day I've been using the DrivePool re-balance target arrows just to tell me how much needs to be moved from each drive and doing it manually in Windows Explorer, from two drives to my two new drives simultaneously which should cut my initial estimate of a few days in half. Each time I initiate a move it takes a few hours for those two drives to finish moving the data, but that's far better than what I was getting. Just to hammer home that it is not my HBA and I don't have any SMR drives, here's another photo of the manual file-moving I've been doing. It's been going like this with no speed problems all day. I've never thought to take a screenshot of StableBit Scanner during a SnapRAID parity check, but it always goes quickly so I'd bet it can maintain these speeds across all drives. It has to be something to do with DrivePool. Thanks again for the help, I'll post again when I have a chance to try it.

I added two new 12 TB drives to my pool yesterday and hit Re-Balance, and it is taking forever. As you can see in the pictures, it is currently moving data from one of my 8 TB drives to one of my new 12 TB drives. It has been doing so all night at about 10 to 20 MBps. At this rate (2% completed in one day) it will take about 50 days. Also shown in the pictures is me bypassing DrivePool by manually moving some files within the PoolParts using Windows Explorer from a 10 TB drive to the other new 12 TB drive. Stablebit Scanner shows that these speeds are normal, around 200 MBps. They are all on the same HBA, so the problem can only be caused by DrivePool. I know the obvious solution would be to manually move all the files to the new drives myself like I demonstrated in the pictures, but that would still be several days of me babysitting the process. I paid for DrivePool, and would like to be able to use it so I can just hit the Balance button and walk away. I tried checking and unchecking the Bypass File System Filters and Network I/O Boost settings but that had no effect, and I am not using file duplication. Is there anything else I can try?

Did you check with Task Manager or the Performance arrow in DrivePool if it's just when it writes to one specific drive that it does this? Because I had the exact same problem with a drive I used for a time in a use case where I wrote many thousands of small files that would then be deleted & new ones created often. A full zero-write format fixed the issue for me. Might not have anything to do with your problem but just thought I'd mention it.

@cichy45 Ok, thanks for clarifying that for me. I just wanted to make sure there wasn't a setting I wasn't seeing that would let me do it that way. It's not a deal breaker or anything, but it would certainly be a nice feature to have.

Just to clarify, when you say "The Disk Space Equalizer forces it, but may default to percentage", do you mean only with a balance after the data has been moved into the pool? There is no way to use the plugin to make it so the new default is to add new data to to the disks with the biggest percentage of free space rather than simply the biggest amount? If not, it would be nice if you would consider adding that in the future. By using the smaller disks immediately it would keep the parity file as small as possible, allowing for the fastest possible rebuild in the event of a drive failure. Thanks for responding btw, I would have checked back earlier but I didn't think you'd answer so fast.

I have 4x8tb & 2x5tb drives and would like to use the Disk Space Equalizer plugin to keep them all at the same percentage filled. The initial re-balancing did exactly that, but afterwards if you have Do Not Balance Automatically ticked, it seems to revert to adding new files to the drives with the most free space (in my case the four 8tb drives only). I also tried checking Allow Balancing Plugins To Force Immediate Balancing. I was afraid it might shuffle files other than the ones being added, but instead it seems to have no effect and the files continue to be added to only the 8tb drives. I'd like to keep the new files spread out among all six drives because I also use SnapRAID and this would minimize my downtime in the event of a rebuild. But for this reason I can't have it shuffling files other than the new ones I'm adding because that would invalidate the parity file. I'm sure once the 8tb drives get filled enough it will start using my 5tb's, and I'm prepared to live with that if there's no other way, but I was just wondering if there's a setting I'm missing that will allow the plugin to do it's job in real-time. I thought it would replace the default behavior of adding new files to the drives with the most free space to adding them based on percentage of drive filled, but unless I'm missing something it only works with a manual balance after the fact. And in that case it would end up moving files that were already there instead of just the new ones. Would appreciate any clarification/help.