How to Shutdown cleanly?

[omniphil]

I have 5 external USB boxes each with 4 HDDs in it. I use 19 of these drives for 1 big drive pool and 1 for SnapRaid parity.

This is just a backup raid/pool for me so I only bring it online about once a month, copy any new data from my Synology over to it and then power the backup raid/pool down.

I manually power down the USB boxes once all the lights stop flashing and all data has been written, the issue is when in a month I want to fire them all back up....

When I power them all on DrivePool see's everything as missing and never reconnects to the drives. I have to reboot the server and DrivePool takes a while to rediscover all the driver and the does a check of the pool health.

Is there a way that I can get DrivePool to just bring the pool back online without a reboot?

(Previously used Windows Storage Space and I could power down the disks and fire them back up and the volume would automatically be mounted and available)

[gtaus]

I now have 23 USB HDDs in my DrivePool. I don't remember at what point I started having problems with DrivePool reconnecting to the USB HDDs, but it's not just DrivePool. Windows Disk Management doesn't connect with all the drives if I try to reconnect all of them at the same time. I am thinking it has something to do with the USB and identifying too many drives at one time.

My solution was to buy 7 port USB Hubs with individual power switches for each port. So, I start my computer, and then load each USB drive, one at a time, making sure it shows connection in the DrivePool GUI before I move on to the next USB HDD. Obviously, I hate rebooting the server. But at least I can now get DrivePool to reconnect to the HDDs, albeit one drive at a time. On my system, it takes about 30 seconds to turn on and reconnect to each HDD. Not a very fast process but is much better than before when half my USB HDDs never reconnected.

 

On 11/26/2022 at 3:31 PM, omniphil said:

Is there a way that I can get DrivePool to just bring the pool back online without a reboot?

 

I have one internal SSD as a frontend cache for my DrivePool. When I reboot my computer, it is the only drive found by DrivePool and all the other USB HDDs are missing until I turn them on and load them - one by one - into DrivePool. In your case, if you shut down all the USB HDDs but still had one small SSD/HDD online, you should be able to reconnect all the other USB HDDs without rebooting. I do that all the time with my DrivePool when I swap in/out USB HDDs. Since I always have that one SSD online and DrivePool is always up and running, I can disconnect and reconnect the other USB HDDs without rebooting the computer.

Of course, if you have any HDDs listed as missing, DrivePool goes into a READ Only mode and you will not get full functionality READ/WRITE until all HDDs are reconnected.

There might be a way to start/stop the DrivePool services without rebooting, but I have not figured it out.

[CyberSimian]

8 hours ago, gtaus said:

There might be a way to start/stop the DrivePool services without rebooting, but I have not figured it out.

On the few occasions when I have wanted to re-arrange the contents of the pool, I have used the Windows "Services" panel to stop the Drivepool service. In fact there are two Drivepool services that run continuously:

• Drivepool service
• Drivepool shutdown service

I stop both services before changing pool content, but I don't know whether it is necessary to stop both. However, I also don't know what state the service is left in, so I don't risk restarting the Drivepool services from the "Serivces" panel. Instead I reboot the system.

It would be useful if someone who actually knew the details could post the relevant information...

-- from CyberSimian in the UK

[gtaus]

On 11/30/2022 at 4:47 AM, CyberSimian said:

On the few occasions when I have wanted to re-arrange the contents of the pool, I have used the Windows "Services" panel to stop the Drivepool service. In fact there are two Drivepool services that run continuously:

• Drivepool service
• Drivepool shutdown service

I stop both services before changing pool content, but I don't know whether it is necessary to stop both. However, I also don't know what state the service is left in, so I don't risk restarting the Drivepool services from the "Serivces" panel. Instead I reboot the system.

It would be useful if someone who actually knew the details could post the relevant information...

-- from CyberSimian in the UK

I have stopped the DrivePool services, too, but like you, I reboot when starting everything back up. I don't know if there is a shortcut. And by that I mean, I have 23 USB HDDs (82TB) and it takes a few hours to reboot DrivePool, check all the drives, check duplication, etc... before all those housekeeping services are complete. I typically only schedule a reboot for overnight housekeeping, if at all possible. DrivePool is a great system for my home media server, but it's just not lightning fast on reboots and checking itself. Of course, if I only had a few HDDs or few TBs of data to validate, then the process would go much faster.