How to tell what drive a file is on?

[BackupSecurity]

I have about 18 drives pooled together. Is there any way to tell what drive a specific file was placed on?

Certain media has been unaccessible or errors out, but stablement scanner doesn't show any failing or unhealthy drives. Was hoping to see if there's any patterns of problem files on same drives, but I have no way to tell what drive a file was put on that I know of.  Thanks! 

[Shane]

Personally I use Everything by Voidtools; I also know of UltraSearch by JAM and SwiftSearch by wfunction. So long as your drives either have letters or mount paths they can quickly find files across multiple drives.

[BackupSecurity]

With Stablebit I have all 18 drives pooled as 1 drive letter

[Shane]

You can use Windows Disk Management to mount the drives as folders, e.g. d:\disks\drive1, d:\disks\drive2, etc, so that you can still individually access each drive without having to give them letters.

Note: do NOT mount a drive, that's part of a pool, as a folder within a pool.

[BackupSecurity]

After I mount a drive letter, how do I find a specific files easily?  Will have to mount 18 drives with many folders and sub folders

[Shane]

If you've got one of the tools I suggested above, you can just type the file name (or a part of it) into it and it'll show a list of matching files across all of your drives. I've got my poolpart drives mounted as e:\disks\number where number is each drive's serial number, so hypothetically I might type in "invoice 67" and Everything might show me that "invoice 67.pdf" is in "e:\disks\wcc-xyz\poolpart.bleh\docs\2021\" and "e:\disks\st-abc\poolpart.bleh\docs\2021\".

FWIW, here's how I went about mounting all of my poolpart drives:

1. use Windows Disk Management to shrink my c:\ partition by 8GB and add a simple NTFS-formatted volume e:\ using that free space
2. use Windows File Explorer to create a folder e:\disks and then a bunch of empty subfolders 01, 02, 03, et cetera within that folder
3. use Windows Disk Management to remove any/all drive letters from my poolpart drives and instead mount each poolpart drive to those ## subfolders until every drive has its own e:\disks\## attached to it
4. the disks will show up in both DrivePool (under the "Disks" column) and Scanner (under the "Drive Letter" column) with those ## paths and their serial numbers will show up too (in DrivePool by hovering the mouse cursor over each disk and in Scanner under the "Serial Number" column).
5. use Windows File Explorer to rename each ## folder to their respective serial numbers - DrivePool and Scanner will automatically update accordingly
6. if I add a new disk, see steps 2 through 5.

I do it this way so that I can easily restrict Everything to only the contents of my poolpart drives by typing in e:\ as the first search term (e.g. "e:\ .pdf" will show me the drive and folder location of every PDF document in my pool).