Help - corrupt drive? Duplicating taking forever?

[capnstoobie]

Hope someone can help me - I'm not sure what to do with my current setup.

 

I have DrivePool 1.3 installed on WHS 2011.  I have 3 drives in my pool (2 x 3TB and 1 x 2TB).  Today I noticed that one of the 3TB drives was "missing" in DrivePool.  Looking at diskmgmt.msc I saw that the drive was present, but unformatted (ie showed as "raw").  Look at the system events viewer I saw some "Event ID 11" errors which may mean the controller is not working (could mean replacing the motherboard possibly I guess).

 

I rebooted the machine, then saw that the problem drive was now recognised as NTFS formatted.  DrivePool had added the drive back into the pool, and is now going through the duplicating process.  It's up to 10% as I speak, but going very slowly (it took around 8 hours to get to this point, although for some reason it appears to be going a little bit faster now).  

 

I guess that the duplicating process is completely tying up the server, as it is very sluggish to do anything else, and trying to copy any files from the server over the network is pathetically slow.

 

What do you think I should do in this situation?

 - Wait for the duplication to finish (if I'm lucky it might be finished overnight)?

 - Check the problematic hard drive in some way (not sure if it is on it's way out)

 - Upgrade DrivePool to 2.1?

 

Thanks!

[Christopher (Drashna)]

First, I'm sorry to hear about the drive issues, as that is never a pleasant experience.

 

However, what you're describing may be normal in your situation.  The "RAW" drive means that Windows had issues reading from the partition information. Which is bad. I am glad to hear that rebooting the system fixed the issue (temporarily). 

 

But chances are here, if you're seeing the system become very sluggish, there ma ybe something wrong with the drive.  If you check the Event Viewer, look for "disk", "ntfs" or controller ("ahci", "iaStor" or the like) errors. If you're seeing a lot come from a single disk, check to see which disk that is in Disk Management. If it's the same disk that went RAW, you may want to consider removing it from the pool (using the "duplicate data later" and "force drive removal" options) and replacing it. 

 

 

 

As for the sluggish, as I said, that is definitely unusual.  StableBit DrivePool uses "Background I/O" priority for balancing and duplication, specifically to avoid causing performance issues like this. If you're still seeing that, then it likely indicates a hardware problem here.  And that definitely sounds like it's the case. 

[capnstoobie]

Thanks for the reply!

 

I ran SeaTools and one of the 3 TB drives would not even finish the test.  That particular brand/model seems to be notorious for failing (3TB Seagate from 2012), so I should probably look to replace the other one I have in there (it's working for the moment).

 

Anyway, the drive was too far gone for DrivePool to be able to disconnect it, so I just had to shut down the system and pull the drive out.

 

Slightly off-topic, but now that I have been looking more closely at DrivePool I notice that I am running 1.3 but there is now 2.x available.  Is it worth while for me to upgrade?  I haven't had any issues with 1.x so far so not sure if I should leave it as is.  (I am running it on WHS 2011).

[Christopher (Drashna)]

The ST3000DM001 model, right?

 

 

And if SeaTools failed outright like that ... then yeah, it's time to RMA (or just replace) the drive. 

 

 

 

Slightly off-topic, but now that I have been looking more closely at DrivePool I notice that I am running 1.3 but there is now 2.x available.  Is it worth while for me to upgrade?  I haven't had any issues with 1.x so far so not sure if I should leave it as is.  (I am running it on WHS 2011).

 

Either should be fine. The 2.X version is much more actively developed for, so it may be worth using that version. However, if you want/need "reparse point" support or the file placement rules feature, then yes, you'd want to upgrade. 

 

Otherwise, no need. 

[capnstoobie]

The ST3000DM001 model, right?

 

 

And if SeaTools failed outright like that ... then yeah, it's time to RMA (or just replace) the drive. 

 

 

 

Yes, that's the model!

 

Just upgraded to 2.1 and I like the information shown in the gui that wasn't there in 1.3.  Thanks for your help!

[Christopher (Drashna)]

Yes, that's the model!

 

Just upgraded to 2.1 and I like the information shown in the gui that wasn't there in 1.3.  Thanks for your help!

Yeah, I've had a few of these drives ... Emphasis on *had*. 

 

And yeah, there is definitely a lot more info, and in some cases, much less as well (such as the folder contents). 

 

 

If it's showing any signs of issues, definitely remove it from the pool and RMA it right away.