Option to identify any drive at any time

[fakir]

Hi,

first of all, I'd like to thank you guys from Covecube for this brilliant piece of software! I've been using it together with the Scanner for over a month on my 2012E-based home server, where it replaced Storage Spaces (too cumbersome to use in its present state). 

 

Anyway, after two years of flawless service, two od my disks have failed in last two weeks, which made me to shuffle disks around a bit. And since I don't remember now, which disk is in which drive bay , I would love to have an option to light up any drive's LED at any time. There is the "Identify" button, but it seems that it is only available when the disk is found missing or failed, but I'd like to be able to identify a perfectly fine working disk too.

 

Would that be possible?

 

Thanks!

 

Best regards,

 

Tom

[saitoh183]

In scanner you can manually put you own identification by going into disk details.Its not auto but its an alternaive. Here is what mine looks like:

 

[fakir]

Hi, thanks for reply!

 

I am aware of this feature, but the trouble is that I need to find those disks around my enclosures first. My situation is not actually a "dire need", but there can be many situations where the ability to quickly identify disk by blinking it's LED can be very handy. And since I know this can be done when a disk is bad/missing, I guess it shouldn't be hard to add this feature for good disks too. Now I can identify those disks either by pulling them out one at the time to see which one drops from the pool, or assigning drive letters to each of my pooled disks and then access them individually to see which LED will light up. Being able to simply click and see -ah, it's this one- would be very convenient.

 

Best regards,

 

Tom

[Shane]

Hi Tom, this is already in Scanner. Right-click any disk in Scanner and tick "Ping Disk". There's also a "Ping" column, which is "the average time to read 1 MB from the disk for the past 10 seconds. Pinging a disk is also an easy way to visually identify a particular disk. Just look at the disk access light for disk activity every 1 second." - from the Scanner changelog (https://stablebit.com/Scanner/ChangeLog?Platform=whs2 and https://stablebit.com/Scanner/ChangeLog?Platform=win) for v2.2.0.2723 onwards.

 

Remember to untick the option when you're done. Or tick more disks and see if you can strobe the LEDs. 

[Christopher (Drashna)]

"Ping" works as Shane describes. But "Burst Test" also works, though it keeps the activity constant until you stop the test.  Either are a great way to identify disks. (And burst test is a good way to test your controller, and to see what the max speed on that disk/controller is too).

[fakir]

Hi guys,

many thanks for your input! It didn't occured to me that I can use Scanner to identify my disks instead of DrivePool, so I guess I'll give it a try.

 

Thanks!

Tom

[Christopher (Drashna)]

Yeah, Scanner has a number of features that make it easier to specifically identify (and even organize) your disks.

 

Oh, and you can use Scanner to list the Location (good for multi-disk enclosures), and the bays in that location.  Just right click on a disk, and select "Disk Settings" to change that info.