Modified time stamps messed up?

[tomsliwowski]

So after restoring my data from a HDD loss (covered here: http://community.covecube.com/index.php?/topic/2037-scanner-didnt-find-my-2tb-red-was-going-bad)I noticed a weird issue with my music library.

 

I restore the whole library to an external drive using CrashPlan and then I copied the directory to my drive pool, overwriting all existing files. Everything seemed all nice until I added a new album to one of the sub directories. Subsonic wouldn't find anything and after some troubleshooting with the developer it was discovered that the modified time was not being updated on the parent directory.

 

Here is how the library is laid out:

 

E:\ServerFolders\Music\<artist>\<album>

 

When I add a new file or directory inside an <artist> directory, I expect the modified time of the <artist> directory to also update.

 

I was able to force a timestamp modification by running the following in powershell:

$update = get-date
Set-ItemProperty -Path E:\ServerFolders\Music\ -Name LastWriteTime -Value $update

This is only a simple band-aid since the timestamp won't be updated the next time I add another album.

 

The REALLY weird thing is that it seems to be inconsistent. Like some directories update just fine while others do not.

 

Is there some kind of NTFS flag that needs to be re-set? How can I even start troubleshooting this?

 

 

Here is my server setup:

Windows Server 2012 R2 Standard

Core i5 3570K @ stock speed

16GB DDR3 RAM

OS drive:

Sandisk 120GB SSD

E:\ Storage Pool:

1x 8TB RED

2x 3TB RED

1x 2TB RED

 

[Christopher (Drashna)]

First, I'm sorry to hear about the drive failure/loss. 

 

As for the music library, this may be normal. The folders in question may reside on other disks.  And if data wasn't added to these disks, it wouldn't update the info. And that's "fine" from a file system and technical standpoint. 

 

However, if you REALLY want to make sure that this is properly synchronized between disks, and shows up properly, there is an advanced setting to do so: 

http://wiki.covecube.com/StableBit_DrivePool_2.x_Advanced_Settings

Set "CoveFs_SynchronizeDirectoryTimes" to "True" and reboot. 

The caveat here is that this does have a slight performance impact (which is why it's disabled by default), but the routine is multithreaded, so more cores help. 

[tomsliwowski]

Is this something new in the 2.x version of DrivePool? I don't recall this ever happening on my WHS 2011 server running DrivePool 1.x.

 

Also how big of a performance hit would it have?

[Christopher (Drashna)]

No, the 1.X version of StableBit DrivePool has it as well (since very early on). 

 

However, it's not always a consistent issue, due to how the pool works. 

 

As for the performance hit... that's hard to say. Since it's basically scrubbing the time stamp for every folder on your pool, it depends on how large you pool is.  Also, because it's multithreaded, a higher end CPU (with more cores) will complete this task faster than a lower end CPU). 

But I believe that the performance hit should be very minimal.  When I say slight, that's because Alex has said it's a "small penalty".  And as the driver is very, very efficient, you may not even notice a change.