Some bits and pieces I do not understand (beginner alert! :-) )

[BluezNL]

So, I'm fresh to Drivepool and Drive Scanner, and I run into a few things that I don't understand. I hope someone can explain them to me.

Background: I recently build an AM4 home server, using 8x 4 TB drives (all leftovers, of which some of very questionable heritage, and some are even SMR's, brrr).

• Hardware: AM4 Asus Pro mainboard / Ryzen 5 3500X / Axagon PCES-SA6 / 16 GB RAM / HDD 9x HDD / 1x NVME / 1x SSD
• Software: Windows 11 / Drivepool / Drivescanner / HDD Sentinel
• Other software on the same machine: SqueezeBox (Lyrion) Server / Plex

 

I noticed a few things, and perhaps I don't understand how it exactly works.

1. In the Drivescanner window, it shows how many days ago the last scan took place. I have different periods set for filesystem scans and sector scans. What is exactly shown on that page? The last sector scan, or just any scan activity?

2. When I set in settings 'only perform within this window' it doesn't seem to matter whatever I set as 'unless disk scans are past due by xxx days'. It just never starts scanning, unless I use 'perform work at any time'.

A bug, or something I don't understand? (Probably the latter 🙂 )

3. Under throttling I use 'do not interfere' with 'high sensitivity' which is ok. I was just wondering why 'scan using background' would never trigger a scan, even when there's nto a single user or other application (but the generic services) actively accessing any of the drives.

Again, I'm a newby with Drivepool and Drivescanner...

 

 

[Shane]

A1. It looks like it's based on the oldest scanned block. If you expand the drive (the + sign) it shows the sector scanning and you can see the date and time of when that happened to the upper right of the grid map, which at least on mine matches up.

A2. The tooltip mentions that it's "only when disks have to be re-checked" and the tooltip for "unless disk scans are past due by" mentions it won't do anything until the disk has already been scanned at least once?

A3. Could be Windows-related; I've had Windows insist a drive is in use even when Resource Monitor is saying there aren't any files open?

Welcome to DrivePool and Scanner!

 

[BluezNL]

Thx for the answers. I've been playing around with it, and I still noticed a few things. Root cause is probably between chair and keyboard, but I still have to ask 🙂

Q4. My old drive was a Toshiba P300 Lemon, my replacement drive is a WD Red Pro 8 TB. At the same time I messed around a little with drive names, cable / controller combos, ports on the mainboard, etc. so I might have called this upon myself...

What I saw was this: the new drive (Disk 6 aka J) has a few issues:

- smart data is only read when I disable smart checksum (done that)

- when the drive does a sector scan, the associated image is a bit weird (see attached). Is that a graphical glitch, or is it not scanning properly?

[Shane]

A4. Green blocks are groups of sectors that Scanner has already checked and found to be readable (they may initially start off blue as Scanner works). Grey blocks are those that Scanner has never checked yet (or which you've manually cleared to be re-read). If it seems to be stuck on "Waiting to Scan" then either you've turned off automatic scanning or Scanner's settings are having it wait for something else to finish with the disk (Scanner has a LOT of settings as to when and why to scan or to not scan, which can be accessed via Settings -> Scanner Settings or you can select a "set" of defaults to use via Settings -> Quick Settings).

Also if you minimise the File system health section for J:\ in that screenshot you should see the Disk sectors section show an additional button in the left column of options, which (unless already scanning that disk) should be a blue button with a white triangle, which can be used to manually start a scan of that disk.

[BluezNL]

Understood, but why is it starting 'halfway' the drive with a scan? Shouldn't it start, well, at the start?

 

[Shane]

Huh. Fair, that'd be weird. Any chance it could have gotten a start on scanning the sectors before it had to pause for whatever it's waiting for and you saw its (lack of) progress? Or is the screenshot from like "thirty seconds after being plugged in for the first time" and it couldn't possibly have made that much progress even if it started scanning straight away?

[Christopher (Drashna)]

From the image, and text, it would appear that the J:\ drive has been scanned yet, rather only the beginning has been scanned.   Note that resetting the settings does reset this status.

StableBit Scanner keeps a map of what has and hasn't been scanned, and when it's been scanned.    And as scanned sectors get older, they shift towards yellow to indicate that they haven't been scanned recently.   Once a section hits the threshold, it will be queued to scan.    Over time, this should lead to scanning when the system isn't as active or in use