Can DrivePool tell us why it's measuring?

[Craig]

I'm a big fan of DrivePool, and recently moved a load of pooled drives to a new computer and it just worked, so that was brilliant. Just getting that out there so you know I'm not moaning for the sake of it!

However, I'd really like to know more about why DrivePool is doing certain things.

My system seems to re-measure a lot. To resolve this I've slowly replaced cables, drives, controllers, and now the whole computer (not just for DrivePool, but I had hoped it would help.)

I probably do have a dodgy disk, but I can't afford to replace the whole lot, and it's not obvious which one is suspect. (I do also have scanner, 3 drives have minor smart problems, but otherwise healthy.)

So would it be possible to find out what triggered a measure? If it thinks a drive disappeared for a second, can I find that in a log, or could it be exposed in the UI better?

A bonus question: could DrivePool tell us what files it thinks are open? A few months ago I'd always have a baseline 20+ files open (as reported in the UI), with no pool activity. I replaced an old drive and the files open dropped to 10, which made me wonder is having persistent files open another symptom of an underlying disk issue?

Thanks!

 

[Spider99]

For open files - found this

You can use the Resource Monitor for this which comes built-in with Windows 7, 8, and 10.

Open Resource Monitor, which can be found

By searching for Resource Monitor or resmon.exe in the start menu, or

As a button on the Performance tab in your Task Manager

Go to the CPU tab

Use the search field in the Associated Handles section

When you've found the handle, you can identify the process by looking at the Image and/or PID column.

You can then try to close the application as you normally would, or, if that's not possible, just right-click the handle and kill the process directly from there. Easy peasy!

[Shane]

Missing disk notifications should show up in the daily service logs, "%PROGRAMDATA%\StableBit DrivePool\Service\Logs\Service" folder.

E.g. you could search the logs for "Lost existing pool part" and then look at the identifying string (e.g. 26C04868...) to find the disk containing that poolpart.

You can also view the last ??? minutes of the current day's log via DrivePool's {Cog icon} > Troubleshooting > Service Log menu option if you want to watch its activity in real time, and you can also use that to modify its tracing levels (none/errors/warnings/information/verbose) for various areas.

For example manually disabling a disk via Disk Management displays this in the Service Log view (in the Service Log files it is formatted differently):

11:46:51.1: Warning: 0 : [PoolPartUpdates] Lost existing pool part 26C04868-CC94-4051-B68A-B9ABB6B16E5B (isCloudDrive=False, isOtherPool=False)

You can also get DrivePool to email you about any missing disks: {Cog icon} > Notifications > Notify On Missing Disk (checked) and Notify By Email (filled with your email address). It should contain a description of the missing disk (volume label and drive letter, or model and serial).

 

For seeing what files are open, I sometimes use OpenedFilesView (freeware from nirsoft.net). In this case with View > Use Quick Filter enabled, "poolpart" as the search string (without the quotes). You can either manually refresh or you can use the Auto Refresh under options if you want it to monitor changes.

If the Process Name is "System Process" then it's Windows or a driver, if it's "svchost.exe" then it's a Service (probably also a Windows one but may be something else).

[Craig]

I'll report back when I've had time to look at all the options, but wanted to say thank you now for both the replies.

[Craig]

Thanks to the service log I've spotted that renaming a duplicated file appears to make drivepool check the entire pool. Is that the expected behaviour?

(I probably do this at least once a day, which is why I must see it checking so often.)

[Shane]

That's not expected behaviour.