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Changing Hard Drive Set Up


PetabytesPlease

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I have four drives in my current pool, a, b, c, and d

I have bought a new drive (e)

I have transfer the actual data from c and d (not the whole folder where the name is something like "poolparvcvc4234")

Now I remove drives c and d from the pool

So if i simply add "e" to the pool will all the data migrate  into the other folders of a and b?

For example my overall pool has a folder named "videos" there are specific sub-folders and then files within this main folder and these are spread across a and b and now e, by adding e to the pool will they merge into the pool so that all files across the three drives will have the files within "Videos"?

Thanks

 

 

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DrivePool does not touch any data on a physical drive outside of the PoolPart.guid folders that it creates to form a virtual drive (exception: a blank drive will be formatted if it is added to a pool).

Only subfolders and files inside the PoolPart.guid folders will be spread across the physical drives that are in the pool, and only according to the rules you have set (or the default rules) for that pool.

So if you added an E:\ drive that had an E:\Videos folder, that folder (and anything inside) would stay put as E:\Videos unless you manually moved it yourself.

EDIT: tldr, the preferred method to replace drive(s) is to add the new drive(s) to the pool before removing the old drive(s) from the pool so that DrivePool can take care of the migration for you. It can potentially get complicated when that isn't possible/done.

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If you haven't made any other changes to the pool since then, that would cause a conflict, yes you should be able to transfer the data back so you can do the migration properly. Generally you should avoid directly messing with the poolpart folders unless you can't do whatever it is you need to do via drivepool. That's why the poolpart folders are "hidden" folders.

Whenever you tell DrivePool to remove a drive from a pool, it will attempt to move the files in that drive's poolpart folder to the poolpart folders on the other drives in the pool. So if you add e, as long you have enough free space on a+b+e to store all the files from the poolparts on c+d, then you can safely remove c and d from the pool. Note that drivepool will not delete any files from a poolpart being removed unless it has successfully moved those files to another poolpart.

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Unfortunately i cannot transfer the files because I already formatted them now

I have now added drive e to the pool, which consists of three 6tb drives a, b and e

I did a re-measure, a and b are all blue in drive pool and drive e is half way grey (half full) so how do i "merge" the folders, sub folders and files correctly please

 

 

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Here's a basic overview of DrivePool's pool structuring. There's a TLDR at the end for your specific issue, but please read the overview first.

Each drive* added to a pool gets a hidden PoolPart.guid folder (the guid is different for each drive). Let's say your pool is p and you add a, b and e drives to it.

a:\poolpart.guid\subfolders
b:\poolpart.guid\subfolders
e:\poolpart.guid\subfolders

These all come together to form p:\subfolders where p's subfolders is the union of a + b + e.

For example if you have:

a:\poolpart.guid\videos\holiday\movie1.mp4
b:\poolpart.guid\videos\holiday\movie2.mp4
b:\poolpart.guid\videos\birthday\movie3.mp4
e:\poolpart.guid\videos\wedding\movie4.mp4

Then the pool will show you have:

p:\videos\holiday\movie1.mp4
p:\videos\holiday\movie2.mp4
p:\videos\birthday\movie3.mp4
p:\videos\wedding\movie4.mp4

DrivePool can also be set to keep files on multiple drives. You can set how many instances of each file that the pool (or specific folders in the pool) should keep, and DrivePool will automatically handle this when you add a file to the pool (the default level is "1", i.e. each file should only be kept on one drive with no spares). This automated duplication ability is very useful for protecting against a drive failure.

DrivePool does this by treating any file that exists in more than one poolpart with the same name, in the same folder, in different poolparts, as being duplicated:

a:\poolpart.guid\videos\holiday\movie1.mp4
b:\poolpart.guid\videos\holiday\movie1.mp4
e:\poolpart.guid\videos\holiday\movie1.mp4
=
p:\videos\holiday\movie1.mp4

If the duplicates have different timestamps or different sizes, for example because of a disk error, this will be flagged as an error whenever DrivePool checks the consistency of the pool. If they do have the same timestamp and size then DrivePool assumes they are the same file; only if those don't match does it compare the actual file content (as otherwise checking an entire pool could take a very long time).

So manually placing files directly into a poolpart yourself carries the potential risk of "overlapping" files on another poolpart that may have the same path and name but different content if you're not careful, because you're bypassing DrivePool's safety features. It also means DrivePool won't have accurate measurements of the pool until you force a re-measure, which could impact its ability to balance the drives properly. So if you do manual alterations, afterwards you should use Manage Pool -> Re-measure. And if you're using duplication, then you should also use Cog Icon -> Troubleshooting -> Recheck Duplication so that it can maintain that too.

TLDR: if you move stuff from e:\videos directly into e:\poolpart.guid\videos then it'll show up as p:\videos\stuff but if there was already a p:\videos\stuff you risk messing things up. And the pool should be re-measured afterwards.

* technically we should say "volume" instead of "drive", because DrivePool knows the difference under the hood, but common slang for a volume that consists of a single physical drive that has been formatted with a single partition and mounted as a single volume is "drive", presumably because people enjoy being confused.

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Hi, thanks for that detailed response

I have transferred the files and did and re-measure and now all three drives have blue lines in the GUI which i think means all is good, i also confirmed this by adding the data on each individual drive/volume and compared it to the total size of the pool-data and they match

Only now i have a new issue, when i try to delete a file it says "File Access Denied... You need permission to perform this action... You require permission from Administrators to make changes to this file"

And when i try to edit a word document it says "Word cannot save or create this file. Make sure that the disk you want to save the file on is not full, write-protected, or damaged"

All my drives are in perfect 100% health according to Hard Disk Sentinel

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