DrivePool with a large number of drives.

[Gilgamesh_48 944]

I tried to get a good answer over in the StableBit forums but very few people have as large a pool as I have.

I have 18 external drives in a pool attached to my server computer.
I use a USB hub to get more ports that the computer normally have. I am having a small problem where a drive in the pool, not always the same drive, will disconnect and can only be reconnected by unplugging the power from the drive or by unplugging the drive from the hub and reconnecting. If it were a drive failing I could just replace it with a new drive and be good to go but the drive that gets disconnected changes and, so far, does not repeat often enough to even think a drive is bad.

I have completely changed my USB hub twice so it is not the hub.

I have several options:
1. I can move part of the pool to another computer but that would require another DrivePool license. A second license is only $15.00 so it is not at all a show stopper. It also would take a deal of time as DrivePool is not particularly fast and I temporarily disabled duplication during the troubleshooting of this issue.
2. I can move the entire pool to another computer. That would require pointing Emby at the new share and some re-scan of the libraries.
3. I can create a second pool on the existing computer. The issues with that are mainly time and a re-scan by Emby.
4. Use two hubs on the one computer but keep the single pool. This option is the most attractive for me but I am concerned that the pool being 16 drives may be the problem and just redistributing them around the computer may be ineffectual in relieving the problem.
5. Something I have not thought of. I have the most hope here but I cannot think of another solution except eliminating the pool that I have not really thought of that as it would make maintaining the drives and Emby more difficult as the libraries would often span multiple drives and the backup solution gets more difficult.

I hope someone can come up with something other than changing out the computer. That would be too expensive.

I remember there used to be a problem with some versions of Windows having a limit on the number of USB drives that can be connected but that was fixed in Windows 10 some time ago, I think.

Any help will be greatly appreciated.

Note: I was running a bit low in space when this began happening (which is also why I temporally disabled duplication) and I have ordered a new drive. If I go with  new pool that drive will be in the new pool but if the fix involves just using the same pool I will just add the new drive to the old pool.

The new drive is 10tb and that will get me to nearly 100tb total. I read that there at least one user here that has a petabyte (1000tb) system. I guess my system seems pretty lame compared to that one.  I cannot imagine needing a system that big unless I was keeping everything in "original" format. My movies are usually between 1 and 3 gb. I have seen some people that have movies as large as 40-50 gb and it would take only 20000 to 25000 of those to fill up a petabyte drive. So, maybe, the user with a petabyte system is not really having too large a system.

[Luke 37106]

@rbjtech and @Sammy may have some tips.

[Spaceboy 2494]

USB hubs are inherently unreliable and shouldnt be used in a drive pooling config imo. avoid using a usb hub and your problems will go away. in fact you've pretty much proved this

[Sammy 738]

You need a case that holds more drives.

[Gilgamesh_48 944]

@Spaceboy @SammyI just want to thank all that tried to help. Yep the hub was bad but it was made bad by a short in one of the drives (a VERY old one). That hub was pretty expensive and quite robust. I have had it in place for about 4 years and not once did it fail, until now.

At the time I bought that hub, I do not remember exactly why, I got a great deal and ordered 3 of them. The other two have been waiting in their boxes for this very event. I broke one out and connected it in place of the bad one and connected all 13 drives (I had 14 but there was one really bad one) and then added my new 10tb drive so I have 14 again. I am up and running. I waited for 4 hours after getting everything working to be sure. Before the hub and drive replacement I was getting failures every hour or sooner . The fact that is has held for four hours is a good sign and my confidence is high BUT, like everything else electronic, I cannot be sure it is fixed until I have to replace it because it is obsolete.

I know hubs are generally unreliable but I researched and found that mostly the hubs that are failing are the cheep flimsy variety. Since the first hub lasted for 4 years I have confidence this one is good for another four.

BTW: I proved it was the drive causing the problem by, using one of the cheep hubs, simply plugging it into that hub and then into a testing computer. The hub and drive worked fine for about 20 minutes then, and this time I actually heard a sizzle, it failed. The test hub did not become intermittent it actually produced smoke.

Has anyone ever heard of a drive failing and taking out a hub? I also wonder what might have happened if it was plugged directly into a computer? I am NOT going to test further. I cannot afford more hardware loss.