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[ffd97glx]

Short story:

I'm moving video files to a Raid 1 set.  MC 28 hangs when I try to play a video on that storage space set.  Is this a bug or not supported under MC 28?  If support issue, what about MC 30?

Running latest MS Windows 10 Home.  Plenty of CPU.  Disks are on SATA 6.  MC is the only application running when trying the video.

[eve]

Do the files stored in this Storage Space play in another media player like VLC or MPV?

[ffd97glx]

Works fine with VLC.

[Manfred]

I had MS Storage Spaces for over 4 years without problems from MC26/MC27. Mirroring the disks. I had also videos on it.  WD Red 8 TB disks. Mainboard: Asus P10I-S Server MB, 16 GB ECC RAM, i3-7100 CPU.

Do you have 24x7 type disks like WD Red?

[ffd97glx]

They are both Seagate 12TB HDD Exos X14 SATA 6Gb/s 512e 7200RPM 3.5" Enterprise Hard Drives.

[ffd97glx]

Long Story

I have a large video collection where I've backed up all of my DVDs (via DVDFab, VOB & IFO files) to disk.  Originals DVD disks are in boxes in some corner of the basement.  I have multiple 2Tb WD green drives, all about 7 years old.  I started having trouble playing videos in MC 28; studdering or even hanging indefinitely.  I noticed the problem was just with one particular hard drive.  I purchased EaseUS to clone the bad drive to a new HHD - it took weeks to reach 70% complete (the product obviously won't skip/report bad sectors).  I tried a couple other 'recovery' products with similar results - cancelled the activities out of impatience.  I gave up with this approach.  Did a library XML export from MC 28 to get a list of which videos were lost so I could start rebuilding my collection on that disk.

In the mean time, I found a deal on server grade 12Tb HHDs. "Light bulb!"  How about building raid sets so I don't have to go through the collection rebuild again?  After struggling for a few days with ASUS MB Raid configurations, I once again gave up and decided to go with MS "Storage Spaces".

Then I noticed two other disks were reporting a couple (1-3) bad sectors.  One would think this would be easy for EasUS to clone.  First bad sector it encountered, it stopped.  I tried robocopy.  At least it told me which files were corrupt.  Renamed disk labels and letters to look like the same as original drive.  MC 28 hung trying to play one of the videos.

Thinking I had the wrong switches on robocopy, I deleted the video with the bad sectors and did just a straight copy from the bad drive to the raid set.  Backed up my MC library, then did a "Find and "Replace".  MC found the test video that moved and changed the file paths.  Started the video, it play for a second, flickered, then hung.  Couldn't see the play bar or minimize the window.  Ended up cancelling MC.  Rebooted and the same results.

Questions:

Should I upgrade Windows 10 Home.  At this point, I have enough invested the upgrade cost would be minimal.

Upgrade MC from 28 to 30?  Not a cost issue if it solves my problems.

Try to rebuild the raid set in the ASUS MB.  Google queries turn up a lot of folks saying that's a bad idea.

Buy a raid-specific hardware card to build the raid set.

Bite the bullet and figure out a robust backup plan (cringe) and forgot about the raid solution.

[Manfred]

Should I upgrade Windows 10 Home.

win 10 or win 11 should not be a difference.

Upgrade MC from 28 to 30?

MC 28 or MC 30 should be no difference in using storage spaces.

Personally I have give up using MS Storage spaces because if something goes wrong after 4 years and you have to use the command line interface to admin storage spaces you feel not familiar with it, even if you understand what it should do. You have never handle such an unusual event!

If all your video fits on a single disk you can get acronis or other backup software and make a daily backup to your second Seagate disk.

[Manfred]

One question: Do you use MC Client Server model? If yes you must mount the storage space with the assigned drive letter (say S) to the client computer. If not the chance is high that video stutters.

[ffd97glx]

One question: Do you use MC Client Server model? If yes you must mount the storage space with the assigned drive letter (say S) to the client computer. If not the chance is high that video stutters.

I have a very beefed-up HTPC that's single user.  I use Gizmo, WebGizmo or JRemote if I'm not on the primary PC.  I have 1500+ titles spread across 5 HHDs (4-2Tb WD Greens, 1 12Tb Seagate).

I kinda like the Acronis idea, but it could be weeks before I realize I have a corrupt disk - either source or backup.  I'll keep this in my back pocket.

[leezer3]

TBQH, this smells like your drives had more wrong than they reported to you.

I would strongly suspect that you've now got corrupt files- Try playing them in something else before you do anything.

[eve]

I'm not a fan of using Windows for storage. This is where something like a dedicated linux box excels.
You sound like you have a pretty extensive library. It might be time to look into some sort of dedicated storage solution. Depending on your finances and technical skill, the options are pretty endless.

This definitely sounds like drives, or a storage controller going bad IMO

This could be a great time to move your storage elsewhere.

I use a set of linux servers at home for my local storage and I *really* couldn't imagine going back to trying to juggle 10-20 drives in Windows like I did when I was much younger and was understandably intimidated by linux.

Buy a raid-specific hardware card to build the raid set.

ONLY do this if you're using it to attempt to recover the data and move elsewhere. Hardware RAID is dead and a *very* bad idea in a home situation if it can be avoided. Software is the way to go IMO

My personal setup uses Unraid but TrueNAS Scale is very compelling if ZFS is something you're interested in. Otherwise UnRAID's parity isn't bad (I actually don't use it as I have redundancy and backups)

[blgentry]

Bite the bullet and figure out a robust backup plan (cringe) and forgot about the raid solution.

My opinion on this probably isn't very popular, but here it is:

RAID is a pain.  I've worked with RAID for many years, both hardware and software.  Enterprise use is one thing.  Home use is another.  For my own use I have chosen the simplest solution I could think of:  Individual drives, used separately.  For each drive I use for storage, I buy another identically sized drive to do backups with.

I manually run backups of each drive whenever I think it's necessary.  Usually right after adding new content (new movie, new albums, etc).  So I always have 2 copies of everything.  But all the drives just have regular OS file systems on them.  No RAID, nothing fancy.  No additional layers of "stuff" to get in my way, cause failures, and cause confusion.

In the past 8 years or so I've lost 3 drives that I'm sure about and maybe one more?  I can't be sure if I lost a 4th drive or not.  Each time the recovery was very simple:  Get a new drive and then copy the backup drive to the new drive.

For me, as an IT guy, simple is king.  Easy to understand is easy to maintain and easy to fix.  Just my opinions.

Brian.

[eve]

My opinion on this probably isn't very popular, but here it is:

RAID is a pain.  I've worked with RAID for many years, both hardware and software.  Enterprise use is one thing.  Home use is another.  For my own use I have chosen the simplest solution I could think of:  Individual drives, used separately.  For each drive I use for storage, I buy another identically sized drive to do backups with.

I manually run backups of each drive whenever I think it's necessary.  Usually right after adding new content (new movie, new albums, etc).  So I always have 2 copies of everything.  But all the drives just have regular OS file systems on them.  No RAID, nothing fancy.  No additional layers of "stuff" to get in my way, cause failures, and cause confusion.

In the past 8 years or so I've lost 3 drives that I'm sure about and maybe one more?  I can't be sure if I lost a 4th drive or not.  Each time the recovery was very simple:  Get a new drive and then copy the backup drive to the new drive.

For me, as an IT guy, simple is king.  Easy to understand is easy to maintain and easy to fix.  Just my opinions.

Brian.

Agreed.

RAID isn't worth it in the home anymore. Now I do pool my disks but that's very different. They all on their own, are perfectly readable and merely layer over each other to present as a single 'volume'.

RAID is for more enterprise centric situations where downtime is completely unacceptable. It's not a backup (very far from it), and nobody smart should be using it as one.

Yeah okay, 15+ years ago, RAID was kind of important when dealing with extremely high bitrate content creation / post production situations, where you could get both speed and redundancy from the right configuration. Now? If a spinning disk is too slow for your needs, its time to think about SSD caching, not just adding more HDDs.

On Windows I tried DrivePool and it wasn't too bad at allowing multiple separate, regularly formatted HDDs to present as a single directory structure. On my linux storage servers now, this is handled by MergerFS which is insanely powerful and has applications beyond simple pooling. I use it extensively for media metadata, where metadata (so nfos, xmls, associated images etc) are stored on very fast SSDs, and then laid over slower storage containing the actual media files.

[Manfred]

RAID is a pain.  I've worked with RAID for many years, both hardware and software.  Enterprise use is one thing.  Home use is another.  For my own use I have chosen the simplest solution I could think of:  Individual drives, used separately.  For each drive I use for storage, I buy another identically sized drive to do backups with.

I completely agree: I also do not RAID anymore for the same reasons. I do mostly the same like you!
n x Data Drive->Backup Process->m x Backup/DR Drive. For DVD/BD I have only a DR copy. DVD/BD is the Backup.

[ffd97glx]

I did some more testing of the RAID set.  DVDFab copies either the full DVD (video, menus, extras, etc.) or just the main movie.  MC hangs on the full disc copies and not the main movies.  This is only the case for videos on the RAID set.  It happens whether I open the IFO file if I select any VOB file.

[ffd97glx]

Solved

[eve]

Solved

Curious what the solution was?