XXHighEnd

Haha... just when things are working so well, something else comes up!

I've got my music server all up and running:

- Supermicro mobo (with IPMI ethernet port & 4x ethernet ports)
- i3 6300T CPU
- 16GB ECC RAM
- Win10 on 128 SSD
- 4x 4TB WD Red Pro HDDs (~7.5GTB mirrored Storage Space in ReFS format)
- 1x 3TB WD Red Pro HDD (for temp backups)

I went for Storage Space and ReFS instead of RAID after doing a bit of research online - Storage Spaces beat RAID in many performance tests and ReFS is considered to be the NTFS successor. But I've now got a problem transferring some of my music files from my Synology NAS to the Storage Space. Some files transfer no problem and others not at all. It seems that either a whole album will transfer OK, or not at all (the jpg and pdf files always transfer OK). If not, I get the 0x80070299 error. Hmm... I wonder if some of my CD rips added some meta-data that is not compatible with ReFS?

I've tried some of the files that won't transfer to the ReFS Storage Space, and they transfer perfectly to the (NTFS) SSD.

Ultimately, if I have to reformat the Storage Space, I will. But before I do this, does anyone have a quick fix? (Not a lot on the internet related to 0x80070299 and Storage Space and/or ReFS.)

Mani.

Mani,

There will be no way out of this, unless you recognize that you also switched on some means of compacting or compression etc. ... (switch that all off and you have a way better chance).

Say I spent a nice hour on this, this morning, and that it is my conclusion that this error (which can happen with NTFS just the same) is about "unknown" issues, which still are quite clear to me myself. Think like a "too much for me" issue. Like too much fragmentation, too many files, too large files, too ...

Now your case;
What about skipping ReFS. I would never use such a thing for similar reasons I would never use RAID5; when things break they can not be repaired. At least the chance is way high that it can't.
ReFS ? It surprises me that you can officially get it. Strategy must be the same as with Windows 10. "It hardly works, but let's throw it on the market anyway - and at least we'll have feedback."

The problem you'll undoubtedly have is something which is just unfinished and too complex anyway (may never be for real). But otherwise your biggest warning is this :
There are no tools existant whatsoever for repairing such a file system.
This also implies a chicken-egg problem, because for this reason alone people will not start using it. And without usage there won't be tools.

I'd forget about this.

Regards,
Peter

Thanks Peter.


True. But where would we be if we took the same attitude with XX all those years ago?

I've decided to just transfer all the files from my NAS onto the 3TB HDD in the music server (NTFS) and stick with ReFS for the Storage Space for now - I like the idea of self-repairing and low maintenance disks. I have backups of everything on NTFS disks so am pretty relaxed about things potentially going wrong in the future. Never thought I'd be OK being a guinea pig for Microsoft...

Mani.

Hi Mani,

When I read your opening post yesterday evening, I started reading about ReFS and after maybe 30 minutes, I thought that this new format was not mature enough to be used (for the moment). If someone compares it with NTFS , there are missing features and the fact that if can't be used for the OS partition sounds weird to me. I did not take the time to check if this has similarities with other OS filesystems but I wondered if I would use this for my music drive(s). But I salute your wisdom in not using it for your backups, as it sounds to require some more "breaking in"...

There was something I saw a few times, but I never really checked what it meant... It is about putting a drive in "READ ONLY" mode. Without verifying what it really was about, I thought that the system would prevent anyone from being able to change anything on a drive once content is considered satisfactory, so putting it in READ ONLY mode would prevent something from overwriting or corrupting it. But I am not sure about this. I think I saw this in BIOS, but not sure...

The checksum feature could be handy to assure that I am not about to overwrite a good file on my backup drive with a corrupted one. With TBs of music, how can someone protect his backups ?

I am still waiting for a filesystem that will be simple, standalone (one drive by itself) and very robust. I do not consider RAID methods to be necessary for our purpose of playing music.

I now have hard drives that are from 2009-10 and I am considering replacing them with more recent ones, to prevent accidents. I realize there is no perfect method to protect my precious files, other that having at least 2 backups... But it can be expensive...

Imperfect world we are in...

Alain

UPDATE... just in case this happens to anyone else...


Well, this has been a really strange issue. I cannot for the life of me find any difference between wav files that the ReFS-formatted Storage Space is happy to accept and those that it's not.

But what I have found is that if I convert the problematic wav files to flac, they transfer absolutely no problem. And this process is very, very fast - it's taking me an average of 10 seconds to convert and transfer a whole album.

Mani.

Hi Mani,

I talked about compression;
Do you have any of that switched on ?

So the problem in general with ReFS is compression, or at least the error you receive is most often about that (in its various variations).

Now what about the OS seeing that for FLAC nothing much is left to compress, so the whatever problem isn't run into in the first place ?

Peter

No, no compression as far as I'm aware. Certainly, I never specified any when I set the Storage Space up. Looking at the attachment, the available space is exactly what you would expect with a mirrored drive.

Mani.

I was getting the same error but in a slightly different situation...while copying files from a NTFS formatted volume to two different external USB drives, both formatted with ReFS. After a lot of troubleshooting, including making sure the files are not fragmented (using sysinternal's Contig tool).......I broke down and formatted the external drives using good old NTFS...and voila! problem gone!

ReFS is probably not good for prime time.........OR......maybe it is designed for virtualization........I have been using it at work in my production hyper-v clusters with no issues.....but at home....fail :-(

I do want ReFS, like the OP but it does not work for me.

Thank you for the feedback.
I assume it will help some body some time.

Peter