Techtonic

Thanks for the reply! :-D Yeah the cases you linked, I started on Newegg then Pricewatch after that. The two 45 bay cases looked like they were just storage bays. Didn't look like there was room for a motherboard. Raid cards I didn't look at yet because I'm not sure which ones we would need for all the drives. Just curious the 20 drives are they in raid. If so of the 256GB of ram how much of that is used for the raid caching?

Any an all idea's are awesome so please if you have anything posted it up here :-D Ok so my father and I are really needing to build a super server. As it sits he already has a server rack 48U Rack. It has two HP server's and a number of Sans Digital 8 Bay Enclosures. From what I gathered besides wanting to really get away from all the drive enclosures and have everything in one server. He has found that the HP controller card is causing the drives to randomly spin down because it thinks the temperature is too high. He's found on forums that they purposely do this if they are not HP hdd's. So were needing to build a new super server to replace this and make a house for the all the hdd's. As it sits he has 36 hdd's 3.5inch. So the new chassis we really do know this WILL NOT be cheap lol. So there is room for expansion were needing idea's for a 40 to 45 bay hdd server chassis. Also for all the hdd's some help on what kind of card we would need and how many. Because I understand that there are really no SATA cards where I can slap two of them in and run 35-45 drives off them. Or I could be wrong and you all could help me out with this. I know the motherboard can be talked about later but I do know he want to run an Intel i5 on it. Depending on the room of the chassis and how many controller cards we'll need I'm sure we can gauge which motherboard and CPU would be perfect for this type of server. He's wanting to run a software raid through Windows Server but I'm trying to get him to use drivepool which it's perfect for my 48TB setup. Thanks again for any and all help!! -Aaron

Awesome! Now just to talk to Saitoh183 on the forum that know how to setup Snapraid/Drivepool and we'll be good to go. Drashna I'm going to respect Stablebit and not post a thread on asking how to setup a Snap/Dp setup. I have no intentions to drive anyone away from Stablebit products and the awesome support and great community you have here. Thanks everyone for you help!

If I go snap/drivepool mine would be like this also because the pool wouldn't change that often. Maybe we can rename the thread to StableBit Drivepool or (Drivepool/Flexraid or Snap/Drivepool) Sorry as I have a lot running through my head I'm a bit confused by this. Unless it was a typo and the total used would be 44TB? Sorry I don't mean to be a pain. Drashna, Thanks so much for answering me and allowing this thread up to help as many people as possible. I have finally read both of the links and there great but I think drivepool with something else for parity would work perfect. I still wish I would have had patience and asked this before blindly buy Flexraid with little to almost no research before being sure of the purchase. I'm glad on the SMART data response you had as I thought I might have that problem with my Mediasonic ProBox 8bay. Using USB 3.0 over eSATA I figured that eSATA would give all the information on the drives but not so much on the serial number part. I could be wrong on this though because that was only seeing the information through Disk Management. I really appreciate everyone's input on this matter but I don't think I will have enough space for x2 duplication. So I will most likely have to pick between either Flexraid or Snapraid like saitoh183 was talking about.

How much HDD space? I know when my data is in the pool I was sitting at 15-17TB. So with running x2+ duplication I wouldn't have enough to space right? Did Scanner not work because of the drives being in a USB or eSATA enclosure?

Hello everyone! I'm new here trying to do as much research as I can before purchase. I'm liking all the information I've seen on the main site,manual, and the forums/old forums. I think I've caught a little information off Reddit to push me here. I'm hoping for loads of information and maybe this will help MANY people in the long run on what to do. So first off on the topic string. I would like to use StableBit's products only. So in doing so I gathered some can's and can not's. That the Drivepool with Scanner are a pair made to secure any deal. But I'm also worried about parity. My current pool is: 5x4TB Seagates 2x3TB Seagates The purpose of my pool is family movies / music and pictures. Besides the music and pictures being of small size, the movies range from 400MB-16GB. Here's some Reddit research that even put me on the research run about StableBit products. Ok in this I was told that : 1. Drivepool offers redundancy via duplication 2. Creator of StableBit products has a Youtube vLog channel (Couldn't find it but found Stablebit.com's and only had two videos no vLogs) 3. One user that spoke so highly of StableBit products (Has owned it for 4-5 years now) 4. Drivepools duplication works via client setting the folders or subfolders. To be duplicated 2x,x3 so on. I was confused on the duplication settings. And if there is a parity for at least one HDD failure or more depending on settings. I really love the way these products looks, the active community and the progressiveness of the Covecube staff for their products! I need to really strongly put it out here that I would really rather use StableBit's products less programs running and wouldn't have to worry about which one is or isn't causing problems. This is a two part thread so this is the end of the first research part. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Now for the second part of the researching. I've seen this in a few places doing a StableBit Drivepool for pooling the drives with FlexRaid (Raid-F) for the parity set up. But mostly using all the programs from StableBit where as setting and forgetting "almost" the FlexRaid setup. Here's the research I've dug up well what I could. Oddly I found a couple hints on the Flexraid forums but nothing saying where it was on the forums or what to search for or anything. So most of it was on the old Covecube forums that are read only. I would put links but I think I'll just select the little information I need so this thread doesn't get kicked. And the second part. Ok I read the information on the first thread above and that it talking about how it was possible. Saitoh183 posted a few times on that thread with more information on Drivepooling and Flexraiding. Goes through making sure everyone knows that you lose one or more drives (largest or equal size of a every drive"Not put together") for a parity disk or a PPU so called. In the second quote of research it is a small thread "explaining" how to setup the both of them. I know and understand that Saitoh183 said "It doesn't matter in which order you set them up. DP just merges your drives, Your performance comes from DP and Flexraid doesn't affect it. Flexraid is only relevant for performance if you were using the pooling feature of it. Since you aren't, the only performance you will see is when your parity drive is being updated. Also dont forget to not add your PPU to the pool" I know from what Saitoh183 it doesn't matter. But I figured you would make the StableBit Drivepool setup the drive letter. Now going to the FlexRaid: 1. Add new configuration 2. Name Cruise Control with Snapshot and Create 3. Open the new configuration to edit and open Drive Manager 4. Add the DRU's (Data drives) and one or more PPU for parity backup's (Snapshots) I've read a few setup guides and I've heard 1 PPU drive for every 6 and I've heard 1 PPU drive for every 10 both are fine. 5. Initialize the raid if data is on the DRU's it will now do a parity snapshot, now back to the home page for the named configuration and Start Storage Pool. Not sure what else to after that if it's even right. I don't think the FlexRaid should have a drive letter or it would make things more confusing than it already is using two programs. Please enlighten my with any information that can help this research that will help with my purchase and hopefully more people that decide to do this setup also. I would like to firstly so I appreciate everyone up front for there past help with others to even get me here with this information! Thanks again. Techtonic