Combine Windows SS with DrivePool?

[ajp_anton]

Hi

 

I'm starting to go the Storage Spaces route, using parity and integrity streams in order to just let the system fix silent errors without having to ever worry about my data. However, it's a bit of a pain to add new drives to expand the storage, and I suspect also removing drives will result in problems.

 

My current idea is to put identical HDDs in pairs (and also buy new drives in pairs) and mirror them. Then use DrivePool to pool these into one big drive. Is this a good way of doing it, or do you recommend something else? Will DrivePool at some point do the background error fixing that I currently need Storage Spaces for?

[Christopher (Drashna)]

Yeah, that would work fine. 

 

Storage Spaces drives show up as normal "physical" drives, so StableBit DrivePool has no problems with using them in a pool. 

 

 

As for DrivePool, well, if you have StableBit Scanner, it may get close to that, actually.  StableBit Scanner does a monthly surface scan and file system scan.   This may prevent errors from occurring, but will also evacuate a disk, if errors are detected.

As for more than that, right now, no.  

[ajp_anton]

Using Integrity Streams implies ReFS (can't believe I didn't mention that word anywhere in my post... thought I did). StableBit Scanner doesn't support it AFAIK. And if/when it does, if it detects a hash mismatch without the drive itself being damaged, would it know to replace the data from the mirrored drive? That's where the SS+ReFS+mirror comes from - SS will detect and fix errors in the data automatically.

 

I'm just looking for a way to lower the amount of layers on top of the data. With the mentioned solution, there would be DrivePool on top of SS on top of ReFS. Having DrivePool handle the duties of SS would be the best solution, but I'm guessing ReFS is still a bit too complicated to fully support.

[Christopher (Drashna)]

Technically, yes.  In Storage Spaces, at least.  However, integrity streams are only enabled for file system metadata, and not the actual "regular files" by default, from what I understand.  You'd want to enable it for the entire drive, manually.

 

Additionally, StableBit DrivePool has no issues with ReFS, as long as you're using a beta version (the release version, 2.1.1.561, doesn't support ReFS natively). 

[TechB]

On 10/25/2017 at 1:00 AM, ajp_anton said:

Using Integrity Streams implies ReFS (can't believe I didn't mention that word anywhere in my post... thought I did). StableBit Scanner doesn't support it AFAIK. And if/when it does, if it detects a hash mismatch without the drive itself being damaged, would it know to replace the data from the mirrored drive? That's where the SS+ReFS+mirror comes from - SS will detect and fix errors in the data automatically.

 

I'm just looking for a way to lower the amount of layers on top of the data. With the mentioned solution, there would be DrivePool on top of SS on top of ReFS. Having DrivePool handle the duties of SS would be the best solution, but I'm guessing ReFS is still a bit too complicated to fully support.

I am curious what you decided to do. Do you still use Storage Spaces for the ReFS support and then run Drivepool to pool the SS volumes? How has this worked out for you?