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Migrating from DriveBender with multiple mount points


jackal

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I'll start by saying that this isn't a "how do I migrate from DriveBender to DrivePool" post; I'm aware that that's already been covered.  In a nutshell, my question boils down to something like "how do you organize your pool?"  I'm not really asking a specific question expecting a 'correct' answer; I'm hoping to hear a couple of different ideas and suggestions regarding pool file organization.  I apologize if this has been discussed before [it probably has], but I just haven't found those discussions yet.  And I realize that on some level, this has nothing to do with drive pooling, except that in my case I'm considering migrating from one pooled structure to a different pooled structure with different capabilities.

 

 

Background:

I've been using DriveBender for several years, and I've had a lot of frustration with it recently.  I always seem to have issues with 2+ drives at the same time -- it's never isolated to a single disk failure.  It's happened enough that I don't believe it's coincidence.  In addition, DriveBender rarely brings up all my mount points on the first "try" after a reboot or DriveBender upgrade.  I usually have to keep rebooting several times before they will all come up.  So, I've started researching alternatives, and DrivePool (+Scanner) looks extremely promising.  I've just started a 30-day trial running DB and DP side-by-side with different physical disks.

 

 

DriveBender and DrivePool seem to have different basic approaches when it comes to pools and mounts.  DriveBender and DrivePool are similar in that they both support multiple pools consisting of one or more disks each.  DriveBender then supports multiple mount points (drive letter or network share) within each pool. As far as I can tell, DrivePool doesn't have a similar structure; it just uses a single drive letter mount point per pool.

 

I have the following setup with DriveBender:

- 1 DriveBender pool

- 7 physical disks (HDDs ranging from 1TB to 4TB)

- 8 drive-letter mount points: M: (music), P: (photos), T: (TV and movies), U: (user files -- "my documents") etc.

 

I like being able to separate these different types of files into different drive letters, while still using the same pool of physical disks.  Using DrivePool, I started creating a similar structure of subdirectories on the pool drive, but I'm not crazy about it so far:

\backup

\docs

\music

\photos

\software

\video

    \tv

    \movies

 

Once I get comfortable with it, I intend to remove the drive letters from the individual pooled drives so they don't show up in Windows Explorer -- I only want to access the drives via the pool (with duplication). I've seen some mention of using Windows' mount-point folder paths to do something like this, but I can't seem to find that thread again.

 

So: what works for you?  Thanks!

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To clarify here:
 
StableBit DrivePool doesn't care about where the drives are mounted to. When accessing the drives, we use the full volume ID. This means that the drive can have a drive letter, be mounted to a folder (like what Drive Bender forces you to do, IIRC) or even not mounted at all. 
 
This means that you have an incredible amount of flexibility with the drives in the pool. And it means that adding disks to the pool doesn't wreck any existing setup (such as installed programs). And you can continue to use the disks as you please after adding them to the pool. However, this will count against the available space (and will show up as "Other" data). 

 

As for mounting the drives to a folder:

http://wiki.covecube.com/StableBit_DrivePool_Q4822624

 

 

And StableBit DrivePool only allows a specific volume to be part of a single pool. You can repartition the drive and add the different volumes (partitions) to different pools though.
 
And a big part of the reason that StableBit DrivePool restricts you in this way, is because of the balancing system.  It's a core part of our software. Allowing a single disk to be parts of multiple pools would make the balancing engine significantly more complex (I couldn't even give an estimate). You'd have to account for the data for that pool and EVERY other pool on the disk and in the system. 
You go from having a system that is mildly complex to incredibly complex. And very hard to troubleshoot when things don't work right (which can be a PITA already).
 
However, DrivePool has a different strategy when it comes to organization: File Placement Rules. 
You can specify which disk or disks a specific folder or file types end up on. 
You could lock the backup folder to a specific disk. Or all "MKV" files to a set of disks. 
In fact, we recently had a user that wanted to put all the metadata for his pool on an SSD. 
 
http://stablebit.com/Support/DrivePool/2.X/Manual?Section=File Placement
 
 
 
Additionally, if you still want to map the folders to drive letters (Such as "X:\backup" to show up as drive letter "V:", for example), you can still do that. In fact, if Drive Bender is doing that, it's probably using "subst" in the background to do this. That or it's automatically mapping a network drive.

 

In fact, if you want to do this, you could just map the network drive.

 

If the folders are shared, that makes it simple. Just open "My Computer" and add a mapped drive. 

http://windows.microsoft.com/is-is/windows/create-shortcut-map-network-drive#1TC=windows-7

 

 

However, if you're not sharing the folders, and you're using the Pro or better version of windows, you can use the hidden administrative shares.

 

If you're Pool drive is "X:", then use "\\localhost\x$\folder". 

 

 

 

 

And I apologize if this is too much information, or if I missed anything. I wasn't entirely sure what you were trying to get at, so I tried to include as much information as i could.

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