DaveBetTech

Thanks again for your input Mr. @Chris Downs. I think I'd be fine with using NTFS vs ReFs as long as there was some way of preventing bit flip / bit rot / corrupted files. While waiting for something in here, I have went ahead and installed Win2019 and fooling around with storage pools. It's a REAL PAIN to use. I tried to add two 10tb and 3tb drives (9.09 & 1.81 effective) using 2-way-mirror and it only gave me a storage pool of 5.37 max. I obviously wanted around 11.8 tb effective, half of the space. I even tried to do 2x10tb & 2x3tb, but nope, gave me 4tb effective. With StableBit DrivePool, I'm pretty sure I'd get exactly what I was looking for. I'm just looking for some kind of protection against bit rot/flip/corruption. It's not clear to me that it has this feature, but am kind of hoping since there's not a lot of flexibility w/o strictly adhering to these storage requirements.

Thank you again @Chris Downs for your feedback. I'm definitely interested in knowing how I can address bit rot and corruption with DrivePool. I'm not clear how both / either are addressed. I see how it scans for bad sectors, but more curious about periodic checking of files against a CRC like in ReFs or maybe compared against each other, dunno. Just want to maintain data integrity over the long term. I have had some of these files since the mid 90s. Thanks in advance for anyone who can provide information about this!

Thanks Chris for the reply. That's good to know about the drives being visible / accessible. I haven't added the drives to the DrivePool yet, so I haven't seen this. I assume there is still a 'drive' that shows the cumulative space across the drives (e.g. 10 tb if you have five 4tb drives in the pool w/duplicate on everything). I'm now curious how it would use the bit rot protection in ReFs. There's a CRC that's calculated originally and recalculated each time it reads the file & compared to the original. If it's bad on a future read or scan, then it copies over the 'good' copy over the 'bad' copy. I'm now wondering if DrivePool works with ReFs in this manner. Or perhaps there's another method DrivePool & Scanner uses?

Hello new-solution-provider-I-just-heard-about. I just started the 30 day trial and had a few questions that I couldn't find the answers within the forum. Let me start by providing some history, which might be unnecessary: ============================================================================================ I've been using Storage Spaces w/ReFs & file integrity for a couple years now. I had five 2tb old drives and two 10tb drives for about 13.6tb effective after 2 way mirror. I have it all in a single volume and it wasn't over provisioned. Recently I went into StorageSpaces and saw that my usage was 100% while the drive was only at 62% used space of 13.6 tb. Strange. It wouldn't let me drop/remove a drive in Storage Spaces, so I physically removed a 10 tb drive, formatted & moved all my data across the network to that 10 tb drive. I then deleted that storage space and recreated it. I started a new WD extended scan on the new drive in the new Storage Space and started testing / verifying file integrity was set by a few CLI commands. Well, while doing this, I noticed that while there was ZERO data on my storage space, somehow it is now showing 40% used. Same issue. I noticed some other weird shit too, like showing 98.3% used on some drives but not others, and Optimize drive usage not working like it historically has. I don't think I can trust Storage Spaces, which pisses me off because I just spent $125 on upgrading to W10 Workstation for better ReFs support. ============================================================================================ KEY DIFFERENCES / SIMILAR FEATURES: NOW, while researching new solutions, including Ubuntu + ZFS, I came across Stablebit DrivePool & Scanner. It seems to operate similar to Storage Spaces with some key intriguing differences: I think you can see where each copy of a file is located on which physical disk. Can't do that w/Storage Spaces AFAIK. All your drives show up in My PC with DrivePool *PLUS* your JBOD virtualized drive vs Storage Spaces which just shows the virtualized one I think it handles bit rot by using Scanner to periodically scan your files which should trigger ReFs recalculation of the CRC. Storage Spaces does this automatically, so this is just a similar feature, not different. Scanner seems to have a better GUI for evaluating health of drives. I have some old suckers in my array. I use CrystalDiskInfo and HWinfo to monitor usually. Scanner can eject drives with issues from the pool. Holy crapballs this seems awesome. QUESTIONS FOR THE BIG BRAINS / THOSE FAMILIAR: Is my above statement correct about showing where each copy of a file is located when you enable redundancy? Is my above statement correct regarding how BitRot is handled with ReFs & Scanner? If not, how would I be able to protect against this using DrivePool &/or Scanner? GENERALLY I'M LOOKING FOR SOMETHING THAT FITS THESE CRITERIA: Ease of administration. I want to avoid using Linux if I can. I'm between a novice and an intermediate Linux user. Has to be on Windows or Ubuntu because of GPU acceleration in Plex. I don't want to buy a separate NAS. Has some level of redundancy and protection against Bit Rot. I want to "set it and forget it" Would be 'nice' to see which physical disk houses each copy of a file.