astuni

Hello there, long story short, i had a very well functioning flexraid transparent array which served me well in the past 7 years allowing me to pool my drives and recover data without any issue each time i had failures (i'd say at least 3 drives during this period). However this month my motherboard died and i had to replace it with a new one, new processor, new ram and that meant i had to reinstall everything from scratch only to find out i can't activate anymore my flexraid license due to developer going into the void with the whole website / domain and the relevant activation server. This led me to evaluate alternatives and i came across the Drivepool/Snapraid combo. Now, to my questions: - I have a grand total of 16 hdds, 15 already filled with data, the last one will be empty and used for parity (i know snapraid recommends at least three parity drives with that many data drives, but i can't afford to migrate to bigger ones right now and my sata ports are all used so it's a no go, i'll take the risk). - can you confirm i would simply install Drivepool, add all the data drives to the pool, then stop the service, move all the folders into the hidden pool folder on each drive, then start the service again and have drivepool index all the content and show it pooled? - Flexraid did an awesome job in balancing files across disks, however i have many instances of the same folders (say: TV Shows\baywatch\S01\) on more hdd's and actual files only on some of them, while others could even be empty folders, does Drivepool goes mad when multiple paths with same name are spread across source disks and only some of them have actual files inside them or, like flexraid pooling, it will show the "sum" of them thus showing all the files gathered into that path across all disks? - How it works if, for some reasons, i have duplicate filenames across source disks for the same paths, it will show either one of the two or it will go mad about them? Even if i know you don't give actual support for it, do you think it's better to first have drivepool setup (and actual files moved into pooled folders) before having snapraid sync the parity from all the data disks? Which options i should disable in Drivepool to have snapraid work efficiently (rebalancing and equalization and such things...). Any other tip you may want to give is welcome, i want to make sure i'm going the right way beforehand. Thank you.