Jason Simone

Hi, I am currently considering my options for a new storage volume and I have just run across this product. I am trying to decide between implementing DrivePool or going with a more traditional RAID solution. Something that attracts me to software or hardware mirroring is the fact that I expect to have many drives and the possibility that I can get better I/O performance through mirroring and striping over many columns. Regarding DrivePool performance, I do see claims on the website that data duplication will improve performance by reading from more than one source at a time. However, it seems to me like the primary purpose of duplication is for data protection / drive failure. What I was wondering is, whether DrivePool can also use additional space on parallel drives to store additional mirrors and improve performance even more? For example, I might have a folder that I don't need a duplicate of, or I don't need more than a single redundancy (for failure protection), but I would like it's read speeds to be optimized as much as possible. So if I have free space on more than two drives, will DrivePool be able to automatically stripe/cache additional copies of certain data and then read that data from several drives when it is requested? Or if this is not currently an option, has this been a requested feature / on the roadmap? Thanks for any help!

I'm new to the product and didn't see this answered in the thread, but does this mean that the SSD cache can be configured for multiple SSD drives in order to speed up writes? I.E. If my maximum degree of duplication is 2x and I am willing to install two SSDs as a cache, will writes of duplicated files be optimized? Also, how does space utilization work for SSD cache drives? Does the space still get used for general storage in the pool? Is there a way to configure the amount of drive space that should be kept free for write optimization?