Has anyone tried this with drivepool for old data which you might still wish to maintain? Given the state of built in drive defect management - I would think this is doable.
Lotsa copies keeps stuff safe. With three copies, I doubt one would need to worry about the condition of used drives?
An example: Lets say you still had 2TB drives in your personal inventory, but they weren't being used because drive sales allowed you to upgrade to the 14TB level. Now you don't wish to saddle yourself with the upkeep requirements of an active drive pool, so you mount all those drives to folders, assign them to a separate pool, then fill them up with archives. Once they are filled you run dpcmd as a final check, wait 24 hrs for that pool to completely stabilize, then disconnect those drives from your system.
Not much different than manually storing copies to old drives, just a bit more disciplined because you automatically store three copies with each group of drives......
What are the potential problems?