larsp

I think it would be great if in DrivePool it would be possible to configure some drives in the pool to only contain data that is duplicated on at least one other drive. That is, non-duplicated data would never be stored on that particular drive.
 
Use case at hand: I'm replacing a couple of fully functional 1.5 TB drives for 3 TB ones, because after 5 years their Load Cycle Count is off the charts according to StableBit Scanner. While at the moment they show no symptoms of deterioration, it would seem like they could still be part of the pool for duplication (and thus freeing up more space on the 3 TBs), but since they could in theory die at any minute, I do not want any data to be kept only on those drives (including data that I would entrust a single of the 3 TB ones).

I have just migrated from DriveBender and back to DrivePool. I tried DriveBender for a period, but it was just slower than DrivePool. When copying many files to DriveBender (ie starting FileHistory from Windows 8), it just stopped working and I had to restart the server. TV-recordings stored in DriveBender was also very slow and uresponsive in VMC. I never had that kind of problems with DrivePool. I do think that the interface in DriveBender is a little more "fancy" but stability is just more important.
 
Anyway. To migrate back to DrivePool i did the following (on a window server 2012 essential):
 
1. Installed DrivePool alongside DriveBender. 
2. Release your DriveBender license before uninstalling
3. Set up a duplicate DrivePool on the same disks that DriveBender used.
4. Stopped DriveBender and DrivePool services from services.msc
5. Moved alle folders on physical disks from DriveBender root folder to DrivePool root folder.
6. Used the script below to move the duplicate files from DriveBenders location til DrivePools location (DriveBender stores the duplicate in a subfolder named FOLDER.DUPLICATE.$DRIVEBENDER, so you will have to move all the content in that folder to the folder below).
7. Started DrivePool and uninstalled DriveBender.
8. Used computer management to give DrivePool the same disksletter that DriveBender had.
 
Bat file to move files stored in FOLDER.DUPLICATE.$DRIVEBENDER to the directory below (hidden files will no longer be hidden as move doesn't move hidden files). This script has to be run on all the physical disks. Stand in the \poolpart.* folder. To try  it out, stand in a subfolder where you can't do much harm.
 
Please note that I give ABSOLUTELY NO GUARANTEE that the script will work for you. Try it out first, and if it seem to work, remove the echo
 
@echo off for /r %%f in (FOLDER.DUPLICATE.$DRIVEBENDER) do if exist %%f (   echo %%f   cd "%%f" echo  attrib -h *.*   if exist *.* ( echo    move *.* ..   )   cd .. echo  rd "%%f" )  
All in all it took just 1 hour to set up and migrate from DriveBender to DrivePool and I did not have to duplicate 6 tb.

I have recentlig migrated from MS Storage Space to Drive Pool. One day may Storage Space went offline, and the only way I could get it back online, was to add an USB2 drive as part of the Storage Space. Not really an optimal situation. 
 
I do feel a lot more secure with Drive Pool than I did with Storage Pool. If the computer fails I can extract the files from the disk. With Storage Space it was lost.
 
But after accidental deleting a file on the shared network, I came to realize that Drive Pool does not support "Volume Shadow Copy". I have now enabled shadow copying on all the disks in the pool, but to undete I have to do it on the server and try to find the disk the file was on. I think it would be quite easy to implement a "recycle bin" on CoveFS. Instead of deleting the file, just move it to /recycle and have a retention policy to clean it up? The same functionality could be used to create file versioning. 
 
The optimal would be a direct integration with windows "restore previous versions" but I think the above should be easier to implement.