sitm

Latest experiences disconnecting the external closures whem computer is running. Drivepool seems to go easy with this - I am able to put my pooldrive offline in Windows-Diskmanager. When back online Drivepool recognizes this and puts pool online again. However I am seeing some BSODs from the marvell-driver mvs91xx.sys driving the external closures. So, Drivepool would be able to handle this, my OS (Win8) is complaining. Not great of an issue as the enclosures are only the backups and not used all the time, so I will do a proper shutdown to switch off the enclosures. Switching on while OS running is not an issue. Migrating on the HTPC from simple use of junctions to Drivepool worked as well.

I recently bought 2 Lian-Li Ex-503 - 5 Bay. Very pleased so far. Good cooling and reasonable quiet. However fan is not temperature-controlled - not an issue at all as it is running silent. To see all your drives in the external closure your e-sata-interface needs to support "Port multiplying" - otherwise you only see the first disk. This is no issue via USB - however many reports out there enclosures getting disconnected with heavy load on USB. USB tends to be somehow unreliable. Cannot tell anything about Firewire or WHS, but JBOD normally gives one big drive. Maybe JBOD on WHS is something different - don`t know.

Junctions work pretty well for me on the HTPC - however I wanna get rid of taking care where there is still enough free space to put additional files and then put a junction in the destination where these files should belong. Reason for switching off is these 2 external closures are the backups - so I don`t want them to be switched on all the time. Somewhere I saw a thread creating a second "dummy"-pool. Will see what I get. Thanks so far.

Done :-) Went almost smooth - all 20 TB and 10 disks no under the "control" of Drivepool. So switching from Flexraid-Storage pooling to Drivepool is easy going. Simply had to draw my 2 folder movies and series into the hidden folder on every disk and content showed up in the pool. Only at the very beginning I had the issue my pool disappeared and I could not add my disks again with error "cannot add a disk twice" Uninstalled - deleted a folder according to another thread - reinstalled and pool with already added disks showed again. Will use Drivepool on my HTPC as well - task for tomorrow. No more fiddling around with junctions.... Write performance seems to be higher - I now get over 100 MB/s when copying over the net. However hard to judge and mostly a little unfair when comparing to Flexraid as the disks are now connected completely different as before. 2 external HDD-closures connected via E-Sata to my main-machine with Win8 whereas before they all where in a quite older machine with Win7. Only thing i have to take a closer look at is the behaviour of Drivepool when the external HHD-closures are switched off --> Drivepool showing missing drives and when the HDDs come back I twice lost my settings - i.e. duplicating was activated although I deactivated it before. Is there any best practice on this?

Thanks again. Think I understood what to do. Just want to be prepared - when dealing with 10 disks and 20 TB copying files again is to be avoided

Thanks for reply. There are no duplicate files on the disks -- just many subfolders with the same names in folders movies and series on every disk. This means I create folders movies and series on the pool before moving files from disks to the hidden folder. In the hidden folder I will then see a subfolder movie and a subfolder series. Then I move contents of folder movies on disk 1 with i.e. a subfolder Elysium and some files in it to the hiddenfolder/movies on disk 1. Then I move contents of folder movies on disk 2 with a subfolder Elysium and some different files in it to the hiddenfolder/movies on disk 2. Would mean converting to be quick and easy.

Hello everybody, I am using Flexraid right now only for storage pooling. For licensing reasons I wanna change to Drivepool. Flexraid is storing the files/folders in the following manner. Example: Disk1 |___ Movies |___ Series Disk2 |____Movies |____Series and so on on the other 8 disks. Movies on Disk1 contains i.e. a folder Elysium and some files of this movie (XMBC - .nfo, .jpg etc....) Movies on Disk 2 also contains a folder Elysium with some other files that originally where all together in a folder Elysium on the source. This may i.e. happen when during copying from source space runs out on Disk 1 and the folder Elysium is continued on Disk 2 or for some balancing-processes running (Source is a HTPC - the machine with Flexraid running is the backup-machine) Movies and Series from the different disks is then merged into a fodler movies and afolder series on the storagepool with the content of all same folders spread all over the different disks. I am aware I can move folders into the hidden folder created by Drivepool on the single disks when the pool is created. So no time-consuming copying needed from the original source via network. So - what will happen after I moved the folder Movies from disk 1 into the hidden folder on disk 1 and then move the folder movies from disk 2 into the hidden folder on disk 2. Both may also have folders with the same name as described above) The pool already containng a folder movies. Will there happen some sort of merging? I am aware this might not be the best way to start with drivepool, but copying 20 TB over the net will take a reasonable amount of time. Any hint appreciated. Or bad idea at all and better do a fresh copy over the net to let Drivepool do its job what belongs to space-balancing and/or keep folders together when creating the pool and spreading the data. Thanks a lot.