Hi all,
I just installed DP on my purpose-built NAS last night and have a couple questions.The NAS is running with drive level duplication enabled on 8.1 64-bit using the on-board Intel SATA controllers.
I understand that if I am running two drives, files exist on both drives, so if one drive fails, I know that I need to copy everything from the remaining drive and I 'rescue' 100% of my files.
However, i'm running 4 drives in the pool (all exactly the same size/brand/model), which is leaving me wondering what I would do in the above case of a drive failing?
I'm having a hard time explaining it, but imagine if I dump 500 files on the DP virtual disk (again, apologies if I don't yet have the terminology correct). How are they distributed among the four drives? How would I be sure to recover 100% of my files if a single drive were to fail? I'm guessing that the data for the entire pool is still visible (read-only) so could back that up, but it's the whole pool rather than just the 'vulnerable' files.
Or, is it really something I'm over-thinking and once I 'remove' the drive from the pool, DP would re-balance everything among the remaining three drives so I'd still have 100% of my files, with redundancy, again?
I'm also guessing I could plop a replacement drive into the pool and it would rebuild?
I'm coming from a many year RAID background, so adjusting to the concepts of duplicating at the file level is just tripping me up a bit. Thanks in advance for the help -- as I've been looking around these forums, I've been astounded at the friendly, knowledgeable support that is provided - kudos!
Mike