PhotonJunkie

Thanks for the good news on how to feed a populated disk into the DrivePool. That process looks about as simple as I hoped.

Exactly right! I'm a little surprised that keeping a folder's contents together isn't DrivePool's default behavior. Sooner or later bad things happen to all forms of storage media, and software design that makes recovery unnecessarily harder should be avoided. As for drive space, I would have to upgrade to all 8 TB drives to do full duplication and still fit in the box and I'm waiting a year of two to see how reliable these shingled drives turn out to be (I have 1 in the pool). In any case, data duplication on a single platform is not a serious backup method - I've seen a catastrophic power supply failure fry practically every component on a couple of PCs.

Thanks Christopher. I will check out the File Placement option. My DrivePool is wonderfully convenient but it isn't my primary backup so it won't be a complete disaster when a pooled drive suddenly fails. However, the scattered folder contents will break many or even most of the BD titles that took most of a week to feed in. A ripped Blu-ray title folder can have 10s of sub-folders and hundreds of individual files with names like 00023.m2ts. The only practical repair for a broken DVD/BD media pool would be to rebuild it from external sources. I am running the StableBit Scanner on the pool so I expect that to provides a bit of insurance. I'm still wondering how to add a fully populated drive to the pool. Can I somehow "move" all the existing folders on that drive into the pool without them being rewritten and their contents potentially scattered? It's good to know you can do a routine defrag on a drive in the pool without breaking the pool but that isn't the fragmentation I was worried about.

I recently set up WHS 2011 with DrivePool to store media files. Other than an early glitch when all my shared folders went missing from the WHS Dashboard and had to be "Recreated", DrivePool has been great. Blu-ray titles occupy most of the drive space and there isn't enough room to do duplication in the pool. I'm concerned from what I'm reading here that any given title will have its folder contents irretrievably scattered across the 8 physical disks in my pool. If that is the case, then I take it that a partial fix is the "Ordered File Placement" plug-in, but that there isn't any sure way to keep the contents of any given DVD or BD title entirely in its original folder? On a related question, If I add a populated drive to the pool, can I then "move" all the existing folders on that drive into the pool without them being rewritten and fragmented?