Will R

Thanks for the reply, I'll try that driver. I don't suppose there's 1.5x duplication? Because honestly with 2x on it's basically mirrored stripes, but minus the rebuild time. I just hate to lose HALF for media files.

Ok so first off I am a newbie to Drivepool and I am currently evaluating it. Box is Win 7 x64 pro, Asus M5A78L-M (AMD 760 chipset) AM3+ mlb with 6 sata 3 ports, FX 8320e, 16gb ram. I also have a cheapo $10 IOcrest ASM1061 PCIe 2 sata expansion card (wanted to use for storage as opposed to boot drive). Wanted to step up from my 2 x 2TB mirror and evaluating this vs drive bender vs flexraid vs W10 storage spaces, etc. So I have 6 x 2TB WD Green drives, 1 has my data so I created a pool with 5 with the intent to do a clean copy, then add the 6th to the pool after. Want to use 2x duplication (follow up question on that as well). 4 drives are on the onboard sata controller (AMD) with 2 on the ASM1061 card. Downloaded 2.1.1.561. It creates the pool fine after some format time. Problems start when I start robocopy from my source drive. Copy write is dead slow, and keeps timing out (robocopy timing out and pausing for 30 seconds constantly). Looking in event logs, and I see sata errors pointing to drive 9 (which is on the pcie sata card). If I leave it alone Drivepool will eventually disconnect the drive and kick it out of the pool. Question #1 - any thoughts as to why drivepool hates this controller? Windows seems fine with it, I can do a 1:1 robocopy to that drive when not pooled and no issues. I did search on the forum and it seemed that was an OK controller to use. Once I figured out it was the drive on the expansion controller, I swapped some cables around and had the same problem with whatever drive was plugged into that. I gave up on that, yanked the PCIe Sata card, and just created a pool with 4 x 2TB drives. No issues now, copy process is moving along fine. Question #2 : So I set the entire pool for 2x duplication. It is my assumption this will give me single drive failure protection, yes? The question is, how much space am I losing to duplication once it fills up? On my 8TB (ok 7.25 or whatever windows says) pool, how much will I lose? 50%, or 4TB? I'd hoped for something closer to raid 5 level of space usage since it's mostly media, but am curious. Question #3 : So when it comes time for bigger drives, using 2x duplication, what's the best way to upgrade? Remove one from the pool, then add in the new drive and let it balance? In the past with raid setups I would just yank one drive at a time and let it rebuild, then expand the volumes 1 drive at a time. Thanks... I have been digging through the forums but haven't found what I've been looking for yet.