WinoOutWest

Edit - I've found a few of my own answers - can anyone help me on the remaining Q's? I really need to figure out whether I am staying with Flex or moving to Stablebit. I have been using Flexraid for drive pooling for over 3 years and have been reasonably happy with the pooling. Registration issues are forcing me to reconsider - and urgently as I have been down for more than a week now waiting for them to sort a re-activation issue. I've already paid twice for the product b/c it was just less hassle to buy a new license with my last rebuild but I refuse to buy it a 3rd time just to resolve my issue (their activation issue/strategy) I am looking for DrivePool experiences to verify my option of moving to DrivePool. I currently have 9 drives in a single 23TB pool. I've added and swapped out different drives over the years and not really had any hiccups with that. My important data is backed up automatically nightly offsite so I am really only looking for a non-destructive pooling like I have with Flexraid. This is running on Windows 10 machine and I have windows shares set up from within my pool with some different rights i.e. kids don't get access to the "Movies-R" folder. Questions: 1) Is my assumption correct that DrivePool doesn't really care about my controller/drives as long as Window can see them beforehand? 1b) Is my assumption correct that I can take my Flexraid drives out of the Flexraid pool and add them to my DrivePool without any data loss/issues? 2) Can I add drives to increase my pool painlessly? 3) Can I remove a drive from the pool, copy files over to a new, say larger drive, then re-add the new drive to the pool? 4) Does DrivePool prioritize continuity of files are not spanned across multiple drives? 5) Does my DrivePool license belong to me or my hardware? For example if I re-do my server in 2 years and replace a MB, some drives etc do I use the same license or do I need to re-purchase/upgrade? 6) Have any users here come from Flexraid (or vice versa) that can share their experience? 7) any caveats or other advice based on my hardware or other information provided that would cause concern? Thanks in advance. Cheers! Darren