Christopher (Drashna)

The user interface is much improved in R2. That said, how honestly do you touch your server, and how much does the interface really matter? That's part of why I'm not on R2, other than I don't have a key for R2.

NO, you use deduplication at the host level so it has nothing to do with the VMs themselves.
 
Carlo

psykix, you could just use a free product like SnapRaid to create a parity across your present DrivePool drives.
The volume you stripe to can be local, on another computer or NAS.  Doesn't really matter.
 
Something to think about for a bit more piece of mind.

I myself use a variety of different manufacture drives for my personal stuff.  I work in IT and work with large data (I mean LARGE data) spread out over numious SANs with more than 10K drives.
 
In my professional life I've seen a trend of higher failure rates among Seagate drives than any other manufacture (percentage wise), bot not in the last 2 years (about even).   These are mostly all Enterprise drives and not the common home user or NAS drives that most of us would use routinely.  So I'm not sure how much this matters.
 
I think a lot of failures over time by some companies/users is choosing the wrong drive for the application at hand.  Drives are built differently.  For example putting 40 drives in one case/cabinet will be different then running one or two drives in a normal case.  Lots more vibration and movement.  This can also be even more of a factor for people who try and stuff lots of "home" drives in large cases then use suspend/power down features.  When the drives spin down/spin up they cause extra vibration that other drives in the running in the case won't like, especially when you have 5 to 10 drives spinning up at one time, etc...  Modern drive are much better with this type of thing, but can take it's toll over time.
 
I'm not sure what value this post has except to say that if any one particular vendor had a much higher failure rate than other vendors they probably wouldn't still be in business. The HDD market place is extremly competitive and any manufacture putting out "junk" would surely be noticed in this day and age.
 
Just pick the right disk for the job at hand based on the features it has you need and don't worry to much about who made it. Of course follow common sense rules such as use the same drives if building a traditional RAID type thing, etc

Yeah, fingers crossed!
 
thanks for your help tho

Thanks Christopher, tell Alex thanks for making such quality products, and to you for your helpful answers. It's hard to find businesses these days with such transparency. 

No, I never have.
 
Sounds like you need to poke around over at http://c64.org  -- You will certainly find the answer to your question. 
 
I never actually play too many video games.. heck, even when I was importing them into the US when I was a kid I didn't play many of them.
 
I was more into the demo scene, importing and collecting.
 
One of these days I need to hook all of my Commodore stuff back up.  It's been sitting in a storage closet at my parents house since the FBI gave it back. (15 years after they took it!)
 
~RF

It's a well discussed (as in, I've mentioned it repeatedly to Alex, the developer) feature, that we do plan on adding in the future. 
 
The best option I can offer for now is to enable QoS on your router, to help curb the usage. 

Lol, my 30TB seems oddly insufficient now.
 
Sent from my SGH-I337M using Tapatalk

I somehow missed this response earlier.  I didn't realize Emby was that nice. (as in an actual Plex competitor) 
 
It really is hard to believe the UI is so that much better, Plex is beautiful.
 
Argh. Now I feel the need to install it just to compare.
 
........more hours in the day!
 
~RF

Somehow Emby has slipped under my radar over the last few years. I might have to take a look at it for the heck of it.
 
I've tried most every DLNA server that I've run across and my experience goes like this.....
 
The first DLNA media server I ever used was TVersity, for a few reasons. #1) It was the first and only (at the time) DLNA server that would transcode AND only when needed on a per device basis. #2) It was 100% free. #3) I simply couldn't find anything better. Free or Paid. 
 
I needed to feed original X-Boxes running XBMC, X-Box 360's and several WDTV Live boxes but the majority of clients were/are Playstation 3's. After A LOT of tweaking I got TVersity where I wanted it and had no complaints for several years. It just worked.
 
Like you said Plex wanted to transcode everything which made it basically unusable for more than one or two streams so I stuck with TVersity.  It just worked.
 
Then I ran across Serviio and have been using it for about a year or so. A few short months ago I decided to check Plex out once again and wow,  I haven't looked back. Plex has its (minor) quirks but they are working their butts off over there and I have zero complaints. The community support is superb and they will get around to fixing what little annoyances I have. I notice the Plex server is updated about once every two weeks or so.
 
I didn't even know they had a Windows 8 app. If it's that bad just open up a browser (suggest Chrome in desktop mode) and skip using the app entirely. I have been extremely impressed with all of the Plex clients that I have tried (they sure support a lot!) but I must say the Samsung Smart-TV app is stunning. The PS3 & Android app are great also. I've read that the Roku 3 and Vizio clients are also wonderful. 
 
Personally I think the best experience is had in Chrome.
 
I know we're not exactly apples-2-apples with our configurations (DLNA, etc.) but I just wanted to share my experiences.
 
I still run Serviio in tandem with Plex though as a backup. I did pay for it and it works great in case I ever have an issue with Plex I can just stream from Serviio, it's on a different machine and pointed at the same media (drive)pool as my Plex server.. although I haven't had to use it yet.
 
PLex has come a long way in the past several months. I 'spect they got some funding.
 
Now go upgrade your Plex pass and show them some more love. They aren't slouching over there and I'm sure any issues you have will be resolved.
 
WIth all that said I wish you the best viewing experience and thanks for sharing your thoughts.    
 
Now to decide on the 10GB hardware I need.... Argh.. need more hours in the day to research!!!! 
 
~RF
 
 
 
 

The Gen8 Microserver needs a P222 so that it's reported to the iLO properly.
 
I wouldn't really want to fudge it :-)
 
These 4 drives were originally in a 4 bay QNAP using RAID 5 but the QNAP is ARM based and very slow, so I migrated to the Gen8.
 
If I duplicate everything, then I need 4 more drives - which means I also need a controller card and an external bay. Too much expense when what I have now will last me for several years since I have 6Tb free. It's just not worth all that expense to cover the loss of one drive. To be honest, if I was looking at parity then I'd have gone the hardware raid 5 route, so that I only had 25% overhead. I know that brings its own problems, and I've had RAID 5 arrays in my datacentre which lost 2 drives and required restores from backups.
 
Sooo... you're not gonna convince me to spend out all that money on duplication! hehehe!

Thank you Christopher for your in depth answer. I'll be looking at getting a second SSD I suppose.

Well since everything on my 4x4Tb drives is media and is ultimately replaceable (albeit with some time and effort!) then I came to the conclusion that having an extra 3.6Tb of available space at the expense of a drive failure is acceptable.
 
I'm impressed with the scanner. When I copied the data off the Storage Spaces array so that I could set up DrivePool instead, I had to use a multitude of small 1Tb and 500Gb drives that I had laying around.
 
I knew at least one of the 1Tb drives was acting strangely (it worked but seemd a bit "odd" at times) and as soon as I plugged it in, I got an email from the Scanner reporting S.M.A.R.T. issues. Therefore it seems to be doing its job.
 
Given the above, hopefully anything other than an instant complete drive failure should give me time to get the data off any drive which begins to show problems.
 
Also, as you mention if I do have data I want backing up then I can just dupe those folders.
 
All good for me, because Storage Spaces is awful - I deleted a load of stuff, and it doesn't rebalance, so you end up with uneven drives. They are not readable individually either. My other option was to add a P222 controller card to my Gen8, but that's a pretty expensive option and would cost at least twice what I paid for the Gen8 itself!
 
I can highly recommend Drivepool and Scanner from what I've seen so far :-)

You nailed that one, Storage Spaces is awful.
 
I have ignored some alerts from Scanner in the past, since I know I'm all duplicated. What happened? I lost the drives not much later. It does its job for sure.

To follow up on what DaveyBoy said, that's the beauty of Drivepool. If you don't want to back up everything, as Christopher said you can just duplicate the folders you want. This is ultimately what brought me to Drivepool over other solutions.

OK, Gotcha. Time to start trolling E-Bay.
 
As I said before, I'm not much of a hardware guy so .... ummmm...
 
Two 10GB NIC's, one for each Norco box...
 
Two Mini GBIC's for the Cisco SG200?
 
Am I missing anything Drashna?   
 
WWDD???  
 
haha
 
~RF

Hi I ran into power issues once and it was related to the psu my server was set to do all its maintenance tasks in the early hours and was drawing too much power in doing so eventually the 5v went pop and I lost 2 drives and a few bad block issues on a few more of them since then I always go for a gold rated over the top psu. I also make sure the power supply has enough connectors without using splitters.

No, that wouldn't work. Since we store the actual files on each drive, there isn't a drive large enough in this situation to store the file.  
 
The OS may see all the space available, but the driver for the pool is intelligent enough to know that no disk in that pool as enough space to store the file, and gives you an out of space error.
 
 
Specifically, when you go to create/copy the file, Windows normally queries for free space (to see if it will fit).  The DrivePool driver gets that query, and then queries each individual disk (based on the "real time placement limits", if any), and looks at those values.  If no disk has enough space to put the 4GB file (and in this example, no disk has the space), the driver returns the "not enough space" error.  This is passed to the program querying, and causes the operation to error out with the appropriate error.
 
 
And if the entire pool was full? Then it would cause problems.
However, one of the balancers, "Prevent Drive Overfill" tries to keep all of the disks in the pool 10% free, or 100GBs free. 
This can also cause issues when using the SSD Optimizer balancer, if you have very small cache/SSD drives.
 
Also, you could use the Ordered File Placement Balancer to minimize this possibility, as it fills one (or two, with duplication) drives at a time.
 
 
If we used a block based solution (such as how StableBit CloudDrive, RAID or Storage Spaces works), then yes, that would work fine. But you're storing the blocks of RAW data, so it's not easily accessible without ALL of the blocks, and those would be divvied up between the different disks.

Now I am really jealous. Do you actually run them through an emulator?

Well, ideally, you want our products to just sit there and do their thing.  
So I'm glad to hear that StableBit DrivePool has been working quite well, in that regards!

Hi Carlo, welcome Philmatic.
 
Looks like Carlo is king but as he said 33TB isn't anything to sneeze at. Especially if it's running, working and reliable.
 
I can certainly see your point on duplicating everything Drashna however that's basically the reason I run DrivePool. I have my important stuff duplicated and the replaceable stuff unduplicated. It's nice to pick and choose with folder duplication. I haven't really done the math but I *think* if I wanted to take that big of a hit on drivespace I'd run a conventional RAID. Maybe. (Not that there aren't plenty of other advantages to Drivepool..and I do need to rethink some things)
 
I was kidding about my Drive Pool being ALL PORN however the majority of my pool is video. (my personal favorite being older TV) however I know I fit the definition of data hoarder. I've got every file and picture that's ever been on any of my machines since around 1997..heck.. even from before that. I've got all of my C-64/128/Amiga disc images, all of my old BBS files, clients, business' etc. all online.
 
I also bought the first consumer digital camera that ever came out and went through several girlfriends with that one so needless to say "stuff adds up!' 
 
This new 4224 build is going to be Server 2012 Standard and I think I'll have some fun with deduplication. I can see it has it's place.
 
I really want the disk subsystem to fly on the this new 4224 build.
 
On hand I have a HighPoint 2740, a LSI 9240-8I and a Dell PERC H710P I scavenged in addition to the ports available on the motherboard, a Supermicro X-10DRI-O however I am not opposed to spending some "real money" on a new controller...
 
Heck, here's a picture of most the hardware that has arrived so far, all sitting on top of my running 4220 on the mini "bench." I'm pretty sure the only thing missing in this picture are two additional EVO 850's that just showed up. (for a total of four)
 
I do also have six 600GB 15K Cheetah SAS drives but I don't know if they will make it into this build or not. They are used with about two years of power on time but barely any usage.
 
I'm pretty sure I'm going to populate most of the bays in the Norco with 7200RPM HGST NAS drives or WD Reds.. I haven't made up my mind yet.  
 
The 4224 case just arrived and is sitting next to this 4220 awaiting insertion of parts. 
 
Decisions, decisions.
 
~RF
 

 
 
 
 

That is not a shabby amount of storage by any means.  Guarantee you have more storage than 99.99% of your local friends!
 
You can store a HUGE amount of media on that storage pool for sure. Basically your own personal version of Netflix.

Depends for me on which way I want to go.
For 8 bay http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817707367
For 15 bay http://www.istarusa.com/raidage/products.php?model=DAGE415U20-PM#.VYI2zflVhBd
 
The StarTech eSATA 8-Bay Hot-Swap SATA III Hard Drive Enclosure with UASP works quite well and pretty cheap at around $300 plus shipping. Connect it up via eSata, USB3 or UASP and it works quite well with DrivePool.  I picked one up a couple of weeks ago and put 8 4TB drives in it and haven't had a single issue with it.  I've first tested eSata, then UASP and then normal USB3.  I left it connected via USB3 and haven't had a single issue.
 
It's not quite as fast as the 15 bay could be since you have 8 drives on a channel vs 5, but for normal (non benchmark use) and Plex use it works just fine.  I stream to anywhere from 6 to 10 people in the evening and it handles that load without breaking a sweat.   What I like is that you can take this box and plug it into just about any other computer/notebook or router and be able to access your data.  One of these boxes and a higher end home router like an ASUS gives you a nice NAS box.
 
The reason I'm leaning toward it is that it's very quite and keeps the drives cool.  It's not a rackmount unit but I don't really care about that for a home unit since it's versitile and works well via UASP/USB3 so I don't need to worry about sata/esata ports.  I still have a few sata ports available (8 I think) but I'm reserving them for internal drives.
 
I could go SAS also but really just don't honestly see the need for a media server when a simple box like this can easily add 8 drives at a shot. Throw 6TB WD Reds in it for a reasonable large amount of data at a decent price.
 
Carlo

 
I've got a 24 core (48 with hyperthreading) SuperMicro server with a few 1 TB drives in it running over 75 virtual machines.  They are all 2012 R2 installs.  Machine flys.
 
Not only does the de-duplication help with storage but also helps the machines run faster as it helps with caching/memory and other important items (not trying to be technical).
 
Carlo

That may all be true for the HGST drives but that does not apply to the Seagates. The Seagates actially come with firmware that optimises write-behaviour. It's "the other approach"  that that article refers to. There are no compatability issues with the Seagates.
 
And yes, due to SMR you may suffer write penalties but if we are realistic, you would have to have quite some heavy I/O to actually suffer/notice this. Opening a word doc, changing it and saving it? No issue. Movie editing? Not sure, perhaps. OLTP-databases? You typically simply do not want to risk degraded performance so no. But I really believe the use-cases where write performance would be an issue are very limited.
 
 
 
OK, but who writes 100TB a year (and wants to keep only 8TB of that)? 
A good review was done here: http://www.storagereview.com/seagate_archive_hdd_review_8tb
 
In the use case of OP, writing in batches of 20 to 30GB at a time, mostly to retain, these are a great deal IMHO. Oh, and read speeds are crazy.