Christopher (Drashna)

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.

I also do the fly by the seat of my pants method..Everything ctitical is backed up three fold or more... If its a few TB of movies then c'est la vie.
This approach may change though when the 8TB drives come down in price a little more.
 
As for DrivePool itself... well (as another Plex user), the best endorsement I can give is that I have been using it since the very early beta stages. 
As someone who used to be extremely active on here I just don't have the time any more. BUT I don't need to be because it just works!!!
Im well over two years of not having touched my server (windows updates aside) in fact I actually feel guilty that I guess I just take DrivePool for granted. It sits there silently in the notification area doing its stuff. 

Hi all,
 
Just wondering if anyone is using the new Seagate Archive drives yet?
 
The 8TB options are extremely competitively priced here in Aus (were down to 35c/GB other day). The drives certainly have their limitations however, mainly that their sustained write speeds are horrendous. They have a cache which will work very well up to 20GB, then slowly degrade till ~80GB or so where it becomes atrociously slow; this is just the nature of the SMR technology being used in a consumer grade product. I personally have no qualms with this. Yes, it will take forever to copy to initially, and would be quite frustrating for RAID due to the rebuild times.
 
However for someone who typically does a one time write and multiple read (ie WORM), they are fantastic value drives and aside from the initial population this issue would likely rarely occur. I usually only copy over batches of 10-20GB files at a time, normally batches off the DSLR.
 
Looking at grabbing 2-3, but currently only have the currency for 1, so looking to combine with my existing WD greens for the time being.
 
What I am wondering though, is would any of this interact strangely with Drivepool? Are there any limitations I should be aware of or need to address? In particular mixing the archive and green drives in a pool? I pressume the green drives will be limited somewhat by the archive drives if I chew through the archive drives cache.
 
Anyways, any opinions welcome, just works out a crapload cheaper than purchasing WD red drives here in Aus.
 
 
Cheers,
Luke

Hey Guys -- Sorry to bail on this thread so long ago. After I read it Mr. Drashna got me thinking.... 
 
Let's say this:  It appears that it's a bad idea to have every piece of network hardware in the house(s) on battery back-ups --particularly when it's cheap hardware.   
 
The power in the neighborhood hasn't gone out for a significant amount of time which meant I had several "junk/dumb" GB switches (meaning Trendnet, TP-Link and the like.) that haven't been power cycled in many, many months.  
 
So.....I'm not sure which switch/router was the problem but after power cycling all of them (and doing nothing else) everything basically matches your guesstimates above.
 
So with this system now up, running & stable I'm about to begin a 4224 build.  Once that's up and running I can revisit the 4220 box and clean up a few loose ends that are bugging me..but at this point it's 100% stable.
 
With my new 4224 build (Meant to separate my media server from my storage server)  I can do things a bit more slowly and concentrate on a few key points. 
 
Originally I was just going to upgrade the motherboard in the 4220 and call it a day but at this point I can't afford any significant downtime and wanted to spend time tweaking (specifically the network side of things) so I decided a totally new build was in order and began collecting all the pieces which have mostly arrived.
 
I'm sure you don't remember me Drashna but you came to my rescue a couple times (On two separate Sundays no less) during the 4220 build which was my first "serious" experience with DrivePool & Highpoint controllers... I sincerely appreciate it.
 
~RF
 
 

RFOneWatt,
 
I just have to know.  What are you using all that space for??  Video?

I'd like to start by saying I've been using DrivePool+Scanner for a while now, and they are seriously awesome. Everything WHS should have been. So much thanks for that.
 
I only use it for home use but the one thing I'm currently lacking is an offsite backup. That's where CloudDrive comes into play for me. Being able to use multiple cloud providers with DrivePool is really powerful. Before now I wouldn't have considered it as I don't want to trust the cloud with my private files, but the encryption part of CloudDrive fixes that.
 
So basically my use case is to pool as many providers as possible, and backup only the most essential data. Speed isn't important to me.
 
On to my first experience. I installed CloudDrive and hooked up dropbox, amazon and hit a wall with microsoft onedrive. I eventually found the forum post (grateful it was stickied) and enabled it. I realise that their service is poop, but would be nice to be able to enable in the UI with appropriate warnings.
 
I put about 10mb of test data in all of the providers and found that they all generated lots of errors and didn't seem to get anything uploaded. Eventually worked out by reading through the forums that it's probably because my connection isn't fast enough (8mbit down, <1mbit up). After massively increasing most of the timeouts, reducing the threads to 1 and destroying/re-creating the drives with 128k chunks instead of the default 1mb I managed to get it stable.
 
What would be cool is if you had a benchmarking feature in the app, a bit like scanner's burst test. Then you could potentially have an "autodetect" settings feature, as finding and editing a config isn't the most user friendly first experience. You could also warn the user that their connection is less than optimal.
 
The only other thing I messed up was that I assumed that CloudDrive was encrypted by default. Would I be right in thinking that with encryption unticked, the chunks in the cloud would be readable somehow? I couldn't find a way to enable encryption on my cloud drives after I had made them, so in the end deleted them and created them again.
 
It would definitely be cool to have an overview panel of all of the connected drives. At the moment you have to hop through all the tabs to see what, if anything, is going on.
 
Anyway hope this feedback is helpful, keep up the fantastic work.
 
 
Max

Here is my configuration along with a custom built rack.
 
Server
iStarUSA D-412S3-MATX 4U Rackmount microATX Server Chassis
Intel Core i7-3770K Ivy Bridge 3.5GHz (3.9GHz Turbo) LGA 1155 77W Quad-Core
Intel Media DQ77MK Desktop MB, Intel Q77 Express Chipset, w/TPM
Corsair Vengeance LP 32GB (4 x 8GB) 240-Pin SDRAM DDR3 1600 (PC3 12800)
Intel 80GB 330 Series Maple Crest SSD
Antec EarthWatts Green EA-380D, 380W
Noctua Ultra Silent CPU Cooler Cooling NH-U9B SE2
3x Noctua NF-R8 PWM 80mm Case Fan
LSI 9200-8e SASController Card, 2 x SFF-8088 mini-SAS External Connectors, JBOD only
Windows Server Essentials 2012 R2
Stablebit DrivePool v2.1.1.561
Stablebit Scanner v2.5.1.3062
IHomeServer v3.1.76.0 (iTunes 12.1.2.27) feeding 2x AppleTV 3
Crashplan
 
 
Array
NORCO DS-24E 24-3.5" JBOD Enclosure
 
Pooled Drives - 59.2TB
2x 8TB Seagate Archive HDD
1x 6.0TB WD Red
1x 4.0TB WD Red
7x 3.0TB WD Red
5x 2.0TB WD Green
1x 2.5TB WD Green
3x 1.5TB Seagate
1x 1TB WD Green
Non-Pooled drive
1x 1TB WD Green - OS Backup drive
 
UTM
ARK IPC-1.5U1525 Black 1U Rackmount Server Case
Intel S1200KP Mini ITX Server Motherboard LGA 1155 Intel C206 BIOS
Intel Core i3-2120T Sandy Bridge 2.6GHz, 35W Dual-Core
Stock Intel cooler
Noctua 60x25mm A-Series Blades with AAO Frame, SSO2 Bearing Premium Fan
G.SKILL Ripjaws X Series 16GB (2 x 8GB) 240-Pin SDRAM DDR3 1600 (PC3 12800)
Intel 60GB 330 Series Maple Crest SSD
100gb 2.5 HD
Intel Dual Port Pro 1000 PCIe NIC
picoPSU-160-XT, 160w output, 12v input DC-DC Power Supply
Ubiquiti Networks Unifi UAP-Pro Enterprise Dual Band AP
Untangle v11.2
 
Dell PowerConnect 2824 24port GB managed switch
Dell PowerConnect 2724 24port GB managed switch
 
VMware ESXi 5.5 Home Lab server
ARK 1U125 Black 1U Rackmount server case
Supermicro A1SAi-2750 mini ITX MB
Supermicro PWS-203-1h 200W 80 Plus Gold
Intel Atom C2750 2.4GHz Avoton 8 core CPU
32gb Kingston DDR3 1600 ECC memory
LeefSupra 16gb USB 3.0 flash drive
1x 480gb Intel S3500 SSD
2x 240gb Seagate 600 Pro SSD (200gb)
1x 128gb Samsung 810 SSD (cache)
1x 64gb Intel 330 SSD (cache)
 
APC Smart UPS SMT1500RM2U 1000W 2U rackmount
 
 
Ctopher

Someone has to have it, right?
 
How about we start with the largest pool of the members that participate here?
 
I'm taking an uneducated guess that theoretically Drivepool should scale indefinitely (or to some insane limitation imposed by the O/S, hardware or something else) however we all know the real world is where it's at, yes?
 
I'm sure I'm nowhere near the largest but I've maxed out my Norco 4220, and then some.
 
It's NOW time to start building the successor! 
 

 
 
 
Would love to see what everybody else has going on!
 
~RF