GreatScott

So I'm not fully set up yet, but I tested it with a slice of the drivepool on the 2nd server and it appears this solution will work! Leaving this post up for others who may find it. Use CloudDrive to take shared network drives and turn them into locally-mounted drives that you can use in DrivePool.

Seeing this MIGHT be possible with CloudDrive... if it can take a windows share on the network and turn it into a drive that DrivePool recognizes, that'll work just fine. I need some time to try it though - I'm still setting up the new backup system.

Situation: 2 separate Windows servers, each has 5-10 hard drives, each independently runs DrivePool. I was using the 2nd server as a backup for the 1st server. I'm trying out a new backup solution now, and I'd like to merge all the hard drives from both servers into one big DrivePool. But I can't figure out how to add the hard drives in server #2 into the DrivePool on server #1....

Have NOT fully tested this yet but I think it's possible with CloudDrive. Option 1: use Drivepool on the 2nd server and create one big drive, share it on the network, and use CloudDrive on the main server to connect to that share and it will become a drive that can be brought into DrivePool on the main server. Option 2: Share each of the drives on the 2nd server on the network individually, connect to each using CloudDrive on the main server, and you'll see them each appear in DrivePool to be added to your pool. Not sure which method would be more efficient for load balancing and such...

VERY IMPRESSED! Didn't need to create an account and password Same activation code covers EVERY product on EVERY computer! Payment information remembered so additional licenses are purchased easily Nice bundle and multi-license discount I'm in love with the Drive Pool and Scanner. Thanks for a great product and a great buying experience. -Scott

Never mind! I tried a different SATA port and lo and behold, there it is. Definitely some bad sectors I think but I'm able to access the files and started copying things. Whew.

A friend of mine went through a thunderstorm and ended up with 3 dying hard drives. Two I recovered data from, but the third won't even show up in the Windows Disk Management utility. The drive still seems to spin up (I can feel the vibration) but Windows won't recognize it at all. Does that mean it's the circuit board that's most likely dead, not the actual platters? Does it mean I could get a used $30 drive off ebay (same model) and replace the circuit board and maybe bring this drive back to life? The data on the drive isn't super-vital but it would be worth a $30 experiment to recover if it makes sense to try it. Model WD10EADS is a regular WD Green 1TB 3.5" 7200rpm -Scott

Awesome, I will do exactly that, as soon as I get a motherboard that works. Stupid thing is getting RMA'd tomorrow. I'll be getting my license later in the week

Is it possible this is actually 2048 bytes (not kb)? I've never heard of a cluster size greater than 64k, but 2k is certainly possible.

I'm building a couple new media storage servers. One for my data and a second for backups. After months of research into all the various storage systems (freenas, unraid, snapraid, windows storage pools, etc) I was *almost* ready to go with unRAID; the only thing I didn't like about it was Linux (I'm a Windows guy) and if the server failed, I wouldn't be able to stick the hard drives into a Windows PC to retrieve data. And then today I read an obscure blog post from 7 years ago that mentioned DrivePool and ta-da!! Exactly what I was looking for! My first project is a media server, I purchased 4 of the WD 8tb easystore drives to get the Red's inside them. I want to do a thorough test of these new drives to make sure they're 100% healthy before I put them to work. What do y'all use for an initial test of a new drive before it goes into a production machine? It doesn't need to be fancy... something like CCleaner could do a 1 pass "drive wipe" and then check the SMART data afterward for reallocated sectors? -Scott