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Showing results for tags 'Drive Bender'.
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I'll start by saying that this isn't a "how do I migrate from DriveBender to DrivePool" post; I'm aware that that's already been covered. In a nutshell, my question boils down to something like "how do you organize your pool?" I'm not really asking a specific question expecting a 'correct' answer; I'm hoping to hear a couple of different ideas and suggestions regarding pool file organization. I apologize if this has been discussed before [it probably has], but I just haven't found those discussions yet. And I realize that on some level, this has nothing to do with drive pooling, except that in my case I'm considering migrating from one pooled structure to a different pooled structure with different capabilities. Background: I've been using DriveBender for several years, and I've had a lot of frustration with it recently. I always seem to have issues with 2+ drives at the same time -- it's never isolated to a single disk failure. It's happened enough that I don't believe it's coincidence. In addition, DriveBender rarely brings up all my mount points on the first "try" after a reboot or DriveBender upgrade. I usually have to keep rebooting several times before they will all come up. So, I've started researching alternatives, and DrivePool (+Scanner) looks extremely promising. I've just started a 30-day trial running DB and DP side-by-side with different physical disks. DriveBender and DrivePool seem to have different basic approaches when it comes to pools and mounts. DriveBender and DrivePool are similar in that they both support multiple pools consisting of one or more disks each. DriveBender then supports multiple mount points (drive letter or network share) within each pool. As far as I can tell, DrivePool doesn't have a similar structure; it just uses a single drive letter mount point per pool. I have the following setup with DriveBender: - 1 DriveBender pool - 7 physical disks (HDDs ranging from 1TB to 4TB) - 8 drive-letter mount points: M: (music), P: (photos), T: (TV and movies), U: (user files -- "my documents") etc. I like being able to separate these different types of files into different drive letters, while still using the same pool of physical disks. Using DrivePool, I started creating a similar structure of subdirectories on the pool drive, but I'm not crazy about it so far: \backup \docs \music \photos \software \video \tv \movies Once I get comfortable with it, I intend to remove the drive letters from the individual pooled drives so they don't show up in Windows Explorer -- I only want to access the drives via the pool (with duplication). I've seen some mention of using Windows' mount-point folder paths to do something like this, but I can't seem to find that thread again. So: what works for you? Thanks!
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When both products were in beta, I picked Drive Bender and have been using it since. However, recently, I'm getting a lot of dropped drives which is greatly frustrating. The idea of running Stablebit Scanner along side Drive Pool has me considering the switch. However, I have 20 drives totaling 60TB in storage with everything duplicated (a hidden duplicate on various drives) so manually recombining stuff is going to be a pain. That being said, can someone familiar with both programs answer these questions for me: 1. If a drive drops, is there a manual/automatic tool that will identify which primary files were located on the dropped drive and then find the duplicates remaining in the pool and mark them primary then duplicate them? 2. Is there a caching mechanism? What type of read/write should I expect if a file is being copied twice in parallel? All my drives are green 5400rpm drives yet on tests, I'm still getting around 60megs read/100megs write in my current config. 3. If Stablebit scanner finds errors on a drive - what does it do? Some of my reading says it pulls the drive automatically - but then would it initiate (the answer the question 1?) 4. In the same vein, is there a tool to check the integrity of the duplication? Can I scan for every file in a duplicated directory to confirm that it has a duplicate somewhere else in the pool? Thanks. Edit: Larsp has posted an "unofficial" guide on how to migrate the Drive Bender pool to StableBit DrivePool, include a script to handle reorganizing the duplication into a format that StableBit DrivePool will properly handle. http://community.covecube.com/index.php?/topic/511-migrate-from-drive-bender-to-drive-pool/?p=4554 -Christopher, aka Drashna