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Hello - I have been using WHS2011 and Stable Bit Drive Pool on a HP Proliant N54L for several years. I have been happy with it, and don't really want to change, however it is 2020 now and as i understand it, support for WHS2011 ended in 2016... So, I got my hands on a QNAP TVS-671 (Intel Core i5 based) NAS and was wondering if there is any way to still use Windows/Stable Bit Drive Pool with this hardware? The NAS does support VM's, but it has to be set up in some way (either JBOD or RAiD) before I can create/use VM's, so I don't a VM running Windows/Drive pool would work.. Would it? Or even there's a way to run Windows/Stable Bit Drive Pool on a separate physical machine, and then use the NAS as a 6 bay enclosure connected by a single cable, with Drive Pool providing the fault tolerance, etc, I would be interested in that..Or any other suggestions for a way that I could use this QNAP NAS hardware with Windows/Stable Bit Drive Pool... Any ideas/suggestions will be appreciated! Thanks!!

Hello everyone! I was recently given a brand new WD MyCloud EX4 4-Bay NAS, already populated with 4 x brand new 3TB WD Red HDD's (NASware 3.0). I can always just pull the drives and install them in some of my other available slots, and sell the NAS Box or utilize it in some other way. But ... my main server box of 15 drives is already full, as is also my only decent exterior storage box of 5 more drives. The only available space I have (if I don't find a way to utilize the WD Box), is an open & exposed 5-Bay Sans Digital Hard Drive Rack that I set up to be just a temporary facility until I could find something better. It only has one drive in it at present, so it could hold all 4 of the drives from the WD NAS box if need be, However, I would REALLY like to utilize this very nicely constructed WD NAS Box, preferably as-is. Its only method of external communication is Ethernet without me hacking on it to make it SAS compatible, like I did with my AMS NAS Box (see signature details). The WD MyCloud manual says I can configure 1 or all 4 of the drives in JBOD mode. SO ... I could do that and put the box on my Network. What I don't know is if I utilize the drives this way, will DrivePool even SEE them at all? And if DP does see them, will it see them as 4 separate drives, as I would prefer, or just as one 12TB drive? OR ... is there some specific way to set this up such that DP can see and control the drives in the WD Box as if they were 4 separate drives? Also, all my Pooled drives are mounted like: "Disk01", "Disk02", "Disk19" etc. Naturally I would prefer to be able to do the same for the drives in the WD NAS Box. Would this be possible? Here are some information Links for this WD NAS Box: Overview Manual Specifications Knowledge Base Shares Online User Guide & Solutions I have spent hours pouring through the WD knowledge base, and various Forums (mostly this one) and I cannot find anything that addresses this specifically. I suspect that what I want can't be done, because (as far as I can see), the only way to access a specific drive behind this NAS Box is to MAP it, which has all the limitations associated with that. I hope I'm wrong, but given my very limited knowledge on this subject, it looks like to me that I might have to do essentially the same thing I did with my AMS NAS Box. This would mean bypassing the NAS electronics portions of the Box and install a SAS 8087-to-8088 adapters to connect the drives semi-directly to the controllers in the main chassis, using something like THIS or THIS and THIS and THIS. Is there such a thing as an Ethernet to SAS converter? (JK) Or maybe, depending on what you guys tell me, I might just keep the drives, sell the Box and buy a more suitable Multi-HDD chassis. I don't know what to do. If anyone has any experience with doing this or any knowledge, I sure would greatly appreciate some advice. Thanks so much, Gary (GDog)

Greetings, I have two NAS devices, plus a few local hard drives, and I'd like to aggregate them all together in one Pool (ie, so that they show up as a single drive in Windows). From reading through the website and forum it seems like this may be possible, but in my initial experiments with DrivePool and CloudDrive I'm having trouble achieving this. I can create a pool of the local drives in DrivePool, and I can create a drive of a shared folder using CloudDrive. But I'm not seeing that CloudDrive location show up in DrivePool. From my initial looking I think I'd prefer to just use DrivePool if possible, as it seems to have the sorts of features I'm interested in (eg, I know that I want to use the Ordered File Placement plugin). Ideally I'd like to be able to just enter in a UNC path for a shared folder on each NAS in order to add it as a pooled data location in DrivePool. But I could be fine with mapping NAS drives as well, though that doesn't seem to do anything. I'm trying out DrivePool 2.1.1.561 x64 and CloudDrive 1.0.0.854 x64. The background on all of this is that I have CrashPlan installed on this computer, and I want to create a pooled location to point CrashPlan to for storing data that will be backed up TO this computer from another computer (using CrashPlan computer-to-computer backup). CrashPlan only supports selecting a single location for this scenario, but since I have several old NAS's, plus some local hard drives I'd like to pool them all into one drive to use as my CrashPlan repository. For those that see the value in multiple offsite backups you'll appreciate knowing that I also backup to CrashPlan's servers as well. Thanks in advance for any help or advice on all this!

Hello! I'm looking for some advice on a server build I'm planning. Primarily this server will be a fileserver and Plex or Emby server supporting at least 2 streams at a time. OS will be Windows Server 2012 R2, and I want to run at least a couple of Hyper-V guests on this machine so it won't just be a NAS. I use DrivePool currently and I'd like to stick with that. I already have drives - a Samsung 850 Pro 1TB for OS and VMs, a smaller SSD that I can use for write cache, and several WD Red NAS drives. I don't want to do a rack mount build, so I plan to use a Caselabs Mercury S8 with 3 x 4-in-3 Hot Swap bays for a total of 12 hot swap bays. I'm leaning toward this model of drive bay, http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00OUSU8MI?psc=1&redirect=true&ref_=ox_sc_act_title_8&smid=ATVPDKIKX0DER , but I'd love suggestions. I'm up to speed on the gaming side of builds, but when it comes to server components I'm just not sure what makes the most sense these days. So, what I really need advice on is Motherboard/CPU/Memory, and a drive controller if necessary. I'm looking to support at least 14 drives. I'd like to keep these 3-4 components under $1,000. I'm thinking I will run a Xeon E5 of some kind, but I'm not sure which model would be the best bang for the buck. Since it's on 24x7, something with low power requirements would be nice. For the motherboard, I'd like to stay ATX or smaller. I'm fine with an add-on card like the IBM m1015 (or any other suggestions) to get support for the minimum 14 drives. Multiple NICs would be nice too, but not required. For memory I'm targeting 32GB. Any suggestions? Thanks, Jeff

Hi all, I'm just testing out Drivepool because I want to address all my NAS drives as one. I have some mapped as Network Drives and some not at all but either way Drivepool doesn't seem able to see them or address them. Is this a limitation of Drivepool? Thanks, James