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DrivePool - questions from a nervous noob


strangel

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Hi all.

Complete friggin n00b here. Askin all the stupid question.

This is one of them:
I have created a pool in Stablebit Drivepool (SBDP from now). I am migrating from Storage Spaces (SS from now) to SBDP because i didn't set the correct cluster size when i started using SS and as a result, i banged my head into the 16TB limit.

Something big had to be done. I realized i could do 1 of 2 things;

1. Make a new storage space with the correct cluster size and then remove disks from the old storage space to the new one.
2. Give SBDP a try, since I have read a lot of positive reviews about it. Many ppl seemed  to consider SBDP to be considerably better than SS.

I choose option 2. So, as i said, I have created a pool in SBDP. At the moment it consists of just one 14TB disk. However, that will change when i choose to remove the rest of the HDD's from SS and add it to the new and glorious DrivePool pool :)

At the moment there is one thing that puzzles me; why do i see BOTH the drivepool and the local disk under My Computer?
(see attached picture)
I would've expected the local disk to "disappear" and become a part of the pool. The way it is now makes me unsure about some things:

  • Which one (local disk or the pool) should i "interface" with?
  • Will more or less fatal errors occur if i use the wrong one?

Please bear with me here, please. I feel like i am taking a chance here; moving a lot of precious data and trying out a new system. I just need someone to reassure me and/or explain it to me as if I were a 10 year old :)

And please feel free to tell me all the ways DP is better than SS (and in which way) if that's the case.

 

dpool.jpg

Edited by strangel
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For this, you'd want to use the DrivePool (F:\).

Just move the data from D: to F:, and then you should be fine. 

 

And no, you won't mess anything up by using E:\.  However, you'd want to move the data to the hidden "poolPart.xxx" folder instead of to the root directory on the disk. And then remeasure after the data is moved/copied over.  And we don't recommend doing this normally, but for the initial migration process, it should be fine. 

Also, if you want to hide the drive letter for the E:\ drive, you can do this:
https://wiki.covecube.com/StableBit_DrivePool_Q4822624

 

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On 10/15/2022 at 4:52 PM, strangel said:

Hi all.

Complete friggin n00b here. Askin all the stupid question.

This is one of them:
I have created a pool in Stablebit Drivepool (SBDP from now). I am migrating from Storage Spaces (SS from now) to SBDP because i didn't set the correct cluster size when i started using SS and as a result, i banged my head into the 16TB limit.

Something big had to be done. I realized i could do 1 of 2 things;

1. Make a new storage space with the correct cluster size and then remove disks from the old storage space to the new one.
2. Give SBDP a try, since I have read a lot of positive reviews about it. Many ppl seemed  to consider SBDP to be considerably better than SS.

I choose option 2. So, as i said, I have created a pool in SBDP. At the moment it consists of just one 14TB disk. However, that will change when i choose to remove the rest of the HDD's from SS and add it to the new and glorious DrivePool pool :)

At the moment there is one thing that puzzles me; why do i see BOTH the drivepool and the local disk under My Computer?
(see attached picture)
I would've expected the local disk to "disappear" and become a part of the pool. The way it is now makes me unsure about some things:

  • Which one (local disk or the pool) should i "interface" with?
  • Will more or less fatal errors occur if i use the wrong one?

Please bear with me here, please. I feel like i am taking a chance here; moving a lot of precious data and trying out a new system. I just need someone to reassure me and/or explain it to me as if I were a 10 year old :)

And please feel free to tell me all the ways DP is better than SS (and in which way) if that's the case.

 

dpool.jpg

 

I ran Windows Storage Spaces for about 7 years before I had my third Storage Spaces massive failure and data loss. I switched over to DrivePool a couple years ago and it just works so much better for me. When Storage Spaces works, it's a good system. When you have problems with Storage Spaces, you often have massive data loss due to the stripping method of placing data on all disks in the pool. Even with Parity or Duplicated Storage Spaces, I had massive data loss with a single HDD failure in my Storage Spaces pool of ~20 HDDs. That should never happen, in theory, but it did. Anyway, I have had much better results with DrivePool, and if you have a HDD failure in DrivePool, it only affects the data on that specific HDD.

If you have a drive letter assigned a HDD, and you add that HDD to DrivePool, you will still see the original Drive Letter under My Computer. I know in Windows Storage Spaces, adding a HDD to your pool removes that HDD from your view because Storage Spaces takes total control over your HDDs and they cannot be used for anything else. In DrivePool, you can add a HDD to your pool, AND, you can still use that drive as a normal drive on your computer system. That might be an advantage to you in some setups. 

In my case, I add my HDDs to my DrivePool and remove the Drive Letter of the specific HDD so that it does not show up under My Computer view. But I have 20 HDDs currently in my DrivePool so that would make a very messy My Computer with all those drives and drive letters showing up in the listing. I only want to see my DrivePool drive letter (F: in your setup) and not all the other 20 HDDs that are in that pool. If I have any problems with a specific HDD, I can always reassign a drive letter to that drive using the Disk Management program. Assigning or removing drive letters to your HDDs in DrivePool has no affect on how DrivePool works. That's a very big plus in my opinion.

IMO, there are a number of advantages of DrivePool over Windows Storage Spaces. First, and foremost for me, is that DrivePool uses the normal NTFS file system for the pool HDDs, and if you have a HDD failure, it only affects data on that HDD. In Windows Storage Spaces, the data is written in packets across the HDDs in the pool. If you have a HDD failure in Storage Spaces, it can affect the entire pool because Storage Space might not be able to reconstruct the missing packets. In theory, Storage Spaces should be able to rebuild itself if you use Parity or Duplication spaces. In my case, Storage Spaces does not live up to its promise and I had massive data loss despite have both Parity and Duplication spaces on my system.

In DrivePool, you can set the duplication on either the entire pool, or to specific folders. For example, I mostly use my DrivePool as my Home Media Server, and only have 1 file of the data so I can maximize my online storage (I have all data backed up on HDDs in my closet). I do have a few folders that I have 2X duplication, and I think I had one folder with 3X duplication. All that does is to let DrivePool rebuild itself on those folders with duplication faster if you have a HDD failure. In my case, I'll just grab my backup HDDs from the closet and put whatever files I want back into DrivePool.

If you had a total failure in Storage Spaces, those HDDs cannot be rebuilt because of the packet writing system across multiple HDDs. You can't read a Storage Space HDD. That happened to me a number of times before I gave up on Storage Spaces. In DrivePool, if you had some kind of total failure, you could pull the physical HDDs and read them in another computer or desktop disk caddy because the data is stored in normal NTFS volumes. In short, I have found data recovery possible in DrivePool, whereas Storage Spaces it was not.

Originally, I was disappointed with the write speed of DrivePool compared to Storage Spaces. DrivePool writes the entire NTFS file to a single HDD, and that is limited by the HDD write speed. In Storage Spaces, where it writes packets to multiple HDDs all at the same time, I used to get much faster write speeds. I solved that issue by adding a SSD to the front end of my DrivePool. Now, all my files are first written to my SSD at the SSD write speed, and later, it will flush the data cache to my slower HDDs in the background.

Read speeds, for my Home Media Server, are not so critical for me. Again, Storage Spaces initially has the speed advantage on read speeds because because it can read packets from multiple HDDs at the same time. In DrivePool, you can enable Read Striping on data that is duplicated and that will boost your speed, almost, but not quite 2X the speed of one HDD.

What I found more useful, is that in DrivePool I can clear my SSD cache with an initial re-balancing, and set the flush threshold high enough to hold a large temp working folder. That way, my temp data is both read/write on that folder sitting on the SSD in DrivePool. For example, I might set the SSD flush threshold at 100 GB, perform a re-balancing to flush the SSD of all data, and then set my video editing temp directory to DrivePool which will first use only the SSD for all data reads/writes up to that 100 GB threshold. Works good for me.

Another option, is that I can just leave a drive letter assigned to my SSD, and use it both for my media editing software as a normal SSD drive AND still be used by DrivePool as my SSD cache. You can't do that in Windows Storage Spaces.

Like I said, when Storage Spaces works, it works just fine. When you have a problem with Storage Spaces, you are on your own trying to figure out how to recover from your situation. Even MS does not pretend to offer any help. I came to not trust Storage Spaces after many years of use. DrivePool just works so much better for me. If I have problems with DrivePool, I can usually figure it out myself, or sometimes I might get a helpful response from the fourm. But, the point is, I have had very few issues with DrivePool, whereas I used to spend hours, days, weeks, and even months trying to get my Storage Spaces working correctly.

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