Migrating from storage spaces

[spork]

Quick query, I'm looking to move away from storage spaces parity volume, got 4 HDD's in it, they are currently hooked up via SATA but I want to eventually move them to a suitable USB3 enclosure because I want to get rid of the SATA controllers and HDD bays taking up space in PC (plus I've had way too many bad run in's with eSATA enclsoures) so USB3 it's got to be. I'm also picky about noise so I may need to try a few before I find the right one for me.

 

Any way, if I create the drive pool based on the HDD's currently hooked up via SATA if I remove them and put them in USB3 will the pool just auto adapt like storage spaces does or does this require re-doing the pool from scratch ?

 

Thanks.

[Christopher (Drashna)]

It will absolutely auto-detect.  In fact, we have at least a couple of users that have done this exact thing, and a few that actually use a "portable pool" as well. 

 

However, as for USB (even USB3), I would recommend against it. The drives can, are allowed to (by the USB specs) and WILL periodically suddenly disconnect. For a short term storage, this is fine. But if you're planning on using USB long term, you could end up with issues. These disconnects can cause data corruption (including turning the disk "RAW") 

 

As for eSATA, we do highly recommend the ASMedia AMS1061 chipset, as it's the most stable chipset that we've found. Despite descriptions that say they only support 7 disk per port... we've found that to not be accurate (we've had a few users with 8 bay enclosures on these cards).

[spork]

Thats good to know thanks, the USB drives wont be going anywere, they will be connected 24/7 with UPS backup but if there is a chance even some random disconnect will do some serious damage I think I might have to stick with storage spaces.

 

 

For me it was the awful & buggy jmicron controller found in almost all eSATA enclosures which I wasted a lot of money on trying differents enclosures and controller cards in PC to make it behave. I have not gotten eSATA to work reliably so I'm quite wary of spending any more money on those solutions, I may have to stick with storage spaces for the time being as I have a second mirror storage spaces volume working via USB3 and it has been quite reliable for me.

 

Thanks for the help.

[Christopher (Drashna)]

Well, USB can cause the issues with storage spaces as well...

 

however, if the USB connection has been stable for you, then it may work just fine!

 

 

As for the JMicron, yeah, they're .... weird controllers.

[spork]

Yeah and practically every eSATA enclosure uses them so if your not doing a tower PC with lots of SATA drives you have very few options.

 

I want to ditch the tower PC so USB is my only real path, if drive pool is no more "risky" then storage spaces over USB I might give it a go then.

 

One last thing does your drive scanner tool have USB spindown prevention, I used a similar app (HD Sentinal) which could stop USB drives going idle, some commercial USB drives (e.g. Seagate) have very aggressive idle times down to seconds.

[Christopher (Drashna)]

The only thing I'd recommend is running Scanner with DrivePool as well. This way, Scanner will run a chkdsk pass (the file system scan) at least once every 30 days. This should help detect issues caused by disconnects. Though, it may be a good idea to schedule a "chkdsk /r" pass periodically, as we only to a "quick scan".

Also, if you're using Windows 8, you can use the "/scan" option with CHKDSK to run the scan online (it won't unmount the disks to scan them).

 

 

 

As for USB Spindown prevention, well, sort of. We query SMART data often (I think once a minute, by default), and that may prevent spindown/idling. 
Usually people are asking for the other way around, honestly.

 

If you're having issues with idling, then let us know. I'm sure we can add something to help prevent idling of the drives.