Hiding drive letters, other than the pool?

[Belfaborac]

Yo,

 

I'm intending to upgrade my current 10 x 1-2TB storage drives to 4-6 x 8TB Seagate Archive drives and I'm also considering picking up DrivePool.  Before I do though (well before, as this is a month or four away still) I'd like to know if there is an option to hide the regular drive letters so that only the pool is visible in Windows (8.1 Pro at the moment, then likely 10 fairly soon after launch)?

 

It's not a huge deal, but after years of looking at 15, 16, 17 drive letters I'd dearly love to clean up the list of visible drives as much as possible. 

 

In the event that I do indeed decide to use DrivePool, would it be better to start with unformatted drives, or should I format and transfer the data to the new drives first?  Or is that much of a muchness?

[Belfaborac]

A little more reading answered question one: I simply don't assign drive letters to the drives in the first place.  Duh.

 

However, this throws up another question: if I forego the drive letters, will DrivePool play nice with DLNA servers?  Specifically I use Serviio and Wild Media Server to deliver audio and video to the BluRay player and stereo in the living room.  Anyone know if this is likely to be a problem?

[Christopher (Drashna)]

You mean want to check this out:

http://wiki.covecube.com/StableBit_DrivePool_Q4822624

 

 

And no, the it won't affect the DLNA players at all. If they're pointing to the pool, then it doens't matter how the disks in the pool are mounted.

 

As for adding the disks to the pool. You can add them, it doesn't format the disks. However, the contents will remain on the disks, outside of the pool.

We do have a guide on how to quickly seed the pool, if needed:

http://wiki.covecube.com/StableBit_DrivePool_Q2299585B

 

If you have any other questions, don't hesitate to ask.

 

 

 

Oh, and if you format the 8TB Seagate Archive drives yourself, I'd recommend using the "64K" allocation unit size, as you may get better performance out of them (especially with large files)

[Belfaborac]

Thanks Christopher, that all sounds ideal and DrivePool keeps sounding better the more I read.  If I do end up using single drives I'll likely use ReFs and in an absolutly ideal world DrivePool would support it (I gather it doesn't?), but as it is DP seems to have entirely too many advantages to not take advantage of it.  The price doesn't hurt either; at $35 for DP+Scanner it has to be the best value going given the feature set.

 

I'm not looking forward to the migration, but I do look forward to when it's all done with and (fingers crossed) working smoothly with lots of yummy, yummy free space to play with.

[Christopher (Drashna)]

 

And no, we don't support ReFS yet. It's on our "to-do" list to investigate adding it. But it may not be soon, if we do.

 

 

As for the migration, it sounds more complicated than it really is. But if you want, we can set up a remote support session, and I can help you do this.

 

But I'm glad to hear that you're really excited about our products!