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Any other solution with drivepool like flexible pool extension/expansion?


mr_yellow

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Hi All,   

 

Not sure if this is a faux-pas or not and this is certainly not a knock on drive pool at all (I love it), but does anyone here know of any other solutions that provide similar/same flexibility that drivepool has when it comes to growing/shrinking your drivepool while maintaining duplication and uptime?  I love how I can throw in an extra HDD through USB 3, or eSata, or SATA, or USB, or whatever, and just add that to the drivepool and be done with it.  

 

I've looked at all the linux based NAS os's (freenas, unraid, synology, etc...) and I can't seem to figure out if they have the same capabilities.   My understanding of RAID says once you've created your RAID volumes, you cannot extend/grow it without having to start from scratch.   unraid seems to tout some flexible RAID volume feature but besides some jargon on their website, I can't find any technical guides on how it actually works.  Same with freeNAS.   There seem to be lots of mentions that you can grow a ZFS volume from one type to another as you add drives, but I can't seem to find any real details.  

 

hopefully someone here has had some experience with this.  

 

Thanks!!

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I'm assuming that you mean for *NIX (linux, BSD, etc). 

If so, ZFS should allow that, but I think it is picky about the disks you add (same size, IIRC), and removal.

 

However, there is "GreyHole" which was DIRECTLY based on Drive Extender (and part of "Amahi", which was aiming to be a linux style WHS alternative).

This may be exactly what you're looking for. 

https://www.greyhole.net/

http://www.amahi.org/

 

 

 

As for growing a RAID array, this COMPLETELY depends on the controller you're using. Most consumer grade controllers? Nope, not a chance. Enterprise grade ones (like LSI) may allow you to do that. 
But both won't really let you shrink them. 

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Thanks!

 

I took a look at grey hole and it very much looks like a Unix version of drivepool but with less features and scalability.

 

I guess I should've elaborated on the reason for my question. I was looking to get AFS support with some of these Unix based solutions but it looks like there's still nothing close to the ease of windows and drivepool.

 

Not willing to give up all of that just for AFS. :)

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