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Pooling with Drives often Disconnected for Long Periods of Time?


ben98923

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I've tried to read all I can find described about Drive Pool, but I haven't seen a real explanation of how Drive Pool handles a drive in the pool being disconnected for long periods of time.  Let's say I wanted to have a drive which is periodically connected and then removed to act as an offsite backup.  Or let's say I had an external drive connected to my laptop which houses primarily games and I don't generally need those when I'm disconnected, but would still like it to be part of the pool for other content.  I'm just not clear how drive pool knows how to re-sync things.

 

Related to this, am I correct in assuming that you cannot pool the same drives twice with the same content; for example, have laptop A pool it's D: drive and a shared E: from laptop B, and then have laptop B pool it's E: drive and the shared D: from laptop A.  If that is possible, how does it sync and not become inconsistent with concurrent accesses/disconnects?

 

Thanks, still wrapping my head around what Drive Pool can and can't do, I think I'm still imagining it to be slightly different than it is.

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Each pool uses a unique ID for identifying it. This is how settings are stored for it (balancer, file placement rules, and other information). 

 

The member disks and other information is stored in the settings store, so that if you disconnect the pool (all of the disks in the pool), this information will be retained until the disks are reconnected (up to a year, I believe).

 

So, when you reconnect one or more of the disks, StableBit DrivePool will recognize the pool ID, know which disks are supposed to be a part of the pool, and the settings for it. 

 

 

However, to clarify, if you pull a disk from a pool, (just one), then that disk is marked as missing and the pool is put into a read only state (specifically to prevent corruption and related issues). You can remove that disk or you can reconnect it. Removing it, well, removes it from the pool and it's no longer considered an active member. 

But in this case (and only this case), if you reconnect the disk, it will be repooled, as the disk itself hasn't been marked as removed and would still be considered part of the specific pool.

 

Also, when re-adding missing disks, it will remeasure the pool, and look for any mismatched files. It will flag any problem files it runs into. 

 

Related to this, am I correct in assuming that you cannot pool the same drives twice with the same content; for example, have laptop A pool it's D: drive and a shared E: from laptop B, and then have laptop B pool it's E: drive and the shared D: from laptop A.  If that is possible, how does it sync and not become inconsistent with concurrent accesses/disconnects?

 

Yes and no.  The same volume/partition cannot be added to multiple pools. Each can only be added to a single pool. However, if you have multiple partitions on the same disk, these can be added to different pools. 

 

And I'm not too clear on what you mean here. But I suspect that you mean about moving a single disk from a pool around to different drives. 

If so, while this may be technically possible, it's not recommended and definitely not supported. 

And at best, each time you moved the disk, it would trigger the pool to remeasure, and recheck the duplication. And this is a time consuming process. 

 

At best, you would want to move the entire pool over, not a single disk in it.

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Thanks for the explanation.  I think part of my confusion is that when I came across Drive Pool, not knowing its legacy and what was normal for these types of products, I imagined that you could run Drive Pool on multiple computers within a house/company to create one or more pools spanning computers.  For example, I have four or five always-on computers in the house and had imagined that I could pool their storage together as a sort of virtual NAS, with each computer running Drive Pool to access/manage the pool.  But I see now that's not what Drive Pool is at all. :)

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Thanks for the explanation.  I think part of my confusion is that when I came across Drive Pool, not knowing its legacy and what was normal for these types of products, I imagined that you could run Drive Pool on multiple computers within a house/company to create one or more pools spanning computers.  For example, I have four or five always-on computers in the house and had imagined that I could pool their storage together as a sort of virtual NAS, with each computer running Drive Pool to access/manage the pool.  But I see now that's not what Drive Pool is at all. :)

 

Well, you *can* share folders on the pool, allow access to it from multiple different systems. 

 

But yeah, it's only meant to pool data on a single system at a time. 

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