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Is SBDP a good fit for me?


Blindsay

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Hi all,

 

Someone on overclock.net pointed me this direction as i was looking for an alternative to the Windows 10 storage pools and i had a few questions so i figured i would ask here.

 

Right now my pool is backing up because I made the mistake of creating it with a 4KB cluster size so I hit the 16TB limit but I figured since I had to re-create the pool I would investigate other options.

 

1. I don't like that the Win10 "simple" pool is basically striping my data. I don't want to deal with having to rebuild the entire pool if one drive fails, from what I read SBDP would take care of that issue correct? (I would only lose the data on the actual drive that failed)

 

2. That said, if I do have a drive failure will the software let me know what data I have lost? I will have a 1:1 backup available but I don't want to have to dig through everything trying to figure out what is missing,

 

3. With regards to the backup, I am not sure how to best handle that. It will be equal to my main pool size wise but most of the drives will be slower than what is in the main pool so I didn't think mirroring them would be good as I don't want the performance of my slower drives impacting my main drives.

 

This will be for a plex server that I am running and I estimate about 30TB in the main pool and then another 30TB in the backup.

 

Let me know if you need any more info.

 

Thank you

 

-Bill

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Allways Sync is a very good option. :)

 

And to swap out the lower capacity drives, it depends. 

Normally, yes, StableBit DrivePool will need to move all of the data off of the drive before removing it.  However, there is a "Duplicate Data Later" option when removing disks. When you use this option, it only removes the unduplicated data from the drive. Once that's complete, it will remove the drive and start a duplication pass. At this point, if you disconnect the old drive and replace the new one and add it to the pool, likely most of the data will be duplicated to the new drive (as data is placed on the disk with the most available free space, by default). 

 

 

As for StableBit Scanner, it's a very good option. Not only can you purchase it at a discount if you own StableBit DrivePool, but there is some integration between the two products. 

 

Specifically, if you have both StableBit Scanner and StableBit DrivePool installed on the same system, DrivePool will grab information from Scanner. And if Scanner detects damage on the disk, DrivePool will automatically move data off of the disk to help prevent data loss due to corruption/damage.
 
 
 
 
And yeah, having a lot of data can be a huage pain to manage. Or having a bunch of data on multiple different hard drives is also a pain, as well. So we're glad to hear that you're liking our software!
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  1. StableBit DrivePool stores the files on the individual disks themselves, in hidden "PoolPart" folders.  So, yes, if a single disk fails, you only lose the contents of that disk.  However, if you're using duplication, only unduplicated data on that disk is lost, and the software will check and reduplicate data as needed after you remove the problem disk. 

     

    Additionally, since each disk is handled separately, and the pool drive is an emulated disk, there is no size limitation here. You can continue to use 4K cluster (allocation units) on the drives without any problems.  In fact, I was doing so until recently (well past 50TBs in fact). 

     

  2. Unfortunately, no, there isn't a list of the data on the drive. We use NTFS to look up what is on the disk, rather than relying on an external database, for a number of reasons. 

    We do have a thread on this (as well, as potential plans on changing that, in some regards):

    http://community.covecube.com/index.php?/topic/746-drive-must-have-died-is-there-a-way-to-tell-what-was-on-it/

     

    You should definitely check it out, as a number of people list ways (or software) they use to inventory their systems. 

     

    But to be honest, the easiest way is to enable duplication on the entire pool, or maybe use something like SnapRAID to add snapshot parity. 

     

  3. This one is trickier. Having a backup is absolutely a good idea. But redundancy is good too. But redundancy isn't a backup. Generally, it is good to have both.  

    However, the reason that I bring this up is that if you do have slower drives in the pool, and duplication enabled, the Read Striping feature will actually attempt to read from the faster or less busy disk, to optimize performance. 

     

    Otherwise, as for backing up, some tools won't work on the pool. Because the pool doesn't support VSS, tools like Acronis don't support it properly, and you'd have to backup the pooled drives rather than the pool. 

    However, using syncing tools (such as BTSync, Allways Sync, Free File Sync, or the like) you can copy the files to a backup location without a problem. 

 

If you need any more clarification or have any additional questions, don't hesitate to ask.

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  1. StableBit DrivePool stores the files on the individual disks themselves, in hidden "PoolPart" folders.  So, yes, if a single disk fails, you only lose the contents of that disk.  However, if you're using duplication, only unduplicated data on that disk is lost, and the software will check and reduplicate data as needed after you remove the problem disk. 

     

    Additionally, since each disk is handled separately, and the pool drive is an emulated disk, there is no size limitation here. You can continue to use 4K cluster (allocation units) on the drives without any problems.  In fact, I was doing so until recently (well past 50TBs in fact). 

     

  2. Unfortunately, no, there isn't a list of the data on the drive. We use NTFS to look up what is on the disk, rather than relying on an external database, for a number of reasons. 

    We do have a thread on this (as well, as potential plans on changing that, in some regards):

    http://community.covecube.com/index.php?/topic/746-drive-must-have-died-is-there-a-way-to-tell-what-was-on-it/

     

    You should definitely check it out, as a number of people list ways (or software) they use to inventory their systems. 

     

    But to be honest, the easiest way is to enable duplication on the entire pool, or maybe use something like SnapRAID to add snapshot parity. 

     

  3. This one is trickier. Having a backup is absolutely a good idea. But redundancy is good too. But redundancy isn't a backup. Generally, it is good to have both.  

    However, the reason that I bring this up is that if you do have slower drives in the pool, and duplication enabled, the Read Striping feature will actually attempt to read from the faster or less busy disk, to optimize performance. 

     

    Otherwise, as for backing up, some tools won't work on the pool. Because the pool doesn't support VSS, tools like Acronis don't support it properly, and you'd have to backup the pooled drives rather than the pool. 

    However, using syncing tools (such as BTSync, Allways Sync, Free File Sync, or the like) you can copy the files to a backup location without a problem. 

 

If you need any more clarification or have any additional questions, don't hesitate to ask.

 

 

 

Cool, thank you for your help

 

Just installed the trial and I am copying my data into the pool now.

 

Probably will pick up a license for it in the next couple days, just wanted to install and see what its like first

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Someone on overclock.net pointed me this direction as i was looking for an alternative to the Windows 10 storage pools and i had a few questions so i figured i would ask here.

 

 

 

Not to brag or anything, but I'm that mystery 'someone on OCN'. :D

 

I'm glad you went with my suggestion. I'm pretty certain you won't regret it. SBDP is excellent piece of software.

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You are very welcome! 

 

And I'm glad to hear it. Also, in case it helps (sorry, I know it may be too late), we do have a seeding guide to quickly move the data into the pool:

http://wiki.covecube.com/StableBit_DrivePool_Q4142489

 

I don't believe that would have worked in my case, once I removed the drives from the windows storage pool the drives were not even visible to SBDP as the drives appeared unformatted.

 

Only 17hrs left of copying anyways haha :D

 

Not to brag or anything, but I'm that mystery 'someone on OCN'. :D

 

I'm glad you went with my suggestion. I'm pretty certain you won't regret it. SBDP is excellent piece of software.

 

Thanks again, I read several positive reviews online outside of OCN so I decided to give it a shot

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I don't believe that would have worked in my case, once I removed the drives from the windows storage pool the drives were not even visible to SBDP as the drives appeared unformatted.

 

Only 17hrs left of copying anyways haha :D

 

Ah, yeah, that would make things more complicated!

 

And so you only had 4-5TBs of data left to copy at that point? (Roughly 4 hours per TB, barring performance issues)

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Ah, yeah, that would make things more complicated!

 

And so you only had 4-5TBs of data left to copy at that point? (Roughly 4 hours per TB, barring performance issues)

 

My main pool is up and running now, I am using Allway Sync to Sync to the backup pool now, I figure this was a good solution because if I ever lost data in the main pool, I could just flip the direction of the sync and recover whatever is missing.

 

Just to confirm though, say I had a lower capacity drive that I wanted to replace and I remove it, assuming I have the space on the other drives will the software move the data off of that drive and put it on the other drives? (I have a couple 2TB drives I am using for now but will replace in the near future)

 

Also think I am going to nab a copy of DriveScanner as well, that seems like a good one to run in combo with DrivePool.

 

Thanks again, nice to find some software that makes this easy. Dealing with this much data is usually a pain

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as far as knowing what was on each drive what i do is i have the individual drives mounted in a drives folder and have a script scheduled weekly to run tree on that folder and output it to a text file with the date of the backup in the filename on my google drive folder  that way if the unthinkable happens and multiple drives fail i can still see what was on each drive even if the comp is completely dead

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