Setting up DrivePool with Win8

[tallmomof2]

I recently had a catastrophic storage space failure in Win 8. I lost around 12TB. I'm looking at the best way to implement drivepool in Win 8 so that when a drive fails I'll still have a decent chance of accessing the data on the hard drives. I used to run the first version of Windows Home Server and when the system died the files were still accessible on a different computer. However, Win 8's storage space doesn't allow that.

 

I'm trying to understand if drivepool will be able to help me in case of a catastrophic failure. I don't see how I'll be able to get to the files if storage space goes bad.

 

On my Win 8 machine I was running WHS 2011 in a virtual machine for backups but I'm seriously considering going back to Win 7 and building a separate PC for WHS 2011.  

[Christopher (Drashna)]

Tallmomof2,

 

First, let me say I'm sorry that Storage Spaces ate your data. That's never a pleasant experience.

 

DrivePool operates very similiarly to how WHSv1's DrivePool did. In fact, that's the inspiration for our product. Though we've made a number of improvements.

 

First, all the files are stored on normal NTFS volumes. So if you decide that you don't want to use DrivePool anymore, you can just uninstall it, and then recover all your data from the hidden "PoolPart.xxxx" folders in the root of each drive.  

 

Also, if you reinstall the OS, or decide to migrate to new hardware, you can just move the disks over. Once you reinstall DrivePool, it will immediately recognize the "old" pool, and "rebuild" it.

I'm not sure if you have had to deal with a system disk failure in WHSv1, but you basically had to completely rebuild Drive Extender's storage pool by copying everything back into the pool. A very time consuming process. Like I indicated, for DrivePool, it would take seconds... just reinstall DrivePool and reattach the drives!

 

If you decide to go with a dedicated system for WHS2011, then I'd recommend checking out StableBit Scanner as well. Namely, because it gets SMART data from the drives, as well as scans them for issues periodically.  And if you have both products installed, Scanner can evacuate a DrivePool drive if it detects errors with it, to help prevent data loss.

[tallmomof2]

Next question. Since I already have a new storage space set up, Drivepool will see that as one big drive instead of the 4 separate drives. So I need to move my data, delete the storage space, remove the hard drives (from the control panel not literally from the PC) and then create the pool in Drivepool. Is this correct? Do I need to format the hard drives first since they are currently in MS version of RAID?

 

I just want to be clear before I make any more changes to my setup.

[Christopher (Drashna)]

DrivePool will see the Storage Space as one gigantic drive.  In fact, Storage Spaces works so low level, that nothing but it sees the individual drives.

 

 

And yes, you'd want to move the data off of the Storage Space before breaking it. After you break it, I believe you'll have to initialize the disks (just like a brand new disk).

 

Additionally, if you have enough spare drives (to equal the capacity of the "Space"), you may be able to add the Storage Space to a new pool, and add the additional drives to the Pool as well, then move Storage Space's content into the hidden "PoolPart.xxxx" folder. In that folder, it would be considered part of the pool, and subject to duplication and balancing. You could then duplicate the entire Pool. Once that's done, you could just break the STorage Space, which will cause a "Missing disk" error in DrivePool, which you can then just remove the now missing disk and add the individual disks into the pool.

[tallmomof2]

Thanks! I copied the data to an external drive and reformated the drives. When the original storage space went down, I had all my critical files backed up to Crashplan and about half of my recorded video (TV and movies). 

 

My next project is build a separate backup server to backup my PCs and Macs. I was running WHS 2011 in a VM on the Win8 server but I lost all the backups when the storage space went down. I will be using drivepool on the new backup server.

[Christopher (Drashna)]

You're very welcome.

 

And as for the backup server, a lower powered box dedicated for WHS2011 wouldn't be a bad idea at all.

 

And sorry to hear about your issues with Storage Spaces.