Drivepool and Drive letters - maximum number of drives?

[Spider99]

Hi

 

Just trying out Drivepool and first question i have is Drive letters and what happens when you run out of them

 

I am building a large storage/backup server and its likely i will add more than 20 hdd 

 

Just experimenting with 4 hdd plus OS drive - created a pool which is assigned a drive letter but also the four drives that make up the pool are also assigned drive letters

 

The drives were not assigned drive letters before adding to the pool (un-formatted)

 

So what happens when you want multiple pools and have a large number of drives - do you have to use mount points?

 

Currently i am testing on win7 64bit

 

Any pointers or advice would be good

 

Thanks

 

 

[lee1978]

Hi the individual drive letters are not needed most people give the drives a name like bay 1 bay 2 etc purely to help identify the drives then remove the letters under disk management.

[Spider99]

Thanks

 

Have mounted then and removed drive letters and Drivepool picked up the changes

[Christopher (Drashna)]

StableBit DrivePool doesn't care about drive letters.  It uses the Volume ID (which Windows mounts to a drive letter or folder path). 

 

So you can remove the drive letters, if you want, or mount to a folder path. 

 

http://wiki.covecube.com/StableBit_DrivePool_Q6811286

[Spider99]

or not mount them at all appears to work fine as well - swapped to win 10 pro 64bit now - as clean install the mount points were lost but drivepool picked the drives up on reinstall without re mounting them

 

just have the os drive and a test pool working well so far - interesting watching the pool fill up for the first time and turned on duplication half way through a backup job - handled very well by the app

 

its also interesting to see that in task manager the "pool" has no disk activity reported while the underlying disks are running around moving data - i assume this is normal?

[Christopher (Drashna)]

or not mount them at all appears to work fine as well - swapped to win 10 pro 64bit now - as clean install the mount points were lost but drivepool picked the drives up on reinstall without re mounting them

 

just have the os drive and a test pool working well so far - interesting watching the pool fill up for the first time and turned on duplication half way through a backup job - handled very well by the app

 

Yes, you can do that, too.  

 

However, I generally prefer and recommend mounting to a folder, for ease of access.

 

It's much easier to run "chkdsk c:\drives\pool1\disk5", than "chkdsk \\?\Volume{GUID}"... and easier to identify.

 

 

its also interesting to see that in task manager the "pool" has no disk activity reported while the underlying disks are running around moving data - i assume this is normal?

 

Yes. The actually pool is handled by a kernel mode driver, meaning that the activity is passed on directly to the disks, basically. 

 

Meaning, you don't see it listed in task manager, like a normal program.