Just sharing the mini-nightmare I experienced this week, in case y'all have any recommendations:
I have an IcyDock external 4 drive JBOD array, running SATA disks over its single USB interface because it is connected to an Intel NUC with no eSATA ports (there's one SATA connected to an external BluRay drive).
I have a UPS and the array has been running for months with no problems.
Early yesterday I had some USB device errors (keyboard or something) and accidentally pull the array's USB cable. Plugged it back in and everything seemed fine ... but not for long.
After a reboot, all 4 drives in the array came up with their NTFS partitions marked as "RAW". Geesh! I thought NTFS was more tolerant to a little glitch than that!
I felt some comfort that because I had DrivePool with full duplication enabled, I would have two opportunities to recover the data. I purchased "GetDataBack Simple" for this purpose. It recovered most of the folders and files intact, though a few folders lost their names and proper locations in the tree. I recovered by writing to a pair of larger external USB drives already connected to the PC.
So... Now I have to put my array back together again... But am rethinking the layout:
Since a "hiccup" on the one USB cable and/or chassis has proven that it can destroy both supposedly independent NTFS file systems, obviously one duplicate of each drive should be on a different USB bus ... either a separate chassis or independent external drives.
The 4 chassis drives are 1tb each and I have a pair of 3tb external drives. So my plan is to partition the 3tb drives into 3 (1tb, 1tb, and slightly under 1tb), and pair up chassis drive to each partition. But wait ... that doesn't quite balance out!
So I guess I could create 1 or 2 Pools and just create balancing rules that ensure all duplicates span across the total of USB ports (1 chassis USB with 4 drives + 2 external USB drives)?
Question:
Is it possible for a partition (a single NTFS "drive") to belong to more than one Pool? The 3tb drives, for example, could then belong to 1 Pool for mirroring 2 of the chassis disks each, and also belong to a separate Pool to duplicate each other?
Of course... I can do the above with partitioning, but since DrivePool uses a top-level NTFS Folder to hold the pooled data, can't it just have 2 (or more!) folders on each single partition, one such folder for each pool the partition belongs to?
Thanks for indulging my insanity. DrivePool is a powerful product, so there's bound to be several bad ways and a couple good ways to handle this.
I'm presuming that DrivePool itself didn't play any role in the simultaneous NTFS corruption ... but let me know if that is not a safe assumption.
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CosmicPuppy
Just sharing the mini-nightmare I experienced this week, in case y'all have any recommendations:
So... Now I have to put my array back together again... But am rethinking the layout:
Question:
Thanks for indulging my insanity. DrivePool is a powerful product, so there's bound to be several bad ways and a couple good ways to handle this.
I'm presuming that DrivePool itself didn't play any role in the simultaneous NTFS corruption ... but let me know if that is not a safe assumption.
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