Newbie Help - Two Pools, 1to1 mirroring?

[Maniero]

Hi everyone!  I've read numerous praises about SBDP, so I figured I'd give it a shot with my new media server build.  Here's what I want to do:

 

4x HDDs in 2 pools, one pool is for media to be accessed by the other devices in the house, the other pool is just a 1-1 backup.

 

I've gotten as far as making the two separate pools like this:

D: & E: = pool F:

Y: & Z: = pool G:

 

So I see the menus for file duplication, but can I specifically tell the software to basically copy anything that I put onto F: on G:?

 

Also, can I change the drive letters somewhere?  I went to do it in diskmgmt.msc, but it yelled at me so I stopped and posted here instead!

 

I have yet to copy any data over yet, so I'm still dealing with completely blank drives (they are already initialized and formatted, however).

 

Thank you in advance for any help!!

 

-Maniero

[Spider99]

Hi

 

i'm not sure you can do a mirror of pools in DP

 

any particular reason for having two rather than one ?

[Maniero]

Thanks for responding.  I guess, based on your response, that I'm not exactly understanding then what DP does with file duplication. What exactly is the software doing when it copies a file/folder/drive twice?

[Spider99]

exactly that - you have two copies of each file on different disks - in windows explorer you see only one copy - no magic sauce just a merge of the files structure to hide the duplicate entries for all disk in the pool

 

if you have a ssd cache drive setup - the file is copied to the cache from you client machine as it does so a copy is being created on one of the archive drives at the same time or very shortly afterwards depending on the speed of the archive drive - first copy will then be copied to another archive drive at some point later depending on your balancer settings. If no ssd cache then an archive drive is chosen for the landing zone - rest is the same.

 

you have four disks i would make one pool - turn on duplication 2x or more and copy over a large sample directory and see for yourself

 

rather than dup everything you could do it at the folder level as well - i.e. only duplicate folders you care about or x4 those you cannot loose - max is number of disk you have in the pool obviously

 

Oh i would also remove the drive letters from your pool disks (mount them to a directory instead) makes for a cleaner interface - you can still access them directly but it prevents an accidental mistake

 

DP takes the next available drive letter when created so in my case E: - not tried to change this but its emulating a real disk so changing the drive letter should be fine - did you try in disk management?

[Maniero]

Thank you again for the help and explanation.  I unpooled everything, removed drive letters, then merged all four drives into one pool.  Turned on 2x and I'm copying over my files now.