Keep folders consolidated on individual physical drives

[KenVives]

Hello,

I am considering purchasing and installing DrivePool in the following situation:

I am involved in media sound production and have several hundred "virtual instruments". Each of these is in it's own folder with multiple subfolders. The total size of each folder is on the order of several gigabytes to 1.5 TB. These are currently distributed across 4 m.2 nvme drives and 2 sata SSDs. 

There is no easy, unified way to index these instruments - some only run within other programs (i.e. Kontakt, Halion while others are their own virtual instrument which I load into a DAW.

So, I'd like to put them all on one virtual drive so that rather than searching through six drives looking for something, I can search through one.

1) If a create a pool with all 6 disks and add the entire contents of all six to the pool, they will stay right where they are on the physical disks, right?

2) Can I create a rule such that when I add a new virtual instrument folder that the whole thing goes on one physical disk? For these things, if you are missing one file, the whole folder is useless. In the event of drive failure, this would simplify recovery.

Thanks so much for your help!

[Shane]

1) Adding a disk to a pool only makes its free space available to the pool, via creating and using a hidden PoolPart folder on the disk; it does not automatically add that disk's existing content to the pool so any existing files stay where they are.

If you want to quickly move those files into the pool rather than copying them "between" disks (because Windows treats the pool drive just like any other drive) then you can "seed" the pool as per this article - except that in step 4, where it says "For example, find the "G:\Files\" folder, and move the "Files" folder to "G:\PoolPart.xxxx\" you should first ensure that no other disk you plan to seed contains a folder or file at the same level with the same name. Otherwise, DrivePool will think they are duplicates rather than unique files.

To avoid that risk, if you are seeding I suggest instead creating unique subfolders in the poolparts, e.g. moving "G:\Files\" into "G:\PoolPart.xxxx\G\" and moving "H:\Files\" folder into "H:\PoolPart.xxxx\H\", etcetera, so that you see "P:\G\Files" and "P:\H\Files" in the pool and can rearrange them at your leasire once they're in the pool.

2) DrivePool's File Placement rules let you assign folders to prefer or exclusively use specific disks, e.g. you might decide that the "Piano" folder can only be stored on disk A while the "Violin" folder can only be stored on disk B. However, there is no way to "automate" this for new folders (although any subfolders of an assigned folder will default to inheriting the assigned folder's placement).

On that note, DrivePool does not save its own separate record of which files are on which disk in a pool; it simply queries Windows' own file tables in memory for each disk. This means if a disk should fail then you cannot ask DrivePool "what files were on that missing disk", so if you want to keep a record then you will have to do so via some other utility.