Switch from DriveBender

[HolF]

Hi there,

in the past I was using DriveBender to pool my drives on a WHS 2011. Worked fine for years but then the problems started. Some Probs where issued by WHS itself, so I deceided to switch to W10 as my file server. Using W10 and DriveBender was... Well, not so funny. Slow performance, loosing drives from pool, issues with security settings.

Í´m thinking about switching to DrivePool so I have at two questions and hope somebody can answer this:

a) When I remove a drive from the pool without using the "remove drive" option, is the content of that drive readable on another pc?

b) Can an encrypted drive (all my HDDs are encrypted with Bitlocker) be added to a pool?

 

Thanks for your answers!

 

Kind regards from sunny bavaria (bad time for computerproblems),

HolF

[Jaga]

A -  Yes, it is - any OS that can read the file system you formatted the drive with (assuming NTFS in this case) can see all it's files.  The files are under a "poolpart..." hidden folder on each drive, fully readable by Windows.

B -  Yes, it will work with Bitlocker.  This is a quote directly from Christopher on these forums:  "You cannot encrypt the DrivePool drive, but you CAN encrypt the disks in the pool."  (Link)

[Christopher (Drashna)]

Jaga answered thes pretty well already.

On 5/21/2018 at 4:58 AM, HolF said:

a) When I remove a drive from the pool without using the "remove drive" option, is the content of that drive readable on another pc?

Yes.  You can find the contents in a hidden "PoolPart.xxxx" folder on each disk.  

If you move all of the disks over, just install StableBit DrivePool, and it will automatically rebuild the pool on the new system. 

On 5/21/2018 at 4:58 AM, HolF said:

 b) Can an encrypted drive (all my HDDs are encrypted with Bitlocker) be added to a pool?

Absolutely!   I do this for my desktop system actually, and it works pretty well.

Though, I'd recommend encrypting the system disk, and enabling auto-unlock, as it may make things simpler.

 

[HolF]

Thanks for your answers. 

I installed the testversion yesterday, created a pool and copied a lot of files there. Seems to work better then some other product...

[Christopher (Drashna)]

Awesome, glad to hear it!