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So far so good...


johnnj

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I've been using Drive Bender since MS EOL'ed Drive Extender, but have never been able to use any of the 2.x versions of it due to random drive disconnects under 2012/2012r2.

A couple of weeks ago I upgraded the MB in my server and put a fresh install of 2016 Essentials on, but the mount point on my trusty old DB 1.9.5 wasn't working so I had to go up to 2.8.

To be honest, it's been nothing but trouble.  Drives dropping off (but still showing up under device manager) and system lockups.  It got better when I disabled the DB SMART monitoring service, but whenever DB would start an automatic health check the pool would freeze and eventually the system would lock up, not even responding to RDP.  

I've been aware of Drive Pool for some time, but assumed (incorrectly) that migrating the pool would be a pain.  This morning I finally had it with DB and decided to check out Drive Pool and found the migration post on the forum.  The part that took the longest was removing the duplication on the DB pool before moving the file structure on each drive.

I migrated a 19 drive 95TB pool in about 2 hours total and the pool came right up in DP and so far it's very responsive.  I like how lightweight it is and I got the license package with Scanner, which seems like a big improvement over HD Sentinal (which had its own issues).  It's only about 25% of the way through creating the duplicates, but even with that going on it seems to perform better than DB did when it was just sitting there.

I feel like I should have switched a long time ago....

Thanks, StableBIt and thanks to the community for having all the info I needed on this forum to make an informed purchasing decision (warts and all) and to do the migration itself.

John

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20 hours ago, johnnj said:

I've been using Drive Bender since MS EOL'ed Drive Extender, but have never been able to use any of the 2.x versions of it due to random drive disconnects under 2012/2012r2.

A couple of weeks ago I upgraded the MB in my server and put a fresh install of 2016 Essentials on, but the mount point on my trusty old DB 1.9.5 wasn't working so I had to go up to 2.8.

To be honest, it's been nothing but trouble.  Drives dropping off (but still showing up under device manager) and system lockups.  It got better when I disabled the DB SMART monitoring service, but whenever DB would start an automatic health check the pool would freeze and eventually the system would lock up, not even responding to RDP.  

I've been aware of Drive Pool for some time, but assumed (incorrectly) that migrating the pool would be a pain.  This morning I finally had it with DB and decided to check out Drive Pool and found the migration post on the forum.  The part that took the longest was removing the duplication on the DB pool before moving the file structure on each drive.

I migrated a 19 drive 95TB pool in about 2 hours total and the pool came right up in DP and so far it's very responsive.  I like how lightweight it is and I got the license package with Scanner, which seems like a big improvement over HD Sentinal (which had its own issues).  It's only about 25% of the way through creating the duplicates, but even with that going on it seems to perform better than DB did when it was just sitting there.

I feel like I should have switched a long time ago....

Thanks, StableBIt and thanks to the community for having all the info I needed on this forum to make an informed purchasing decision (warts and all) and to do the migration itself.

John

Yep, it rocks doesn't it. Back in the WHS/WHS (2011) days, I opted for Drivepool when reading up on both DP and DB on the WeGotServed forums. Honestly, its just sat there doing its job for all these years since. For me, things that just work so well that you almost forget you're using them are THE truly great apps. 

Granted I have recently had a bit of a moan but the issue I raised is already being looked at. Don't worry it's nothing truly catastrophic like data loss because that's something that has never happened with DrivePool since the very earliest release. (Unlike Storage Spaces.) 

There is no doubt whatsoever that in my 20 plus years of using a PC and purchasing various apps/programmes/subscriptions (many of which I don't even remember) nothing has come remotely close to the value for money that my DrivePool and Scanner licenses have offered. Over the years I have purchased a few licenses for various StableBit products not because I needed them. Simply because they don't take donations. So it's just an alternative way to support development.

Awesome stuff indeed. 

 

 

 

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I'm sorry to hear about the issues with Drive Bender.  But to be honest, I can't say that I'm surprised. (I don't want to talk down about them, but if you want to know about the technical reasons, just ask). 

But it sucks, no matter what. 

On 5/30/2018 at 4:03 PM, johnnj said:

.I've been aware of Drive Pool for some time, but assumed (incorrectly) that migrating the pool would be a pain.  This morning I finally had it with DB and decided to check out Drive Pool and found the migration post on the forum.  The part that took the longest was removing the duplication on the DB pool before moving the file structure on each drive.

Well, as I started reading, I was going to mention said thread, but ... you got to it already.

Though, I'm sad to hear that you disable duplication.  There is a script in that thread that will actually convert Drive Bender's duplication format into ours.  So... you wouldn't have had to worry about that.  But, it's too late now. 

On 5/30/2018 at 4:03 PM, johnnj said:

.  I like how lightweight it is and I got the license package with Scanner, which seems like a big improvement over HD Sentinal (which had its own issues).  It's only about 25% of the way through creating the duplicates, but even with that going on it seems to perform better than DB did when it was just sitting there.

Well, HD Sentinel is a good program too. But it's a very different one from StableBit Scanner, with very different design goals (ours started off as a WHSv1 app, actually!)

And I'm glad to hear that performance is looking better, already! 

And as for the duplication (and balancing), the software uses a background IO priority.  That means when you do something on the pool (like access a movie), the "user task" gets priority, and the duplication and balancing happen only if there is "spare IO". 

This means that any normal activities should not be impacted (or may be very slightly slower to start, in some cases). 

On 5/30/2018 at 4:03 PM, johnnj said:

 I feel like I should have switched a long time ago....

 Thanks, StableBIt and thanks to the community for having all the info I needed on this forum to make an informed purchasing decision (warts and all) and to do the migration itself.

Well, we're glad to hear that you switched now. :)

And if you have any questions or issues, don't hesitate to ask. Either on the forums or at https://stablebit.com/contact

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4 hours ago, Dave Hobson said:

Granted I have recently had a bit of a moan but the issue I raised is already being looked at. Don't worry it's nothing truly catastrophic like data loss because that's something that has never happened with DrivePool since the very earliest release. (Unlike Storage Spaces.) 

Yeah, we're sorry about that!  And I did talk to Alex (the Developer) about this directly this week.  So, it's definitely on his mind.  (and he's said as much). So... hopefully we'll have a fix for it in a future release. :)

4 hours ago, Dave Hobson said:

 There is no doubt whatsoever that in my 20 plus years of using a PC and purchasing various apps/programmes/subscriptions (many of which I don't even remember) nothing has come remotely close to the value for money that my DrivePool and Scanner licenses have offered. Over the years I have purchased a few licenses for various StableBit products not because I needed them. Simply because they don't take donations. So it's just an alternative way to support development.

We're glad to hear it, and thank you very much! 

 

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1 hour ago, Christopher (Drashna) said:

Though, I'm sad to hear that you disable duplication.  There is a script in that thread that will actually convert Drive Bender's duplication format into ours.  So... you wouldn't have had to worry about that.  But, it's too late now. 

Wow, thanks for responding to my post!  

I had actually seen that script before I started my migration, but wanted to start from scratch duplicate-wise.  DB had a dupe to primary ratio of greater than 1:1 for a long time and I didn't want to bring that along for the ride.  I had actually nuked the duplicates on my DB pool a year or so ago because it was really bad but it's been creeping back up since then.  

I don't want to trash DB too much because for years it did to its job for me and I know that for a couple of years now it's been at varying levels of being orphaned.  It's just that in the last few weeks in the course of doing my server upgrade it caused me to waste a LOT of time and it was irritating.  Had I never upgraded to 2016 I could have somewhat happily continued running my years-old version  But I upgraded my MB and cpu to a new gen 8 i7 and wanted to take advantage of the iGPU hardware decoding and no matter how much inf wrangling I tried I couldn't get the intel drivers to work under 2012r2, so an upgrade to 2016 was needed.  

I've already surpassed the amount of time that DB took before it would act up so I"m optimistic that I can let the server just run and I can go on with my life.  

Thanks again for the response and for being so engaged in the community.  

John

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