Two pools in different hosts - move disk from one pool to another

[XPTO]

Folks,

I have two Drivepool licenses (running on different machines).

Is there any (easy or not) method to move an HDD that belongs to Pool X on machine A to another Pool (let's say Y) on machine B?

Reason is that I have some external disks and that functionality would be of use.

I would like to disconnect disk from machine A (on Pool X) and connect that disk to machine B (on Pool Y)

Regards,

xpto

[Umfriend]

Easily? I think each machine would create it's own PoolPart.* folder, so the files on the HDD would not end up at Pool Y instantly. But if you then *move* the content from PoolPart.* that is X to PoolPart.* that is Y (very fast!), it would be there.

Can't say that it is a use-case that I find attractive though, but you know best!

[XPTO]

20 hours ago, Umfriend said:

Easily? I think each machine would create it's own PoolPart.* folder, so the files on the HDD would not end up at Pool Y instantly. But if you then *move* the content from PoolPart.* that is X to PoolPart.* that is Y (very fast!), it would be there.

Can't say that it is a use-case that I find attractive though, but you know best!

Thanks Umfriend for your answer.

Yes, it seems to work as you describe. Unfortunately not that user-friendly (as in not transparent) if I need to move from PoolPart folder on the same disk to achieve what I need. But it's a solution nevertheless.

I even tried naming the Pool the same on machine A and B but Drivepool considers that Pool X (on machine A ) is different from Pool X (on machine B )

No easy solution then.

Thanks,

xpto

[Christopher (Drashna)]

Actually, if you're trying to move the entire pool (not copy it), you can just move the disks over. That's it.  The new system will detect the pooled disks, and rebuild the pool from the available disks. 

If you want to copy the pool, that's a bit less straightforward.

[Umfriend]

5 hours ago, XPTO said:

Thanks Umfriend for your answer.

Yes, it seems to work as you describe. Unfortunately not that user-friendly (as in not transparent) if I need to move from PoolPart folder on the same disk to achieve what I need. But it's a solution nevertheless.

I even tried naming the Pool the same on machine A and B but Drivepool considers that Pool X (on machine A ) is different from Pool X (on machine B )

No easy solution then.

Thanks,

xpto

I guess it is somewhat contrary to the concept of DP. I mean, what you are looking for, it seems to me, is the virtual equivalent of physically taking a platter out of a HDD and shoving it into another on another machine. Also, the Pool that just lost the HDD should be unusable, as in that it will go into read-only mode as it is missing a disk? It will surely whine about it. So I am really wondering about the use-case here. Could you not, for instance, share a folder and access it over the network?

[XPTO]

5 minutes ago, Umfriend said:

I guess it is somewhat contrary to the concept of DP. I mean, what you are looking for, it seems to me, is the virtual equivalent of physically taking a platter out of a HDD and shoving it into another on another machine. Also, the Pool that just lost the HDD should be unusable, as in that it will go into read-only mode as it is missing a disk? It will surely whine about it. So I am really wondering about the use-case here. Could you not, for instance, share a folder and access it over the network?

 

Not a platter but the whole HDD.

Never underestimate the bandwidth of taking one HDD from one machine to the other vs. copying its contents through the pipe of a 1 GBps network. That's what I was trying to avoid - the copying across the network which is considerably time consuming.

My use case is that I want to move a bunch of new files from one machine to the other just by taking the HDD from the 1st machine and connecting it to the 2nd machine. It would be nice if the pools are named the same on the different machines that it would automagically add the HDD to the pool on the 2nd machine. Please note that I do not use balancing in my systems. All I'm trying to avoid is the copying through the network.

But, alas, I guess Drivepool is not for this particular use, which I understand. 

Thanks for your help Umfriend.

xpto

[XPTO]

1 hour ago, Christopher (Drashna) said:

Actually, if you're trying to move the entire pool (not copy it), you can just move the disks over. That's it.  The new system will detect the pooled disks, and rebuild the pool from the available disks. 

If you want to copy the pool, that's a bit less straightforward.

Thanks Chris for answering.

I was not trying to move the whole pool from one machine to the other but move a part of the pool from one machine to the other. I though if the pools were named similarly on both machines that DP could have the intelligence to automagically add the HDD to the pool on the destination machine. 

I was trying to avoid to move the contents of the HDD from machine source to machine destination across the network.

Umfriend provided an actual workaround (once the HDD is on the new machine and the PoolPart*** is created) move (with Explorer) the files from the "old" PoolPart folder to the "new" one.

It's not pretty or convenient but it should work.

Thanks,

xpto