Question regarding transferring drivepool to external HD

[HDRKC07]

Need some guidance.  I had a OS drive failure which was separate from my drive pool and am unable to get the system that houses my drive pool going.  The system is old and in need of either replacement or a rebuild, but in the mean time I'm trying to get by on the lowest cost.  My problem is my drive pool consists of a mix of drive sizes; 1TB, 2TB and 4TB - seven drives in total.  I have another pc that I could take the drive pool drives and switch them over to it to have access.  At this point would it be feasible to copy the drive pool from those drives onto an external hard drive big enough to hold the entire pool, and if so how do I do this without loosing all the data?  I hope this makes some sense.  Thanks for the help.

Another part to this question.  If I can backup the drive pool drives to an external hard drive will I be able to add the data back into a new system build or could I take the hard drive out of the external drive case and just place it into the new pc.  Sorry for all the confusion, but under the gun to get this back up and running. Thanks again.

[Umfriend]

Not sure what you are looking for. If the other PC has enough ports, then you can simply install DP on that PC and then connect the HDDs. DP should recognise the Pool on the new PC.

If you do not have enough ports and can only attach a few at a time then you could copy the files from a one or a few HDDs to a single very large HDD indeed. Windows will read from the Pooled HDDs without actually running DP easily as they are simple NTFS formatted drives. Without DP, the PC just does not know to present the HDDs as one big virtual HDD.

[HDRKC07]

Sorry for the mess in the question above.  My main question is after I move the drive pool drives to another pc and reactivate the pool - how to I backup the pool to an external hard drive?  Do you have any backup software that you use successfully that you would recommend?  Thanks for the help.

[srcrist]

Create a pool on the new drive, then stop the service and simply move all of the data from the pool folders on the old drives to the pool folder on the new drive. Done. That's all you've got to do. When you restart the service it will remeasure the pool from the new drive. 

You can also just copy the data to the drive if you want. No need to use a pool. The files in the poolpart folders on your pooled drives are able to simply be moved to the root of the new drives if you want. 

If you want to get really creative, you can even use DrivePool to simply duplicate the content from the old pool to the new one in a new nested pool. 

[HDRKC07]

Thanks for the help