New To DrivePool, Have Some Questions

[MrReaper]

Hey everyone! Been using the free trial of DrivePool to see how it works and see if it's something that I would be interested in. So far, I'm very much interested and am interested in purchasing a bundle after the trial is over. I'm very new to these types of programs and have a few questions for my setup before I commit to this program/setup.

I am running my own Plex server. I have 2x 4TB HDD's running inside a 4-bay enclosure vis USB that houses all my media. I back up my media to an external 8TB USB drive. Is it possible to have both the enclosure and external in the same pool, but only use the enclosure for storage and have it duplicate (or balance?) to the external as backup? Or would I just be better off doing what I was doing before and just backing up everything to the external with it outside the pool? Under 'Balancers' I went into 'Drive Usage Limiter' and unchecked Duplicated for both drives in the enclosure and unchecked Unduplicated for the external. Automatic balancing is set to balance immediately not more than every 12hrs. I haven't messed with anything under the 'File Placement' tab as I'm not positive as to what I'd be doing. Is that where I'd create a folder or set a destination for it to automatically backup files?

Thank you for any help/tips.

 

[Christopher (Drashna)]

Yes, you can do that.  Mostly. 

You'd want to use the hierachical pooling feature though.  Add all the disks from the enclosure to a pool.  Then add that pool and the 8TB external to a pool.  Then duplicate on the top level pool. 

That should get what you want.  Though, I can't guarantee that it won't read from the external drive.  Though, the read striping feature is designed to prefer local disks/pools over external drives.  So, it should.