New user - recommendations for migrating from FlexRAID

[xliv]

Hi all,

I'm new here - currently testing DrivePool as an alternative to FlexRAID, which unfortunately is not supported anymore.

I was about to ask the most basic question about why my Pool was not showing the data that was already in the drives, but found the answer here. So I guess I'll follow the recommendation about seeding the pool.

I'm moving off FlexRAID with a pool of 58TB, made of 10 local hard-drives (3 to 10TB), 48TB already full. I was not using FlexRAID parity, but would like at one point to do that.

I have a couple of questions:

• The drive letter for the pool seems to be automatically assigned by Windows. Is there a way to change it within DrivePool, or should I do it in Windows?
• Are there any other recommendation from users who have mirgrated their pool from FlexRAID to DrivePool? Should I clean-up anything on the drives before using them in DrivePool?
• About having a small SSD as a landing drive - is there a recommendation about the size of it? I have a lot of Blu-Ray rips, so quite often I move 50GB+ files to the pool.
• My pool will is almost exclusively dedicated to expose network shares - do I create those shares direclty in Windows, or is there a place in DrivePool GUI that I should use to do so? Do you recommend activating the Network I/O boost? When my PC reboots, will the pool be started before the shared drives reconnect?
• I won't be using duplication - any recommendation about a good parity redundancy software? SnapRAID looks fine, but snapshot only, I hoped to find a real-time parity platform.

Many thanks in advance

[Christopher (Drashna)]

On 8/22/2019 at 7:13 AM, xliv said:

• The drive letter for the pool seems to be automatically assigned by Windows. Is there a way to change it within DrivePool, or should I do it in Windows?

IIRC, you should be able to use the "Manage Pool" menu.   However, you can use Disk Management to do this, manually. 

On 8/22/2019 at 7:13 AM, xliv said:

• Are there any other recommendation from users who have mirgrated their pool from FlexRAID to DrivePool? Should I clean-up anything on the drives before using them in DrivePool?

You may want to look into use SnapRAID with StableBit DrivePool, to get the parity protection. 

Or you could use duplication, if you want. 

On 8/22/2019 at 7:13 AM, xliv said:

• About having a small SSD as a landing drive - is there a recommendation about the size of it? I have a lot of Blu-Ray rips, so quite often I move 50GB+ files to the pool.

For the SSDs, you want a number of SSDs equal to the level of duplication that you plan on using.  And yeah, it should be large enough to fit whatever files you're throwing on the pool. So if you're adding 50+GB files, then you may want 120GB SSDs, or larger.  That way, you have a bit of a buffer for file size. 

On 8/22/2019 at 7:13 AM, xliv said:

• My pool will is almost exclusively dedicated to expose network shares - do I create those shares direclty in Windows, or is there a place in DrivePool GUI that I should use to do so? Do you recommend activating the Network I/O boost? When my PC reboots, will the pool be started before the shared drives reconnect?

You would have to enable the shares in Windows.   

As for Network IO Boost, yeah.  It will prioritize network I/O over local I/O.   

And yes, the pool should start before the shared drives reconnect.  And that shouldn't actually matter, since the shares should remount once the disks show up. 

On 8/22/2019 at 7:13 AM, xliv said:

• I won't be using duplication - any recommendation about a good parity redundancy software? SnapRAID looks fine, but snapshot only, I hoped to find a real-time parity platform.

Just SnapRAID from what I have seen.