Pool drive without service working

[Sergey Klepov]

I wonder how DrivePool works? I notices that if I turn off all services, disable them and restart - my pool is still there and all files are accessible. So what for services are and what is drawback of having them turned off? 

As I understand, there is some new fs CoveFS and there drivers in system which allow all that magic with showing all drives as single drive to work, so services are there just for auto-balance and statistics measurements, right?

Thnx

[Shane]

Very basically there's three layers; at the device layer you have the CoveFS drivers that present each pool as a virtual NTFS drive to the system, at the service layer you have the DrivePool services that handle balancing, diagnostics, placement, repairs, triggers, scheduling, shutdown, etc, and at the user layer you have the GUI that lets you configure and manually operate the service layer.

[Sergey Klepov]

Ah, so basically my drive will work, just that with service turned off no whistles. And if I don't use any functionality like duplications/balancers - I can turn them off without any impact on basic functionality (which is very big volume spanned across several disks), GUI won't work as well, of course.

[Shane]

Yes, that's basically correct. Personally I'd recommend leaving the service turned on even if you have duplication and balancers all turned off, so that it can continue to handle basic diagnostics/maintenance/notifications (e.g. "hey one of your disks just went missing, the pool is now read-only until that gets resolved"), but it's up to you.