Testing Out DrivePool

[Blake]

Hey there,

 

I'm testing out Drivepool before buying and I was wondering if I could get a bit of help. I've established my pool with five 2TB hard drives with data spread across all of them. Coming from a competitor, FlexRaid, I have 6 different folders across these 5 drives with data all split up.

 

Downloads, Movies, TV, Pictures, Documents. So, the model I'm used to is have one drive/pool, and hide the rest of them. So is it possible to transfer my data on drives G,H,I,J and just have a pool at drive V with all my folders? That way I can have consolidated folders in one 'pool'. If so, what would be the (best) way to go about doing it? Cut/Paste? Or is there any easier way?

 

My main concern is speed, because with a single platter drive I was getting a respectable ~45MB/s transfer rate, but FlexRaid, my transfers from my SSD were down to 4-5MB/s after upgrading to Win8.

 

Are there any limits to drive sizes in the pool? I'm thinking about adding a few 3-4TB ones soon enough.

 

Also, if I do decide to purchase DrivePool/Scanner, do y'all offer discounts for students?

 

Thanks!

[Dane]

I can only answer a couple of your questions but maybe that can be the start.  You can have your entire pool show up under one drive letter or multiple, which ever you prefer.  You can also have all your drives set with no letter assigned.  I am trying to attach a screen shot so you can see my basic setup.  As for drive size I do not believe there is a drive size limit besides what your computer is capable of .  My current pool consists of 6 x 2TB WD Greens, and 5 x 3TB WD Reds.  I have yet to try a 4 TB drive but is just a matter of time.  As for transfer speed, it depends on file size and how many.  If I am transferring a lot of small files rate drops to around 10-20 MB/sec.  If it is say a bluray it starts off at around 100-110 MB/sec but stabilizes around 50-60MB/sec depending on what I am doing with the server at that time.  For migrating  your files I cant really help you out.  I built a new...ish server when I migrated from windows home server v1 to the new server.  So all I had to do was remove as many drives as I could add them to Drive Pool and transferred them across the network.  When I was done I removed the last couple drives and added them to the pool as well.  Hope this helped maybe  just a little, I am sure someone with far more DP wisdom than I have can explain your migrating question for you.

 

http://www.flickr.com/photos/98781816@N03/9266435741/

 

Drive S20 (G) in explorer is not part of the pool but it used to be lol

[Shane]

Hi Blake

 

Dane's beaten me to most of your questions, so I'll tackle the migration part. Yes, the safe way is to simply cut and paste. Due to the way Windows operates, it doesn't automagically realise your V drivepool is physically located on your G,H,I,J etc drives, so this can take quite some time if you've got a lot of data.

 

If you want it done in a hurry, it can be worth knowing that DrivePool pools are formed from the collective contents of each pooled physical drive's hidden root PoolPart.guid folder - so you could manually cut and paste each drive's content into the corresponding hidden folder and then tell DrivePool to do a remeasure so it detected the "new" folders/files. However, if you've got different files on the drives that share the same folder/filename structure, or if some of those folders are shared or special or carrying unusual access control metadata, you risk DrivePool and/or Windows getting confused, so this is not recommended unless you know what you're doing.

[Blake]

Thanks for the responses Shane and Dane. I'm slowly taking the 'safer' method of Cut/Pasting everything over. So far, my experiences have been good, and if they still are at the end of the month come payday, you can expect another customer.

[dbailey75]

 

Also, if I do decide to purchase DrivePool/Scanner, do y'all offer discounts for students?

 

Yes, if you buy one, then you use the license key as your coupon code when you purchase the second, I believe is saves you $10,

[Christopher (Drashna)]

Yup. Well, $9.95 specifically but close enough to $10.

Also, this discount is good for up to 10 additional licenses (past the first one). Of either DrivePool or Scanner (or any combination of the two)