File Sizd

[LindsayCole]

Hello All,

 

 I ran into a problem using Server 2012R2 with DrivePool. I am in the testing phases to roll out for my setup here.

 

 It looked easy enough, I set all my drives to pool, and started a restore from my old server to my new server, DrivePool listed that I had 18TB available, and upon viewing it under Computer, the disk agreed. However, under Disk Management- it showed tapped out at 2TB on the DrivePool disk.

 

 When I was running my restore of data to the DrivePool volume, it stopped at 3.6TB and said insufficient space and tapped out. It filled one 4TB hard drive, and called it a day. When there was still another 8TB to restore. (Filetype was a .vhdx) Does DrivePool not support file sizes greater than the capacity of a single disk? In this case, it was 12.6TB.

 

 I have resorted back to Storage Spaces in the interim (this is essentially my swing server so I can reconfigure the main server with fresh drives)- so I will still need to figure out the plan going forward- which hopefully includes DrivePool.

 

Thanks,

[Christopher (Drashna)]

The driver for the pool reports as "2TBs" to the "virtual disk system" (what controls all the disks in the system), which is what Disk Management looks for. However, we report the proper size elsewhere. That is what you're seeing.

 

 

And no, DrivePool does not support disks larger than the capacity of the disks in the pool.  

Since we store the files on normal, NTFS volumes, we are limited to the underlying disk's capacities. Unfortunately, that means if you don't have a disk large enough to store the file, you can't store it on the pool.

 

RAID and Storage Spaces are block based solutions (instead of file based solutions, which DrivePool is), and are able to store files much larger than any disk in the array. However, since they're block based, recovery is more complex.

 

 

 

However, what were you using specifically to restore? Because if you're restoring data to the pool, then it shouldn't have problems here.

[LindsayCole]

I am recovering a Storage Spaces array that is 12.6TB in size. Using ReclaiMe's Storage Spaces Recovery to do it. 

 

It's a long story, but essentially I was running in a MS unsupported way, presenting each drive as its own RAID 0 to Windows, then had a RAID controller fail. 29 drives, that when I hooked back up, because they were set to Windows through a RAID card, Windows did not know how to enumerate the drives, so it couldn't recreate the Space.

 

To further complicate, no-one has really figured out how to recover when using Microsoft's de duplication. So, I had one of the developers of ReclaiMe remoted in, she gave me the ability to export the entire array as a Disk image (.vhdx) which should work okay, since dedupe is automatically handled via it.

 

So I am restoring a single 12.6TB file, after the recovery it shouldn't be a big deal if I want to use DrivePool, since I will be removing all of the data from the vhdx. Which given, is an extremely unique (and hopefully one time) problem.

 

Still deciding if it is a good fit for me or not, I really like the ability to use parity. As I have a fair bit of data that I want to be able to sustain a failure on, but using DrivePool for this, would require me to have almost double the storage for duplication, and I don't have the ability to grow to that size at this time.

 

A normal RAID setup, isn't a good fit for me, as I need to be able to add drives on the fly, of mismatched size.

 

Storage Spaces will work okay for me, but I dislike it's calculations on how much space it makes available- it just doesn't follow a logical convention (for example, I create a simple space (no redundancy)- add all drives, and have a total capacity of 15.5TB- yet it only allows me to create a volume of 13.6TB, With 1.82 unused that I can create another volume with. Which makes no real sense.

 

I want the flexibility and parity of storage spaces, but with a logical, intuitive interface like DrivePool. I am managing about 27 hard drives, + two SSD's for caching, and + two more in RAID 1 for OS. All drives are now controlled by an HBA, so I don't run into this problem in the future.

 

Wow, this really devolved into a rant.

 

Thanks for the help.

[Christopher (Drashna)]

Well, I'm really sorry to hear about the trouble you've had with Storage Spaces. That's definitely not a fun thing to have to deal with.

 

As for the VHDX files, if you're using Windows 8 (Or server 2012) or up, you can mount the VHDX files, so they show up like normal disks. 

 

 

And no, StableBit DrivePool does not support parity. However, there are a few solutions that people have used with DrivePool to "get the best of both".  You may want to check out this thread:

http://community.covecube.com/index.php?/topic/52-faq-parity-and-duplication-and-drivepool/

It has a lot of good information, and at the bottom, there are a few threads on how to set up FlexRAID or the like with DrivePool