Drivepool with USB Drives/Spindown?

[dayoff]

Hi,

 

I'm using Drivepool with some large external USB drives, simply as an archival mechanism for my NAS.  Every so often, I will sync them manually (or use a tool) to copy any changes from the nas onto my single letter that's pooled across the four 5TB drives.

 

Question... how is drive spindown handled in this situation?  I really don't want the four drives to be spunup all the time..especially since I may only do this 'sync' every month or two.  I'd rather not disconnect them from my system, as I don't want something else coming in and taking the drive letters and confusing Drivepool....but being a new user of the product, I'm still in the process of understanding the 'gotcha's' that go along with it's use..

 

Any info is appreciated.  Thanks

Pete

[Christopher (Drashna)]

This depends on ... well a number of factors. However, it should be controlled by Windows, as normal.

 

 

However, if the pool is not being accessed, then the disks in the pool shouldn't be either. Meaning that Windows should allow them to spin down as per normal.

 

However, indexing programs (like Windows Search) may try to access the drive, which will spin them up.

 

As for taking the drive letter, we recommending assigning the Pool a higher drive letter anyways, as Windows can bump the drive letter regardless. 

 

 

 

As for the sync, if you're using a script, I may be able to help there.

You can set the disks as offline and online using powershell scripts (IIRC), which would solve the problem (offline disks are shown as "missing" or not present by DrivePool).

[dayoff]

Maybe I should clarify... I'm used to using unraid, where I have a pool of space and the system only spins up the drive that the data is located...even though that 'share' may be pooled across several drives.  Thus, if I go a week without needing a video I saved to disk 2 of my three drive pool, disks 1 and 3 don't have to spin up the whole time I'm watching that video.  That sort of thing...  Is that capability available in drivepool? I'm a bit worried at the moment as well, as I'm already being thrown in auto-duplicate and balance settings which I really don't want to get into...last thing I need is a bunch of drives with duplicated data to sort out if one drive goes bad...

 

Pete

[Christopher (Drashna)]

Sorry for the delayed response here.

 

Yes, StableBit DrivePool does basically the same thing.

Specifically, it will spin up all of the disks the first time it's accessed. But it then keeps an association with the file in memory, so that any subsequent access to the file will ONLY wake up the disk that the file resides on. 

 

 

 

As for the duplication stuff... If your data is duplicated and you lose a disk, StableBit DrivePool will "worry" about sorting that for you. Once you've removed the missing disk from the pool (or as you remove or after you remove a bad disk), it will check the duplication status of the pool, and automatically duplicate any missing files in the background.

 

Regards