Stablebit Drivepool discussion thread.

easyrider

easyrider

easyrider

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Just a thread to discuss this awesome piece of software.:D

http://stablebit.com/DrivePool/Overview

I have just rebuilt my Home server with Server 2012 R2 and installed this after having a play with storage spaces which was utter tripe,

Kudos to Stablebit. Its a very powerful tool and utterly makes me forget the fondness I had for WHS V1 that inevitably chugged to a halt two weeks ago,

I love it and the scanner software is amazing too.
 
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Windows has finally discovered the concept of a unified filesystem rather than drive letters then? :p

Haven't really investigated the app in question, but as far as I can see it's really just a fancy interface to NTFS junction points and a duplication bit added on. Plenty of apps that do this, and some of them free :)

Install Linux, a MAN's OS and then come back :D

-Leezer-
 
leezer3 said:
Windows has finally discovered the concept of a unified filesystem rather than drive letters then? :p

Haven't really investigated the app in question, but as far as I can see it's really just a fancy interface to NTFS junction points and a duplication bit added on. Plenty of apps that do this, and some of them free :)

Install Linux, a MAN's OS and then come back :D

-Leezer-
Click to expand...

Brilliant....I , myself, had this concept...and just wanted DE to stay

Drivepool doesn't have a fancy interface?
 
Have you tried it in comparison to DriveBender at all? I've got a license to DriveBender but it doesn't appear to play nice at the moment with 2012R2...
 
Been using Drivepool on my WHS2011 box since I built it earlier in the year, having previously used WHSv1 and DriveExtender.

It just works, can't fault it :) Fantastic bit of software, and allows me to keep the familiarity of Windows whilst easily setting up an easily extendable storage solution without having to mess about.
 
Confused said:
Been using Drivepool on my WHS2011 box since I built it earlier in the year, having previously used WHSv1 and DriveExtender.

It just works, can't fault it :) Fantastic bit of software, and allows me to keep the familiarity of Windows whilst easily setting up an easily extendable storage solution without having to mess about.
Click to expand...

Yup, pretty much the same here. Easy to setup and it's been working fine along with the Scanner for me.
 
ER, I've finally got my new system and its up and running now in 2012 R2 and once ive got the basics of the OS installed and running how i'd need i'll be installing drivepool after you recommended it in the HP Microserver thread.

One thing i didnt get an answer on, possibly because you dont know yourself, but i'd read about 'Storage Spaces Tiering' here
http://blogs.technet.com/b/josebda/...spaces-tiering-in-windows-server-2012-r2.aspx

I've googled Drivepool Tiering and it basically suggests Drivepool [p2p filesharing file] so im not sure if its not available with Drivepool, or maybe it is it just that SS calls it Tiering just like SS used to be DE not that long ago.
I've gone and purchased a cheap 64GB SSD purely for this purpose, so i have 4 in 3 systems and im hoping that i'll be able to put 2 into this server, one for the OS and one within drivepool to increase data transfer speeds somewhat.
If i cant do it, i'll just use it in my gaming machine for additional storage for games, but im hopeful that it can be utilised in DP.

Do you know anything about this by any chance? Im hoping to understand it before i install it, simply because of it being a 30-day trial and i dont want to waste 2wk of that figuring out something and not really getting to experience it in action for as long as i'd hope.
 
PaulC2K said:
ER, I've finally got my new system and its up and running now in 2012 R2 and once ive got the basics of the OS installed and running how i'd need i'll be installing drivepool after you recommended it in the HP Microserver thread.

One thing i didnt get an answer on, possibly because you dont know yourself, but i'd read about 'Storage Spaces Tiering' here
http://blogs.technet.com/b/josebda/...spaces-tiering-in-windows-server-2012-r2.aspx

I've googled Drivepool Tiering and it basically suggests Drivepool [p2p filesharing file] so im not sure if its not available with Drivepool, or maybe it is it just that SS calls it Tiering just like SS used to be DE not that long ago.
I've gone and purchased a cheap 64GB SSD purely for this purpose, so i have 4 in 3 systems and im hoping that i'll be able to put 2 into this server, one for the OS and one within drivepool to increase data transfer speeds somewhat.
If i cant do it, i'll just use it in my gaming machine for additional storage for games, but im hopeful that it can be utilised in DP.

Do you know anything about this by any chance? Im hoping to understand it before i install it, simply because of it being a 30-day trial and i dont want to waste 2wk of that figuring out something and not really getting to experience it in action for as long as i'd hope.
Click to expand...


Yes Drivepool can use SSD's as cache drives to speed up pool performance:)
 
Given the limited life span of an SSD, is it worth doing this? I can imagine this being of fanstic use for database work, but for normal stuff you'd be better of with larger drives and duplication as that can increase the read speed?
 
Thats a good point Blizzard, although i dont think there would be too much data being passed around, and at the moment i really dont have the storage space to start duplicating. It was only £40 all in for the 64GB drive and im sure i'd get a good year or 2 out of it, but if i can get similar results with duplication then hopefully in April i'll be able to grab a couple of 4TB's and then i'll be all set.

I found their version of 'SS Tiering' on their blog, so thats good to see (under 'Archive Optimizer')
http://blog.covecube.com/2012/09/stablebit-drivepool-balancing-plug-ins-and-scanner-integration/

Now i just need to get my head around Server 2012, its taking a bit of getting used to but im getting there, and google certainly helps (bloomin IE security junk!)
 
Sorry to bring this thread back from the dead but Im using drivepool and expecting a performance boost, however Im not seeing one at all.

Has anyone else experienced this?
 
Fantom said:
Sorry to bring this thread back from the dead but Im using drivepool and expecting a performance boost, however Im not seeing one at all.

Has anyone else experienced this?
Click to expand...


I had same problem the speeds became almost like usb1 so I switched to DriveBender and not had a problem since.

Sort of glad I didn't pay for it plus I don't like how they have the separate scanner app which costs more it ends up if needing multi license expensive.
 
Drivebender is great if you want all your drives to be used to read files from, or don't mind if they're all spinning as it doesn't have an option to fill only a single drive at a time... Drivepool is good if you DO want to fill drives up individually rather than balancing the space as it has plugins to do that.

I've always found drivebender to be a little bit more buggy and the user interface has not been as nice... But the built in Smart is good but I don't believe it does surface scans like Stablebit scanner can.
 
I am using stablebit with no issues, does exactly what I want. I can't say the drive scanners appeal to be. Do you really want your drives being scanned constantly? It just puts more load and produces more heat.
 
The scanner can be set not to scan all the time. I think I had mine at every 14 days or when SMART suggests there is a problem. The advantage of scanning is that it forces the HDD controller to remap bad sectors before there written to and reduces the amount of issues that could occur later.
 
BlizzardX said:
Drivebender is great if you want all your drives to be used to read files from, or don't mind if they're all spinning as it doesn't have an option to fill only a single drive at a time... Drivepool is good if you DO want to fill drives up individually rather than balancing the space as it has plugins to do that.
Click to expand...

You can set Drive Bender to fill one drive at a time. Not sure whether that's something new to V2 as I never really looked in V1.
 
bit of a drivepool question.

Lets say you've got 3 drives in the pool and you've got movies balanced over the drives.
If one drive suddenly dies without warning is there any way to tell what movies were actually on that drive ?
 
It's very unusual to have a drive die without any warning. My server kept restarting randomly - I wasn't running StableBit Scanner at the time (but I now am), so I didn't realise that this was a sign of one of my drives failing. I just kept on without investigating it, and then, one day, it failed completely.

It's a risk I ran by not having any duplication set up - but I've now purchased the StableBit Scanner to notify me if any of my disks experience any issues, or the S.M.A.R.T monitoring indicates any potential issues with the drive.


To answer your question, though, I use Kodi, so all of my movies are in the library. I just went through each one, one-by-one, and made a list of which ones didn't play and told me the file was missing. I don't "clean" my library automatically, so these items didn't disappear like they would have done if you had a schedule set up to clean the library.

For TV shows, it was a bit easier, because it tended to be episodes rather than everything, so just looked through the folders and found the missing episodes.
 
Confused said:
It's very unusual to have a drive die without any warning. My server kept restarting randomly - I wasn't running StableBit Scanner at the time (but I now am), so I didn't realise that this was a sign of one of my drives failing. I just kept on without investigating it, and then, one day, it failed completely.

It's a risk I ran by not having any duplication set up - but I've now purchased the StableBit Scanner to notify me if any of my disks experience any issues, or the S.M.A.R.T monitoring indicates any potential issues with the drive.


To answer your question, though, I use Kodi, so all of my movies are in the library. I just went through each one, one-by-one, and made a list of which ones didn't play and told me the file was missing. I don't "clean" my library automatically, so these items didn't disappear like they would have done if you had a schedule set up to clean the library.

For TV shows, it was a bit easier, because it tended to be episodes rather than everything, so just looked through the folders and found the missing episodes.
Click to expand...

yep that was my fall back before, I'd just create shares on each drive like "Moves E, Movies D" etc. So then when I know which drive it is I can query the Kodi database for that location, but with Drivepool they all point to the same place.

Is there a column in the database that indicates that a movies missing then ?
 
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