Using a Seagate 8TB Archive Drive with Stablebit Drivepool

Grrrrr

Grrrrr

Grrrrr

Soldato
Joined
23 Oct 2002
Posts
5,721
Location
Various
I wanted to write up my experiences of this because there have been a few threads about the Seagate 8TB lately.

My storage setup is that i have a several hard drives of different sizes all pooled together under a single drive letter using Stablebit Drivepool. This is great, i don't have to deal with loads of different drive letters and worrying about filling any of them up. I can also use the duplicate feature so that more important folders are duplicated across multiple drives.

Last week one of my hard drives failed. I wanted to get a bigger replacement drive so this thread (http://forums.overclockers.co.uk/showthread.php?t=18705769) was useful as my requirements are similar. In the end, though, I went against the advice and got the Seagate 8TB Archive. The lure of those extra 2TB was too strong.

My plan was to setup Stablebit in such a way that the 8TB drive is never written to in the first instance thereby avoiding the write speed slowdowns. All data should be 'balanced' to it from other drives in the background, ideally overnight.

So that's what i did.

Using the "SSD Optimizer" add-in in Drivepool, you can specify which drives are written to when you write to the pool. None of my pooled drives are SSDs, so i just picked the quickest HDD. I also disabled "real time duplication" which means files are duplicated overnight.

One week on everything is working as expected. Write speeds to the pool are fast and the 8TB drives chugs along at painfully slow speeds in the background, completely invisible to the user on windows.
 
Very interesting. The only issue I have with Drivepool is that if (say) you have four 2Tb hard drives and your total data is 3Tb then you can't use duplication. I could be wrong but if I'm not then there's no point in having the 8Tb coupled with smaller drives unless it's for pooled storage. Obviously if you're not duplicating all your data then all's well!
 
How slow is slow when it comes to the 8TB drive? I have a spare slot in my server which could take one and potentially be a decent backup.

Also, with Drivepool, can you pool drives without the pool relying on all drives? So if one drive failed, you would only lose the data that was stored on that drive and they could effectively be read as separate drives without the Drivepool software?
 
Last edited:
Bluecube said:
Very interesting. The only issue I have with Drivepool is that if (say) you have four 2Tb hard drives and your total data is 3Tb then you can't use duplication. I could be wrong but if I'm not then there's no point in having the 8Tb coupled with smaller drives unless it's for pooled storage. Obviously if you're not duplicating all your data then all's well!
Click to expand...

If you have 4 x 2TB drives then you have an 8TB pool, so you could quite happily duplicate 3TB of data. It would take up 6TB of the space.

If you had, say, 5TB of data, then of course you couldn't duplicate it all but you could select at the folder level what you wanted to duplicate.
 
Craig321 said:
Also, with Drivepool, can you pool drives without the pool relying on all drives? So if one drive failed, you would only lose the data that was stored on that drive and they could effectively be read as separate drives without the Drivepool software?
Click to expand...

It works exactly as you described. One drive fails and you only lose what's on that drive. All data on pooled drives are readable on any windows machine without Stablebit software.
 
The data is stored in a hidden folder on each drive. It stores full files which are readable on any machine.

After 2 minutes of testing the software, I bought it. So much better than the MS implementation.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom