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Drive bender is an application that takes multiple hard drives and turns them into a single mount point. It is very similar to the Drive Extender function that WHS originally had. It costs $40 for a home use license and in my opinion is worth it.
It seems to have all the major functions of DE and i think it does it better then DE ever did. It can duplicate specific files/folders, balance the drives, show multiple drives as one, and it uses NTFS, so if your OS drive goes to crap and you can't restore the pool then you can still easily get your data back off the hard drives (note it replicates all folders over all the hard drives, but it only keeps the files on 1 hard drive at a time, unless you told it to duplicate the file, then it will keep it on 2 hard drives at a time)
Setting Up Drive Bender:
for my set up of Drive bender i had 3 2tb hard drives (non identical) with exisiting data (about 900gb a drive)
The first time i tried setting it up i had told it to 'convert' my drives to DB, which something you SHOULD NEVER DO!!!! i converted all three of my hard drives (D: E: and I
and it seemed to work ok.... except for one thing, only one hard drive's data was showing up!
Turns out that for every mount point you throw onto drive creates a different ID folder on all the drives!
It also doesn't play nice with partitions, i had my boot partition on one of the 2tb's and while it didn't delete anything it destroyed the boot manager, its not hard to fix but one should be aware of it.
so the way it turned out for me i had mount points D, E, and I added to my pool, if the pool was showing up as I on my computer it would show only I:'s data, same goes for E and D.
I destroyed the pools and moved the data back into the root folders and deleted the drive ID folders then tried again, but this time i used merge.
i used I: as my first drive, so the mount point was I:, then merged the other two folders and bam! it worked, easy as pie.
I'm really just sharing my experience with this software, i think its very good, i'm running it under windows 7 ult 64 bit with no issues, its supposed to run on any M$ OS from XP-7 (havent tested it on 8) and on WHS 2011
I'm more then happy to answer any questions if anyone has any, feel free to PM me if i don't respond in this thread, i am setting up another pool this weekend using 8 drives that vary from 250gb to 750gb in a server running 2k8r2, hopefully i wont run into any new issues, but if i do i'll post about them here!
It seems to have all the major functions of DE and i think it does it better then DE ever did. It can duplicate specific files/folders, balance the drives, show multiple drives as one, and it uses NTFS, so if your OS drive goes to crap and you can't restore the pool then you can still easily get your data back off the hard drives (note it replicates all folders over all the hard drives, but it only keeps the files on 1 hard drive at a time, unless you told it to duplicate the file, then it will keep it on 2 hard drives at a time)
Setting Up Drive Bender:
for my set up of Drive bender i had 3 2tb hard drives (non identical) with exisiting data (about 900gb a drive)
The first time i tried setting it up i had told it to 'convert' my drives to DB, which something you SHOULD NEVER DO!!!! i converted all three of my hard drives (D: E: and I
and it seemed to work ok.... except for one thing, only one hard drive's data was showing up! Turns out that for every mount point you throw onto drive creates a different ID folder on all the drives!
It also doesn't play nice with partitions, i had my boot partition on one of the 2tb's and while it didn't delete anything it destroyed the boot manager, its not hard to fix but one should be aware of it.
so the way it turned out for me i had mount points D, E, and I added to my pool, if the pool was showing up as I on my computer it would show only I:'s data, same goes for E and D.
I destroyed the pools and moved the data back into the root folders and deleted the drive ID folders then tried again, but this time i used merge.
i used I: as my first drive, so the mount point was I:, then merged the other two folders and bam! it worked, easy as pie.
I'm really just sharing my experience with this software, i think its very good, i'm running it under windows 7 ult 64 bit with no issues, its supposed to run on any M$ OS from XP-7 (havent tested it on 8) and on WHS 2011
I'm more then happy to answer any questions if anyone has any, feel free to PM me if i don't respond in this thread, i am setting up another pool this weekend using 8 drives that vary from 250gb to 750gb in a server running 2k8r2, hopefully i wont run into any new issues, but if i do i'll post about them here!
