Drive pooling: drive spin-up and folder separation

DragonQ

Limp Gawd
Joined
Mar 3, 2007
Messages
351
I currently use FlexRAID for both drive pooling and snapshot RAID but the pooling is just not good enough for what I want. Here's an example of my folder layout and a description of the issues I have:

HDD 1: \Audio, \Data, \Backups
HDD 2: \Video\TV
HDD 3: \Video\TV
HDD 4: \Video\Sport
HDD 5: \Video\Sport
HDD 6: \Video\Films
HDD 7: \Video\Films


With FlexRAID's drive pooling, whenever I want to access \Video, it has to spin up all 7 drives one at a time (it always spins up the first HDD when the pool is accessed), which takes 30 seconds or more. Even if I go straight to \Video\TV, it still has to spin up 3 drives one at a time. It'd be much quicker if they all span up at the same time (or maybe in groups of 3 or something to prevent power spikes). Also, if I copy a new file into \Video\TV, it'll usually get written to HDD 1, even though that folder only exists on HDDs 2 & 3 and I've told FlexRAID to keep folders on single drives where possible. I've even seen the \Video\TV folder appear on HDDs 6 & 7 (not sure why it'd do this).

So basically, the option for keeping folders as separate as possible simply doesn't work (this is acknowledged by the author) and the time it takes to wake up numerous sleeping drives is way too long. It's also crashed on me a couple of times, although it's rare.

I know there are a few other pooling software out there but I'm looking for opinions from those that have used them. Do any of them allow folders to be properly kept separate? Do any of them spin up all needed HDDs at once rather than one at a time?
 
the only way i know to do something similar is with windows drive pooling directly. and manage where your folders are located yourself. and set disk spin up based on the pool. basically undoing what flexraid does.

that is all i can say with out offering up a solution that totally changes your core system, as flexraid, unraid, windows disk pools, windows software raid, are all technologies i have done my best to avoid.
 
Could you explain that in more detail please? FlexRAID's RAID-F and drive pooling are entirely separate and disabling the drive pooling won't upset my snapshot RAID configuration in any way.
 
inside windows you can convert the disks to dynamic. then dynamic disks can be extended across multiple drives or partitions. you could then group 2 drives together and have TV, SPORT, and FILMS. you would lose the head VIDEOS folder but you would then gain the ability to manage spin up/down through windows directly. and you would always know on what drives your data resides.

(note: i also don't regularly use dynamic disks in windows so i can not vouch for stability. in practice this is similar to the WHS drive extender feature that was abandoned.)
 
I have four drives that I use for video storage now as well, and I divided it up similar to the OP, where TV is on a drive, movies on a different drive, etc. I tried drive pooling initially with just two drives, but ran into the issue where if you hit one drive, the other would spin up. I eventually just settled on different drives, so like F, G, H and J right now. So now when Plex hits the H drive for TV shows, the other drives stay spun down.
 
I thought Stablebit Drivepool spins up only the drive(s) it needs, but I haven't played with it in a long time. Anyone with recent experience?
 
Stablebit Drivepool would be the one I'd try if doing this on Windows. Plus the author likes adding features and would possibly consider your scenario if it isnt already supported.

Zedicus's recommendation would also accomplish what you want; a caveat being that if one drive in the dynamic grouping died, you'd have a very hard time getting back the data from the other drives that were members of the dynamic group; since the filesystem is spread across the X number of drives.
 
An update 6 months on... :)

I've migrated to StableBit DrivePool for my storage pooling solution, with FlexRAID running on top. For some reason the re-calculating of parity only took ~12 hours, whereas last time I had to do that it took at least 24 hours. Performance when copying over the network is also now fantastic - I'm seeing 115 MB/s transferring files to my storage pool over gigabit Ethernet (for the faster drives anyway).

However, one of the reasons I wanted to switch was to keep individual subdirectories on separate drives. DrivePool has "file placement rules" to achieve this but for some reason they are ignored. Does anyone know how to correctly set these up? See my post on the StableBit forum for screenshots and details.
 
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