Pooling drives question.

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SedoSan

Limp Gawd
Joined
Aug 29, 2012
Messages
145
I've always been trying to find ways to pool my drives but every solution I find is not really what I had in mind.
Lets say I have this scenario:
4 of (4x4TB HDD in RAID5)
so that's a total of 4x 12TB of data = 48 TB of storage.
Drives are labeled: H, I, J, K. (each 12TB)
I want to pool them together in 1 drive labeled "P" which now will be 48TB.

Here is the confusing part, I used "Driver Bender" and when I copy something to any of the H, I, J and K, it will not copy to P. However if I copy to P directly, then it will copy to the rest. This is NOT what I had in mind.

Here is what I want: I can copy to any of the 4 drives and it will add it to the pooled drive. Or if I copy directly to the P drive, depending on the folder, it will copy it to the assigned folder on the 4 other drivers. Then lets say the folder "Movies" in drive "H" got full, so it will create a new file "Movies" in drive "I" and will continue it there.

Has anyone experienced a pooling software that can do that? I'm using Windows 7.
 
Have you checked flex raid? I had a 16 tb pool, windows saw it as 1 drive letter and I think it was doing what you are describing (I had it set to use drives equally so wear and tear would be equal and it was duplicating folders among different hard drives
 
mls1995 said:
Have you checked flex raid? I had a 16 tb pool, windows saw it as 1 drive letter and I think it was doing what you are describing (I had it set to use drives equally so wear and tear would be equal and it was duplicating folders among different hard drives
Click to expand...

I tried it but it wasn't like what I wanted.
I don't care about duplicating. What I care about is that the new Pooled drive will already have the folders and files inside the pooled Drives instead of starting off Empty.
 
I recommend you try StableBit DrivePool which I have been using for years without problems.

When using DrivePool, you can copy files directly to the pooled drive or to individual member drives.

DrivePool creates a special directory with GUID name on each member drive for keeping track of pooled files. So if you want to copy files directly to individual drives and see them show up in the pooled drive, you must copy files to those GUID directories.

Files copied to outside of the special GUID directories will not show up in the pooled drive.

So If you want to add a drive and see existing data show up in the pooled drive, you just need to move existing files and data folders into the special GUID directory.

I suggest you setup a VM, configure bunch of 10GB virtual hard drives and install the 30-day trial DrivePool to play around in case you don't like DrivePool.
 
Last edited:
FlexRAID does have a pooling only feature that does exactly what you are describing.
 
SedoSan said:
I tried it but it wasn't like what I wanted.
I don't care about duplicating. What I care about is that the new Pooled drive will already have the folders and files inside the pooled Drives instead of starting off Empty.
Click to expand...

I run flexraid pooling here, and it does exactly what you are describing..
 
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