Stablebit Drivepool downsides?

S

sphinx99

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Dec 23, 2006
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I am starting to build up a new storage server. This is my "gen 4" box and I want to stay with a Windows OS for server side app reasons.

I've been testing Drive pool the last couple of weeks and so far no issues. Removing drives, adding drives, testing redundancy, rebalancing all work. The included scanner seems to be OK (tested with known bad drive) and so far no stability issues.

I'll be running about 50TB this time and really want to get it right. My data is copying over as I write this with about 36 hours yet to go. My only open questions are (a) do people have any known concerns with either Stable bit Drivepool, the same vendor's scanner or my OS (WSE 2012 R2) and (b) any suggestions on last minute failure testing or recovery scenarios to try out before I actually cut over 20TB of data?
 
I can't really say anything beyond the fact that I have a 13TB pool for a home media server with file level redundancy, running for about 6 months, and I've been nothing but impressed. It's easy and it's scanning tool and redundancy has already saved me some data loss when an old 2TB drive started showing bad sectors. It automatically redistributed the files to the rest of the drives, emailed me to let me know what was happening, and told me what was testing bad on the drive. All I had to do was remove the drive and then added in a new one.

Read and write speeds were a bit slow, probably because of the older hardware and drives I'm using, everything from an old 640 Gb black drive to a new 4Tb NAS drive, I started using a cheap SSD as a cache drive and it helped a lot.
 
Thanks for posting about this. Looks really slick and accomplishes the same thing I do with stand alone zfs disks pooled with mhddfs and offline mirrors.
 
I'm using Drivepool and Scanner with Server 2012R2 Essentials. OS on SSD, everything else on a large pool (over 20TB) with folder level duplication. Mixture of 3 & 4TB NAS drives Works great for me. I didn't want to use RAID. Scanner has warned me about SMART problems, and I was able to replace drives without issue.

Of note, at least for me, server backup and client backups would not work on pooled drives. I use a separate drive for each.
 
I don't use the redundancy part of Drivepool (I use SnapRAID) but the pooling has worked fine for me - Windows 2012R2 - 24 4TB drives in pool. The latest version has some great functionality around directing incoming files to certain disks.

I have had one issue - I had custom NTFS permissions on the drivepool drive. it appeared to reverse in certain areas (or didn't complete properly in the first place). I had to reapply. No issues since then.

The only application downside for me so far is that the scanner doesn't appear to support Areca cards at the moment - can't get at disk SMART settings. You appear to have tested this so seems all positive news so far from your perspective!
 
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