mediacowboy 438 Posted December 3, 2015 Share Posted December 3, 2015 So I have been keeping up with the post about drive bender on other internet page's, Facebook, and their website. I am kinda of wondering what to do. I love the product of set it and forget it but I am also thinking moving to something with fault tolerance. What are some of the other drive bender users thinking? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
CBers 6780 Posted December 3, 2015 Share Posted December 3, 2015 I'll be sticking with Drive Bender. Have you seen the latest blog entry by Anthony ?? 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ebr 14948 Posted December 3, 2015 Share Posted December 3, 2015 I've been using FlexRaid for about 18 months now and am quite happy with it. I moved from UnRaid back then for two reasons - 1) I wanted a single server to run Emby Server and be the media repository and I wanted to run Windows and 2) The UnRaid file format was completely un-readable outside of UnRaid. With FlexRaid, they are just NTFS drives which makes them accessible to almost anything. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ice pube 20 Posted December 3, 2015 Share Posted December 3, 2015 I really like Stablebit Drivepool. I can add any size drives I want, and I can choose per-folders what I would like to duplicate. This way my media like tv shows I can just not duplicate, but photos I have duplicated 3x. It is pretty much set and forget, I have had it installed for probably 2 years and it has been flawless. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
venom986 2 Posted December 3, 2015 Share Posted December 3, 2015 I'm also a recent and happy drivepool convert. I switched over from zfs in freenas to drivepool in Windows 10 pro. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
CBers 6780 Posted December 3, 2015 Share Posted December 3, 2015 I really like Stablebit Drivepool. I can add any size drives I want, and I can choose per-folders what I would like to duplicate. This way my media like tv shows I can just not duplicate, but photos I have duplicated 3x. It is pretty much set and forget, I have had it installed for probably 2 years and it has been flawless. I think Drive Bender and StableBit DrivePool were released around the same time, in response to Drive Extender bring dropped by MS. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
swhitmore 781 Posted December 4, 2015 Share Posted December 4, 2015 (edited) I've been using FlexRAID for about 5 or 6 years with absolutely no issues. Recommended. Edited December 4, 2015 by swhitmore Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tenzen 1 Posted December 4, 2015 Share Posted December 4, 2015 I own and use all three and have for years starting with FlexRaid, then DriveBender and finally DrivePool. I've even flirted with Snapraid as well. I switch back and forth for various reasons at different times.. (Eg, DriveBender was slow to adopt windows 10 support, and FlexRaid wasnt working well with a database program I had running at one point...) Currently I run DrivePool. I find all of them work quite well and if you have multiple disks, they are all fantastic tools. FlexRaid is the most difficult to use, but gives you pairty redundancy doesnt chew up 50% of your disk with the mirror approaches of the others. I find DriveBender and DrivePool about equal.. biggest difference is the interface. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
revengineer 127 Posted December 4, 2015 Share Posted December 4, 2015 (edited) So I have been keeping up with the post about drive bender on other internet page's, Facebook, and their website. I am kinda of wondering what to do. I love the product of set it and forget it but I am also thinking moving to something with fault tolerance. What are some of the other drive bender users thinking? I have been using Drivebender for 3+ years. Fantastic product and available now for only $5 donation, which will help the developer to keep the lights on for the servers. That price is less than what you pay for a Starbucks coffee. Edited December 4, 2015 by revengineer Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
revengineer 127 Posted December 4, 2015 Share Posted December 4, 2015 I think Drive Bender and StableBit DrivePool were released around the same time, in response to Drive Extender bring dropped by MS. Drivebender was first out of beta by quite a bit. Although I own a Drivepool license as well, I started using Drivebender early on because I did not want to trust my most valuable data to a beta product. These days either one will work well, although the $5 price is hard to beat. Downside is that future development for Drivebender is uncertain. Since the product works on Windows 10, I am hoping that it will work with Server 2016 as well. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
pr3dict 33 Posted December 4, 2015 Share Posted December 4, 2015 I've been using flexraid for about a year (since I started this mediaserver thing) and it has saved me once. It's a bit confusing and I'm not entirely sure if I'm using it correctly but like I said earlier, it did save me once. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ronvp 92 Posted December 5, 2015 Share Posted December 5, 2015 Drive pooling using Storage Spaces in windows 10 is just really good and sensible choice.. Flexibility is just amazing.. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ebr 14948 Posted December 5, 2015 Share Posted December 5, 2015 Drive pooling using Storage Spaces in windows 10 is just really good and sensible choice.. Flexibility is just amazing.. Does it provide any fault-tolerance beyond straight duplication these days? That is the main reason I went with something like FlexRaid over pure drive-pooling because duplication isn't practical for video libraries. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Koleckai Silvestri 1150 Posted December 5, 2015 Share Posted December 5, 2015 Storage Spaces supports both Mirroring and Parity these days. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ebr 14948 Posted December 5, 2015 Share Posted December 5, 2015 Storage Spaces supports both Mirroring and Parity these days. Kewl. Thanks. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JeremyFr79 228 Posted December 5, 2015 Share Posted December 5, 2015 Storage Spaces supports both Mirroring and Parity these days. ^this, sadly parity performance isn't good at all. I was going to use Storage Spaces in 2012 R2 to move away from my hardware RAID. I got sucked in by all the glamour and high promises, only to be QUICKLY disapointed. Parity performance was abysmal. Storage Spaces is nowhere near prime time. Personally I'm still a huge fan of hardware RAIDS. My main storage array is a 24 drive RAID50 and Performance is fantastic. 2 iSCSI boxes are running a few RAID 5's that I use for storage of backups etc. All in all it all works very well for me especially after finally figuring out a performance issue I was having with my main ARRAY. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ronvp 92 Posted December 6, 2015 Share Posted December 6, 2015 Does it provide any fault-tolerance beyond straight duplication these days? That is the main reason I went with something like FlexRaid over pure drive-pooling because duplication isn't practical for video libraries. It does today.. I personally use a 6 Disk hardware Raid 5. Works perfectly. Read speeds are around 250 mb/s Write large files about the same speed. This is a good speed for ,y media server. IT easily keeps up with 4 clients.. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ebr 14948 Posted December 7, 2015 Share Posted December 7, 2015 It does today.. I personally use a 6 Disk hardware Raid 5. Works perfectly. Read speeds are around 250 mb/s Write large files about the same speed. This is a good speed for ,y media server. IT easily keeps up with 4 clients.. Hardware raid is not Storage spaces providing fault tolerance - it is your hardware... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
psykix 97 Posted December 7, 2015 Share Posted December 7, 2015 Storage Spaces is DREADFUL. I used it when I was running Windows Server 2012 R2 Essentials. Write performance is awful, which isn't so much of an issue really if you are using it only for media which doesn't change very often. However, if you ever add another drive, then it is unable to redistribute the data evenly across the expanded storage space, so if you let drives get too full before adding in more space then you are pretty much stuffed. I now use Stablebit Drivepool, along with Stablebit Scanner, but I don't duplicate the drives. At the end of the day it's just media and is retrievable (albeit with a fair bit of work). Photos on the other hand I keep a local copy and 2 cloud based backups. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
wraslor 70 Posted December 7, 2015 Share Posted December 7, 2015 Storage Spaces is DREADFUL. I used it when I was running Windows Server 2012 R2 Essentials. Write performance is awful, which isn't so much of an issue really if you are using it only for media which doesn't change very often. However, if you ever add another drive, then it is unable to redistribute the data evenly across the expanded storage space, so if you let drives get too full before adding in more space then you are pretty much stuffed. I now use Stablebit Drivepool, along with Stablebit Scanner, but I don't duplicate the drives. At the end of the day it's just media and is retrievable (albeit with a fair bit of work). Photos on the other hand I keep a local copy and 2 cloud based backups. Same setup here. I've preached how terrible storage spaces is since it's inception. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ronvp 92 Posted December 7, 2015 Share Posted December 7, 2015 Hardware raid is not Storage spaces providing fault tolerance - it is your hardware... I know, I am not using storage spaces anymore. I like Raid 5 better.. much faster any very low cost vs redundancy.. when I was using storage spaces it worked great, just a little slow.. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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