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Guest asrequested

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CBers

Still don't understand why you would have any "non pool used".

 

Just checked my pool and it says 0.00Kb.

 

Just checked on the DB forums and it could be as a result of removing duplication.

 

Isn't v2.5.5.0 the latest?

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mediacowboy

Still don't understand why you would have any "non pool used".

 

Just checked my pool and it says 0.00Kb.

 

Just checked on the DB forums and it could be as a result of removing duplication.

 

Isn't v2.5.5.0 the latest?

2.5.0 is the latest stable. I think some of maybe be from the recycled bin folder on the drives. More reason to upgrade. [emoji2]
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CBers

Drive appeared but showed the same 1.14 TB issue. Lose power at work and had to leave and get everything back up and running. Came back and only had about 5 GB showing the used non pool storage. Yay.

 

Just checked my pool and it says 0.00Kb.

 

 

When I migrated my pool to the new server, I removed duplication, as it's done elsewhere, and I noticed after the first night of balancing that I had 19Gb of Non pool used, but after 2nd night, it's down to 16Gb.

 

Hopefully over the next few days that'll go down to zero.

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  • 1 month later...
CharleyVarrick

I am not using any drive pooling software for now, but I may eventually.

One question, are any one of them able to "single-handedly" manage 2 different computers?

 

On a totally unrelated subject, a couple of weeks ago I saw in one of the Hardware threads a screen capture of a Sophos monitoring software.

Problem is I can't find it back, it might have been in the 60 pages "show of your rig". I don't even remember what was the exact purpose of this, but it looked real cool!

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CBers

I am not using any drive pooling software for now, but I may eventually.

One question, are any one of them able to "single-handedly" manage 2 different computers?

 

I don't believe either DriveBender or DrivePool can do that.

 

You could have a DriveBender pool on each server and then use their "client" software to connect to either pool.

 

DriveBender does have a "sister" app called CloudXtender, that allows you to pool local and cloud storage.

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CharleyVarrick

I don't believe either DriveBender or DrivePool can do that.

 

You could have a DriveBender pool on each server and then use their "client" software to connect to either pool.

 

DriveBender does have a "sister" app called CloudXtender, that allows you to pool local and cloud storage.

2 computers on same LAN, I should have specified. Put another way, can those software work with network shares?

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Guest asrequested

2 computers on same LAN, I should have specified. Put another way, can those software work with network shares?

The software license is per computer. But if you mapped them, you could probably have a work around.

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CharleyVarrick

Another totally noob question about drive pooling.

It's been a few months since I had to add a drive, or replace a smaller drive with a larger one.

Each time I did that, I then have a week's worth of work to re-arrange my media to keep individual disk utilization within my (overly) safe parameters (less than 75%), then renames the drives accordingly, and finally have Emby forget the old library scheme and scan the new scheme and figure out what went were.

And then Kodi needs to update to what Emby's sending it's way. All in all lots of work!

 

in 2013, I had 2 movies hard drives, 1 named Movies 1900 to 2000, and the other for Movies 2000 to now

in 2015, I had 3 drives, Movies 1900 to 1994, Movies 1995 to 2005, Movies 2006 to now

late 2016, went to 4 drives, Movies 1900 to 1990, Movies 1991 to 2000, Movies 2001 to 2010, Movies 2011 to now

 

 

With drive pooling I could just assign a single Movie pool folder and they'd be all floating happily "together" in the same pool. Next time I need to add a Movie drive, it would just "blend in". Do I have this right?

Edited by jlr19
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Guest asrequested

It makes a "drive" that windows treats like any other drive. So you just add a drive to the pool and that's it. The software will rebalance as it needs to. As far as the OS is concerned, it's all one drive.

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Guest asrequested

But, In your case, you'll have a lot of files that need to be added to the pool. Once done, you'll never have to move them again.

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CharleyVarrick

Sounds good to me!

Pre-2010, I had a 4 bay NAS, a D-Link, it was the slowest piece of junk I ever used. (write speed were in kb's... :( )

I had a few Raid options available, one of which was Jbod (I think), it did merge all 4 drives into a gigantic one (gigantic at the time at least).

Those were the days!

Edited by jlr19
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CBers

DriveBender and DrivePool were born out of the demise of Disk Extender from the WHS 2011 operating system.

 

Drive Extender was a drive pooling system on the original WHS OS.

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PenkethBoy

@@jlr19

 

if the drives you are using are NTFS then with DP you can add them to the pool with data on them (will not be lost) and move the data into the pool via the poolpart directory (essentially a move within the same HDD - so very quick) no need to copy off then back or anything like that.

 

You can control DP on another machine (assuming both have it installed - two licences) but not combined as a pool. You could use iSCSI to have "local" drives from your remote server = but this gets complicated and if the remote machine goes offline.......

 

A new DP feature in beta is the ability to have Pool A and Pool B as Pool C with or without duplication (i.e. a pool of pools :) ) - as i understand it the Pool A and Pool B need to be on the same machine - its only been available for a few days so it probably needs a bit of maturity needed.

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CharleyVarrick

@@PenkethBoy

good to know, not quite ready to take the pool "plunge" just yet. ;)

I'll keep an eye on it for sure, though!

Edited by jlr19
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Wilky13

I am not using any drive pooling software for now, but I may eventually.

One question, are any one of them able to "single-handedly" manage 2 different computers?

 

On a totally unrelated subject, a couple of weeks ago I saw in one of the Hardware threads a screen capture of a Sophos monitoring software.

Problem is I can't find it back, it might have been in the 60 pages "show of your rig". I don't even remember what was the exact purpose of this, but it looked real cool!

Check into FlexRAID tRAID. It uses a service and then a separate GUI to manage the raid services. I believe the GUI can manage several different software raid volumes, perhaps on different PCs.

 

I used FlexRAID over file system at first which was basically a snapshot software raid. But then a few years back they came out with transparent raid (tRAID) which is realtime software raid.

 

It also does drive pooling which is nice. It has options for SSD cacheing and the such like drive bender and stable bit.

 

I was about to ditch FlexRAID last fall because it hadn't been updated in a while and it didn't play well with my macs running OS X, but the developer put out a beta last fall which made it work with macs file fork system, so it's working great now.

 

It's more expensive than DB and SB, but works great on my HTPC.

 

 

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

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CharleyVarrick

But, In your case, you'll have a lot of files that need to be added to the pool. Once done, you'll never have to move them again.

 

Trying to get that thru my thick skull.

So my movies would be scattered in 4 or 5 different drives.

1) Is the structure similar to present one (without pooling; movie folder (2017)/movie file (2017) and accompanying nfo+arts files

Put another way, it doesn't scatter respective content of a movie folder (?)

2) When one of those 4 or 5 drives fail, how do I know it's specific content, as "windows treats them all as 1 big drive"

2a) Does Drive pooling require Raid (in one flavor or another)

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Swynol

1. structure will be what ever you want it. So i have 12 Drives in a Pool but in windows it only sees one drive which is 30TB. On the one drive i have folders for movies, tv, pictures etc. The contents are spread over all the drives. so say i have Movies/A/Avengers/... Avengers.MP4 (is on HDD1), avengers.jpg (is on HDD2), backdrop.jpg (is on HDD8) so is scatters them.

 

2. You can still see each drive individually if you want, theres a hidden folder on it with all the contents. just add a drive letter to the hard drive and you can see the individual drive. 

 

2a. No raid with the drivepool. you can setup duplication if you want. with duplication on each file is stored on 2 or more HDDs. so if one HDD fails the data is still accessible as its stored on another drive. you can then install a new HDD and let drivepool rebuild the duplication.

 

If you remove a good hard drive from the machine and install it in another machine you will see all the data on it as its store as NTFS. where as with Raid if you remove it from the machine its no good in any other machine.  

 

Hopefully these screenshots may help.

 

Here you can see that i have added a drive letter to each of my Hard Drives which are in my Pool. Media Z:/ is my Pool drive.

 

590af904733c4_pool.jpg

 

 

Here is HDD-7. you can see the hidden pool folder.

 

 

590af94839298_pool1.jpg

 

 

And again HDD-7, you can see the folder Tree on this particular HDD for the film Avengers Assemble it only has the nfo file. the other files are scattered across my other HDDs.

 

590af96956799_pool2.jpg

 

And then if i look at my DrivePool (Media Z:) i see all the files that are scattered across the drives

 

 

iPtWQcZ.jpg

Edited by Swynol
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CharleyVarrick

1. structure will be what ever you want it. So i have 12 Drives in a Pool but in windows it only sees one drive which is 30TB. On the one drive i have folders for movies, tv, pictures etc. The contents are spread over all the drives. so say i have Movies/A/Avengers/... Avengers.MP4 (is on HDD1), avengers.jpg (is on HDD2), backdrop.jpg (is on HDD8) so is scatters them.

About this specifically, even though Avengers data (mp4, nfo, jpg) is scattered on many drives, from your Media-Z drive, when you click-open the Avengers folder, all the Avengers related files do show up within this folder (?).

Edited by jlr19
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CBers

About this specifically, even though Avengers data (mp4, nfo, jpg) is scattered on many drives, when you click-open the Avengers folder, all the Avengers related files do show up within this folder (?).

Yes they will. It might take a while to enumerate them though, depending on how many physical disks they are spread over.

 

If I remember correctly with DriveBender, the lowest nested folder is always kept on the same physical disk in the pool.

 

I need to confirm that though.

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Swynol

About this specifically, even though Avengers data (mp4, nfo, jpg) is scattered on many drives, from your Media-Z drive, when you click-open the Avengers folder, all the Avengers related files do show up within this folder (?).

ye, my last screen shot on the post above shows my Drivepool Drive. All the files are visible as you would expect if it was a standard hard drive

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Swynol

Yes they will. It might take a while to enumerate them though, depending on how many physical disks they are spread over.

 

If I remember correctly with DriveBender, the lowest nested folder is always kept on the same physical disk in the pool.

 

I need to confirm that though.

 

ye i wish drivepool would keep the lowest nested folder on the same disk, makes maintenance easier.

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Guest asrequested

To simply it, you can remove the drive letters on the poolpart drives, and they won't be seen in explorer. You'll just have the pools.

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CharleyVarrick

Thank you to everyone for the detailed and pertinent answers.

One question remains for me with drive pooling. What happens to data when a drive suddenly goes south?

 

Right now, if one of my lettered drive dies, I know exactly was was on it. I put in a new drive, and copy to it my last daily backup.

With drive pooling, how does one know what exact files they've lost? I believe the data is being balanced out over the other drives pool all the time.

 

I'm also wondering how you backup a pool of drive, as if the data is constantly being moved over, the backup needs to mirror it. Wouldn't that be a bandwidth hog?

Edited by jlr19
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Guest asrequested

In my case I have file duplication enabled. So I have two copies of the file on two drives. If I lose one drive, no data is lost. Just replace the drive and let it rebalance. This also allows me to use striping, which I do.

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Happy2Play

 

I'm also wondering how you backup a pool of drive, as if the data is constantly being moved over, the backup needs to mirror it. Wouldn't that be a bandwidth hog?

Depending on your backup process are you backuping up data or drives. 

 

If you use duplication then you will always have x copies of the media you have selectioned for duplication across your drives.

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