FlexRAID 2.0 Opinions? Thinking of going with it over UnRAID/SnapRAID - Page 9

Any opinions on this? I'm interested in this answer as well.

Another question regarding FlexRAID.

Lets say I have three 3TB drives, two of which are in a pool and one of them is the parity drive. As I understand, FlexRAID fills one drive at a time in a pool before moving onto another. So if there's a "Movies" folder in the pool and one of the drives in the pool is almost full, what happens to the "Movies" folder when I put a movie that won't fit in whatever space is left on the first drive? Will the movies folder be split in two?

1) I think that post should read, "if" your os drive fails . No different than if your os drive fails and you are on a one drive system . Your toast ! You need to make a back up of your os drive . That is sop for any computer . No exception here either .
2) If you loose the os drive you will need to start over with FR assuming you have no back up of your os drive AND you would have to manually re add all the drives back into the pool . Basically start over. If you have a back up then yes, you would pick up where u left off from the last time the os was backed up .You could make a back up of the os drive on the server . Unlikely the os drive and a data drive would fail at the same time. Make sure you register your copy of FR weather you install it right away or not . The license code expires in about 7 day's of purchase . If you register FR right away you can extend that 7 day limit . Just FYI



Understand this : FR works in a POOLED environment. When you click on "computer" inside the explorer bar of your os you will see one drive called (example only) " V Flexraid" that is the entire pool in one drive . That is where your " movies folder" is pulled from , not the individual drives inside the pool. In essence you will still have one folder called "movies" . The over flow will move to the next drive but still be seen as one in the pool .

This is one concept of FR that is tough to grasp at first . Think .... " many drives pooled into one "

I haven't done this in a while but I will make exception here ( i got flamed to many times ! )

Assassin puts out a FANTASTIC guide on Flex Raid . Hands down , no question !

http://www.assassinserver.com/

I would also urge all folks who are curious to go to the FR wiki page . There is a TON of info that will explain it in more precise detail . It truly is an amazing program and I highly recommend it

http://wiki.flexraid.com/

The forum . Be patient . This forum is slow in responding to questions and bumping your own thread is not frowned upon;)

http://forum.flexraid.com/index.php

And last but not least .... the Home Page

http://www.flexraid.com/
Edited by flocko - 10/11/12 at 4:28pm

Doesn't UnRaid have pooling too? Or something about setting up a shared folder which acts the same as pooling.

No, technically it does not.

Could you explain why what Unraid does with user shares isn't drive pooling? I see my 6 drive unraid server as a single 5.5 TB volume, while unraid automatically fills the drives using high water allocation. Would I not see the same thing if I were to use drive pooling in another program?

Drive pooling merges all of the drives into a single volume, which is what FlexRAID does. Shares are folders within each drive that are spread over the entire array but appear as a single folder that can be mapped from another PC. It appears pretty much the same way to the user but shares appear as a folder whereas the drive pool appears as a single drive. FlexRAID also allows for shares to be set up. With unRAID you can map a shared folder or an individual drive. With FlexRAID, I believe you can map the shared folder or the entire drive pool.

It sounds similar to Windows 7 Library concept - i.e. a collection of item from different drives but on the surface appear to be stored together , plus they can be mapped.

So, its fair to say Drive Pooling is slightly better implemented on FlexRAID but a similar effect can be achieved in UnRaid. So no clear winner on that one.

You'll have to determine which scenario works best for your situation. If you're building a multimedia server, either solution will work fine. If you're building a home server that contains mostly data, then drive pooling may be best suited to your needs.