Need alternative to FlexRAID w/ Pooling and snapshot

Why do you need such a large drive for the liveTV buffer? Whether you use snapraid, flexraid or something else, wouldn't it just be easier to have one drive as your OS/liveTV buffer drive and then archive your recordings nightly to the pooled drive? That's what I do and I have no issues at all.

How big is your SSD drive? If it's not big enough to hand the live buffer and a a few recorded shows before they get archived to the pooled drive, it would probably be easier to buy a bigger OS drive than to try to find some pooling solution that you can use. I have a 160GB on my HTPC and it more than meets our needs. Windows 8 Storage spaces might suit you, but obviously the whole Win8 issue comes into hand.

Would DriveBender work? Not sure if that would produce the same problems or not, but I think it works in Windows 7.
Edited by ncarty97 - 9/26/12 at 12:14pm

A combo of Snap raid and liquesce might be what you're looking for.

i had the same problem with Flexraid and WMC. I eventually had to remove one of my drives from the Flexraid pool and use it as the WMC liveTV/recordedTV location.

Sucks, because now it isn't covered by the parity drive anymore if it fails.

How do you handle the nightly archiving to your pool?

I'm late to the commenting party on this, but I believe you could add most of the drive back to your storage pool by partitioning it.

There are powershell scripts that you can task schedule and move day old recordings to the pooled partition after they are a day old (or just move them manually).

I don't think you'll find a solution for real time parity protection

You just need to create an expert mode FlexRAID config instead of cruise control.

With expert mode, you can set your 7MC to record directly to the OS drive path instead of using the storage pool and then point your storage pool to the same folder. However, you couldn't use hard drive space past the 1 HD except to manually move them to another drive in the pool (and define the DVR HD as restricted so the storage pool doesn't add files to it). I would discourage this route in any setup, though. You do not want your Live TV Buffer on a snapshot parity. It will basically make your parity worthless because the buffer is constantly editing and deleting which is corrupting your snapshot.

You'd be surprised how quickly the live buffer can corrupt data. I accidentally deleted about 800GB of recordings due to moving the DVR drive to a new HTPC and pointing 7MC to the record folder but not telling the DVR to use the entire drive (it defaults to 200GB or so). So when the next recording came up, 7MC saw that it was over it's defined allowed space and deleted all the oldest recordings to make room. In the meantime, live TV was running for about 2 hours before I noticed this. When I went to use a deleted file recovery software, I could only get about 200GB of data back. That's how quickly the live TV buffer wrote all over the drive and corrupted the deleted files. This exact same scenario would play out on your snapshot parity if a drive failed and you were watching live TV before performing a snapshot update.

Only realtime RAID would work in what you are seeking, and that won't work because it won't be fast enough in writing throughput to do multiple recordings. The only setup that would be capable is hardware RAID5/6, and it isn't worth the investment.

Instead, you should look to set your DVR/Live Buffer on a drive/folder outside of your snapshot parity. If you want to parity backup your recordings, then you should use a script/program to move the files from the Recorded TV folder to your storage pool with snapshot parity. Another option is in expert mode, you can define folders for the snapshot parity to ignore (so you could set the live buffer folder to be skipped) and it won't corrupt your parity. I haven't been able to figure out how to get it to work.
Edited by jrwalte - 10/18/12 at 2:11pm

Sounds like an okay option. It comes down to preference of ignoring parity protection on a folder or completely isolating the live tv / recorded tv from the parity. There are lots of scripts supposedly, but it's not impossible to go once/week to your recorded tv folder manually hit Ctrl+A, Ctrl+X change to a storage folder and hit Ctrl+V. If the partition method is used, the on disk cut paste time is ridiculously fast. In any case you could just set it and come back later.

jrwalte, why do you mention you haven't been able to figure it out at the end of a description of how you figured it out?

I think parity protection on a live TV buffer falls into the "law of diminishing returns" When you do the math of hard drive failure probability coupled with absolute necessity of protecting the live tv buffer vs the cost and complexity it seems wise to ignore this rathole. Most live tv is repeated later or can be found again from streaming services, etc.

My point was you can include the live TV buffer in the snapshot, but define a clause in the advanced settings to ignore files and or folders. I haven't been able to figure out the proper code to place in that advanced setting to get it to ignore folders. It isn't as simple as just adding "[drive]:\[folder to ignore]".

You CAN record directly to Flexraid (including the live tv buffer), by changing it from a removable volume (of course, you still have to have flexraid installed on the same PC as WMC).

Try these steps:
Go to your raid-f/pool in the web client.
Go to Preferences and Settings.
Go to Run-Time Properties
Click the arrow by Advanced Properties.
Scroll down and change the Removable field from true to false.
Restart Flexraid.

I just downloaded Flexraid last week, so maybe my version is newer and that's why it works, but it seems to be working after changing the volume to a fixed drive. Are there any drawbacks to doing this?

I have mine set to Fixed drive as well, removable had some permission issues for me. Another thing was that i changed it from "FlexRAIDFS" to "NTFS" in one of the same advanced properties. After that, it behaves just like any other drive for me.

Besides having SnapRaid and Liquesce, are there any other alternatives?

Liquesce is very buggy at the moment.

Sorry missed this. I use the built in TV Archive that comes with WHS, but you can easily setup a task to do it as well if you don't use WHS.

Also it should be noted that in the latest version Liquesce has disabled the ability to share the drive over the network.

Local installed scratch disc ???

Move over to server after recording completed ????