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Drive pool musings

255 Views 3 Replies 4 Participants Last post by kapone, Mar 13, 2015

ajkrishock

Discussion Starter · Mar 13, 2015

All,

I recently had a 1Tb drive die on me. It was part of a 4-drive RAID 5 array that I was using for media storage in my server (Windows Home Server 2011). Anyway, I pulled the drive quickly and sent it off to Western Digital for warranty replacement It had 6 days left on the warranty (which has never happened to me before).

I have since rebuilt my RAID 5 array with 2Tb drives, and soon I'll have four 1Tb drives that I don't have a use for. I'll definitely leave them in my server, but I'm thinking of pooling them together. I would like to hear from folks who are using one of the two most popular pooling apps for Windows Home Server 2011 (Drive Bender or Stablebit Drivepool). Which do you prefer? Are there any more appealing options out there besides these two? I'd definitely want a folder duplication feature. What about the built-in Drive spanning thing that Microsoft offers? There's no duplication, but maybe there's a stand-alone program/addin for that?

Your thoughts & experiences please..

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tman247

· #2 · Mar 13, 2015

Stablebit for me. Been rock steady since I started using it. I don't think the WHS2011 version is getting much love by the developers at the moment, but it still does exactly what it's meant to do.

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StardogChampion

· #3 · Mar 13, 2015

I have StableBit DrivePool in my WHS2011 server and I never, ever need to do anything with it. It just works. I have two pools: one is "live" and one is for backup.

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kapone

· #4 · Mar 13, 2015

I have Stablebit as well, but not on WHS2011. I have it on Server 2012 R2

The performance is actually higher on 2012 than on WHS 2011 as the SMB protocol got some revisions. And really, there wasn't anything else that I was using WHS 2011 for, except for the TV Archive service, which I solved with writng a custom Windows Task on the HTPCs that moves everything to the server at night.

The one thing I do miss is the bare metal backup, but it's not that critical in my case, as I have rescue disks for every HTPC and a backup image is saved on the server anyway.

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