A second pool?

daveyboy37

Hey Alex, awesome work so far.

 I was just wondering, do you ever see in the future, the possibility to create more than one pool. I only ask because as you probably notice from the forums lots of people are using DrivePool mainly to aggregate their HD Movie collections. For me at least the ultimate would be to be able to store my movies on one pool and be able to keep the other (almost certainly lower volume) default folders on a separate pool. I know several pools are currently possible in DriveBender, but i do appreciate that DB may be written a totally different way.

 Judging by forums at HSS and WGS i think WHS2011 users are tinkerers by nature. Reinstalls for hardware upgrades, reorganising files and folders cos youve just bought another 2 X 3TB hard drives and suddenly decided that you now really do have the volume capacity to duplicate your 8TB of HD Movies. Or even reinstalling cos youre bored one Sunday afternoon. I think the ability to create that secondary pool would be massive for lots of us. Anyway maybe its something that could be added as a premium feature. Personally i would have no problem at all paying extra. Or maybe its just not gonna be doable at all, in which case i understand.

 By the way, i always feel progress can be judged by reaction and comments. So on that basis that the forums are pretty quiet recently, even after an update is released, shows that you have a winning product. I really hope that when DrivePool for WHS 2011 is finished, you push ahead with ability to use it on any OS. WHS users are a small relatively small group.Your product deserves a much wider audience.

 

:-)

Shane

Seconded.

daveboy37 writes, "For me at least the ultimate would be to be able to store my movies on one pool and be able to keep the other (almost certainly lower volume) default folders on a separate pool."

As I see it the two main advantages of multiple pools are:

(a) optimising performance - e.g. if set A has heavy random access (e.g. db/docs/pics) while set B has heavy sustained transfers (e.g. music/video), ideally A and B will never be located on the same disk(s). Multiple pools allow this.

(b) optimising redundancy - if you wish to backup your data without worrying about individual disk capacities, pooling is a necessity. Multiple pools allow this. In other words, JBOD-style backups.

The alternative to adding multiple pools is to add the ability to configure specific shares to use a subset of the disks in the pool. I think the former is more in line with the "keep it simple for the end-users" philosophy of DrivePool. Also, it allows tricks like having intersecting pools (two or more pools with one or more common disks) for the more advanced users.

daveyboy37

Shane writes ,(a) optimising performance - e.g. if set A has heavy random access (e.g. db/docs/pics) while set B has heavy sustained transfers (e.g. music/video), ideally A and B will never be located on the same disk(s). Multiple pools allow this.

 

Thanx for the agreement. I hadnt even thought about things from a performance point of view, but yeah the advantages are so obvious.

 

Shane writes, "The alternative to adding multiple pools is to add the ability to configure specific shares to use a subset of the disks in the pool."

 

This part would actually probably fill my needs but i agree. Serarate pools would be better.

 

 

Alex

This would be another post-1.0 possible feature. I guess we can vote on it once 1.0 is out. I like the idea of having the flexibility to assign which drives may be used for a particular folder instead of forming outright different pools.

For example, 

Videos = Drives 1, 2, 3 ; Documents = Drives 3, 4, 5

You can even have a pool set profile, such as:

Fast = Drives 1, 2, 3

Slow = Drive 3, 4, 5

And then instead of assigning drives to a folder, you can assign a pool set  to a folder:

Videos = Fast

Documents = Slow

All of this needs to be well hidden from the average user so as not to clutter up the UI

daveyboy37

Thats brilliant news Alex... Just the fact that its gonna be possible is good enough for me!

DreNL

Well I would like more the idea of a combination of these ideas Alex. Being able to make different pools AND assigning disks to that pool. And if you could implement even a pool set on that pool, you would make my day. Would be a good add-in. Not for common use, but as an extra (of course for a price). I would pay for this.

JazJon

For me, I'd like to see second pool that can be easily ejected-removed/reactivated-attached as needed.     My secondary 5 hard drive array is only used for backups.   It would be nice if I could have this 5 hard drive system turned into a removable device.   That way I could easily backup my other massive collection without having to manually split things up to single drives until it fits.  (very sloppy/pain for me right now)