Just Wondering

robandcathy

I have been following the top two replacements for DE and have seen the progress Alex has made, so I'm wondering is this stable enough for a work system, or should I wait longer till more bugs are fixed, Not sure how much more needs to be done for perfection or how much longer it will take? any ideas? Obviously this is for data and no one wants to lose it, espically 6 terabytes of it. 

Shane

Executive summary: M4 has only just come out; Alex is working flat-out fixing bugs as he and the community finds them. For production use - i.e. if your job is on the line because you can't get work done while 6TB restores from backup - wait until DrivePool is stable. DrivePool is in BETA!

For the general benefit of anyone reading this, first things first: DrivePool is, at heart, raid at the file level rather than the sector level. It has many benefits over the latter, it's what DE should have been, and it's on my "must buy" list when Alex starts selling it, but its primary job is still pooling your disk space and allowing limited redundancy in case of disk failure.

It does not help if your server burns in a fire or someone/something deletes the wrong 6TB folder. That's what backups are for.

Okay, onwards. I would say DP is stable enough to keep your data. Once DP puts your files on the disk, it's standard NTFS, and exactly as reliable as that file system makes it. You can always bypass DP to read the files directly off the NTFS drives underneath at any time. Kudos to Alex for this.

What I can't say - yet - is whether DP is stable enough to be the interface to your data. Probably so, presuming the software you use for work is making standard, documented, calls. Alex is however still finding undocumented calls (e.g. the one triggered by Boxee/SAMBA that's only just recently, hopefully, been nailed), and it still has some quirks (e.g. I/O stalling while something happens with buffering, which some software isn't tolerant enough to handle) and bugs (e.g. some people are running into issues where shares disappear or scramble the permissions).

Anecdotally: I'm currently using the final M3 build on a work+personal system and latest M4 on a personal system. They're stable for me (currently), probably because both are clean WHS+DP installs (not upgrades) with nothing else running on them, I haven't messed with the default WHS shares, and my desktops tolerate the buffering quirks. I don't have the time lately to stress-test, sadly. Both systems have backups; neither has yet required those backups to be used because of DP. But I'm also only dealing with one-ish TB of work data, not six, and I won't lose my job if that data is unavailable for one day.