Dominant primary drive in pool

GWTony · April 2012

Is there a way to sway Drive pool to use my faster drives? (like add fast drive first, Lower letter is first?)

The reason I ask is, I have 2 faster drives on a 6Gb/s
controller, while there is one drive (so far) on the slower 3Gb/s controller,
and while copying data (over the network) the transfer rate according to windows was 6 to 7 MB/second,
while I normally show 11 MB/sec. I am using duplication, but not for the Ã¢â‚¬Å“tempÃ¢â‚¬Â
folder I was sending files to

The slower drive is F:, while the others are G and H, I changed
the letters to see if it would matter to Drive Pool and the next transfer was
at 9.6 MB/s.

PS, I changed the letters and lost no data at all, before doing
this on the real server, I used my VM to test Drive pool in changing letters.
Using Ver. 5974 Registered / activated.

Thanks in advance!

Shane · April 2012

It's an interesting result, since DrivePool doesn't actually need its pooled drives to have any drive letters at all.

The numbers you give do have me curious as to whether your network is 10/100 or gigabit, since they're around what I'd expect for the former, and you should get a big boost to your rate by changing over to a gigabit network.

GWTony · April 2012

Shane, you're right about my transfer speeds! I was not paying attention to those numbers and after looking my router is only 10/100. I thought this router was the gagabit speed and after checking, it's not.

However, you just taught me something valuable here, I can go into Server manager and remove the drive letters! Yes, I just tried this in my virtual test machine and there was data on the pooled drive, removed the letters of the participating drives, and there was no data loss! The real server is using some of the WHS created folders, and I was going to leave it that way to have the advantage of knowing what drive the data is on.

I built the server before installing Drive Pool and the letters were assigned during their install, also I was not sure which software brand I was going to buy. Drive Pool wins for many more reasons than before! Now I just have to trust it more and put all my data in the pool with some duplication.... who needs backup that way?

Thanks so much for the tip here!

Shane · April 2012

You're welcome.

And though I'm presuming you're being humorous, I'll still note duplication is redundancy, not backup.

Here's a simple analogy:

* data redundancy - your cargo plane has more engines than it needs to fly.

* data backup - you have two cargo planes (or at least a cargo parachute).

saitoh183 · April 2012

Here's a simple analogy:
* data redundancy - your cargo plane has more engines than it needs to fly.
* data backup - you have two cargo planes (or at least a cargo parachute).

I like thats

GWTony · April 2012

Now I really feel stupidÃ¢â‚¬Â¦X_X. Today I went out and bought a new
router (netgear 600N) and this time I paid attention to the actual speeds. WOW
what a difference in wired transfer speeds! I build this sever 2 weeks ago as
un upgrade from WHS V1,V1 was so reliable that I did not want to dismantle it
before getting WHS2011 fully operational. After getting WHS2011 working, the
data transfer took place over the network, as you could imagine I wasted a lot
of time! :-S

Ok now that we really have the Gigabit network / data
transfer speed out of the way, I consider the drive pool file duplication as a
sort of backup for my files, but not the computers.

My analogy would be:

2 Cargo planes flying with the same cargo, and I only need the cargo from one of the planes. If one crashes, the surviving plane will still
deliver the cargo.

Looks like IÃ¢â‚¬â„¢m going to be learning more, and I need to, as
IÃ¢â‚¬â„¢m still not sure how to get the most out of my server. :-?

Shane · April 2012

Yes, if one crashes from internal failure, the other still delivers the cargo. But if the cause is *external*, your plane B will happily follow your plane A into oblivion. If you (or a virus) clicks delete instead of save, it takes no humanly-appreciable time for Drivepool to send that command to two hard drives instead of one.

Drivepool 1.0 is wonderful at what it does: aggregate your drives as a single virtual storage space, and protect that storage space against most failure modes of at least any one physical drive involved. It does not, by itself, provide an *independent* copy of your data.

Apologies for the pedantry; I'm an old-school IT guy (not quite a dino, I never got to play with punch tape). Guess I need to revise that analogy.

robandcathy · April 2012

so can drive pool backup? and whats the difference seems both terms mean that there are 2 copies, aka a backup. If it could read from another drive in place of a failed one, would this not be considered a backup. I really would like to know the difference? Maybe I'm dumb. I understand the fact that it would render files on the fly in case something would go wrong. A backup I'm assuming would need to transfer back the files? Is it worth it to back up? since there are 2 copies anyhow? what would benefit me more redundancy or a backup? I have 14 tera bytes across 7 drives about 6terabytes used.I'm looking for data protection, even though I have a online backup servce, I keep my movies off it or server would run for weeks transferring
.

Shane · April 2012

TL,DR: Drivepool "backs up" against drive failure (and does that very well), not viruses or user error.

It all depends what we choose to mean by "backup". English being the kind of language that grabs other languages, drags them into alleys and beats them up for loose change, some words have different meanings for different people. Ask a soldier if they've got backup and I doubt they'll be thinking about hard drives.

To many computer users, a backup is a spare copy, regardless of how it gets there. In that sense, DrivePool's duplication feature provides a backup against drive failure. Your brand new 2TB drive makes a horrible noise then spits out sparks and dies? No problem, thanks to Drivepool you have a "backup" and you haven't lost your files, including the one you saved only five seconds earlier - assuming the server keeps going, you haven't even lost access to them!

But it does not provide a defence against you accidentally pressing the delete button instead of the save button. To an IT specialist, this is the difference between redundancy (the data remains available despite a problem) and backup (the data is no longer available but can be put back to how it was).

So since I'm an IT technician - someone who gets called when a customer accidentally deletes their project - I think of DrivePool as providing redundancy, not backup.

There are pros and cons to both approaches, which is why (if you've got the money and the files are important enough to you) you do both.

Shane · April 2012

Q: What would benefit me more redundancy or a backup?

A: It depends on your needs. If your dominant concern is drive failure, I'd say redundancy is better, while if your dominant concern is user error or malware, I'd say backup is better. If it's a roughly even mix, I'd probably go for backup over redundancy. If your dominant concern is natural or criminal disaster, well, that's when you need offsite backup locations / online backup services.

Personally I think DrivePool has a lot of potential in this regard; it currently handles redundancy quite well, but its design is such that it can be further improved in this area (e.g. additional redundancy levels, slow/fast sets, etc) and to offer backup features as well (e.g. versioning, offlining), if enough demand is shown for a DrivePool "2.0".

And regardless, DrivePool is also compatible with a variety of third-party backup software.

GWTony · April 2012

Now I understandÃ¢â‚¬Â¦ DrivePool has Live data that is exposed,
where as a backup is preserved data. Shane, thank you for making this so clear and easy
to understand. =D> For me personally, I have some documents, quicken files, and
photos that are very important for me and those are duplicated among 3
computers and the server along with actual backups. Lately I have been
converting movies which take up much more data, and I do not included them in
the Ã¢â‚¬Å“backupsÃ¢â‚¬Â of my client computers, actually the movies are on second drives
in the clients and I just put them in the drive pool. With the limit of 2tb
backup size IÃ¢â‚¬â„¢ve had to rethink how I do my backups, and for now those movies
are Ã¢â‚¬Å“Drive PoolÃ¢â‚¬Â protected, whereas my computerÃ¢â‚¬â„¢s system drive, and the files
stated above are truly Ã¢â‚¬Å“backed upÃ¢â‚¬Â

I have learned things about hardware from some of my other
IT friends, this is why I have WHS 2011, I replace any drive when it gets 3yrs
old, and during this project I actually built and entirely new system, and scrapped out the WHS v1. Now after this
build and reading some of these forums, I have been rethinking how to use WHS
2011 to get the most for my money.

Currently I have a hidden folder that synchronizes my
documents from all the computers to the server, I still do not know how to
share my pictures (they are in a photoshop elements database on only one of the
clients) and I have some movies, along with plenty of music that gets played
through the Xbox 360, and finally it holds backups of the clients, but only the
system drives, not FULL backups.

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Dominant primary drive in pool

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