Newbie Questions about Drive Pool

ddejarnett · April 2013

I've been using WHS v1 for years now. I've finally decided to upgrade to 2011 and want DE capabilities. Based on all of the reviews I've seen, DrivePool seems to beat out Drive Extender. With that said, I have a couple questions:

-Has anyone had any problems using different sizes of drives? I have four 2TB drives, three 1.5TB drives, and one 1TB drive. I've seen a lot of people post that they have multiple drives of the same size and have not had problems, but I was wondering about different drive sizes.

-All of my drives are WD Green drives. Any problems with them?

-Are there any settings that I need to change when creating my drive pool or are the defaults OK?

-What are the advantages/disadvantages of hiding the drive and not assigning a drive letter?

Thanks in advance for any advice that anyone can offer!!!

David

megaman · April 2013

1. No, no problems with that. That's my current configuration.

2. Nope, none here.

3. There seems to be a bug right now that forces you to remove the backup drive from the drive pool. Also, my experience has been that DP doesn't play nice with shadow copies.

I'm not sure of the answer to #4.

May I suggest trying the demo version? It's full featured for 30 days, and definitely cemented my decision to buy.

saitoh183 · April 2013

There is no real Disadvantage to using NTFS mount points instead of drive letters unless you were planning to use those drives to install applications on...which since your putting them in your pool you wont be. Main advantage is that you dont have a limit of mount points. You can just create a folder on your C drive like

Mount

--------Disk00

--------Disk01

..etc

Then you associate your drives to each of the folders. This will not take space on your C drive and you will still have access to the drive content by going into C:\Mount\DiskXX.

Drashna · April 2013

I've used different size drives with DrivePool without issue,

As for WD Green drives. By "problems" with them, you mean other than that they are WD Green drives and all the problems associated with that? Such as head parking too often, slow spin up, poor performance, etc? I'd recommend replacing them, honestly, It' will better for you in the long run. If you like WD, get the RED drives. They're basically Green drives, with all the issues fixed, and meant for NAS devices.

There is a guide on the forum here for migrating from v1 to DrivePool. Other than that... nothing you need to change.

As for hiding the drives, organization. I'm OCD about organization. Also, if you keep adding drives, DrivePool's letter can get bumped up and cause issues.

ddejarnett · April 2013

Drashna -

Thanks for the info. What about WD Black drives? Anything good or bad with them?

David

Drashna · April 2013

I've used a Scorpio Blue in my laptop for a couple years (till it started dying), but otherwise, my experiences (both personal, and what I've seen reported) with the Blue and Black drives is that they are great drives.

Though, I'm partial to Seagate, myself.

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