When will it be safe to jump into the pool?

steen · September 2011

Tonight brand new HW will be assembled and WHS 2011 will be put on the new server. Having a WHS v1 with 5 TB data, the migration is going to take som time. Disk form the WHS v1 will have to be freed up and moved to the WHS v2 - one at the time.

In short WHS v1 will not be able to be a full backup for the WHS v2.

The migration is thus not going to start until DrivePool is reliable/stable. I guess that would be related to the designations RTM og RC?

Can you give an estimated date for the RC or RTM versions?

Am I to careful - is it safe to jump in now?

BR Steen

snake · September 2011

I'm testing M3 release version on my HP EX485 for 2 weeks and it's stable.

hellerbrewing · September 2011

Alex has stated quite a few times that you should not rely on M3 yet. Once it moves to M4, the bugs are supposed to be worked out and the improvements will be focused on performance.

dvdluvver · September 2011

I'm waiting for M4 before I begin relying on it in any way. It *probably* will be fine now, but there are still wierd bugs surfacing here and there. We're almost there!

steen · September 2011

It would be nice to have a rough indication on when M4 will be reached - 1 week, 1 month, 1quarter og 1 year from now ;-)

daveyboy37 · September 2011

Alex has stated quite a few times that you should not rely on M3 yet. Once it moves to M4, the bugs are supposed to be worked out and the improvements will be focused on performance.

Yes he has. Personally i have been trying everything i can to break it on a test system since M2. I havent managed it yet.

And yes there are apparenttly a few bugs about but many of these seem to be related to having the full server backups in the pool. Personally thats something that i never intend to do.Unless i have missed something there is still the 2TB vhd limit in WHS 2011. Therefore i use a dedicated 2TB drive purely for server backup. Im struggling to see any advantage of having the full server backup in the pool.But as i said i may have missed something. I tend to agree with Snake. Its already as stable as in needs to be in that there is no way there is gonna be any data loss. I dont even have performance issues. The absolute slowest I/O speed i have had is about 35-40M/bps. That was writing files to the pool over the network.(so yes room for improvement but for me at least, non critical.) Reading from the pool and writing to a network device im getting 90-110 M/bps. This is no different to what i get going from a non-pooled drive to the network.
:-)

JohnBraham · September 2011

I'm waiting for M4 before trying it again, M3 is really great, but like some others was only getting about 10M/bps which wasn't fast enough, the improvements in M4 (such as striping) sound fantastic and am really looking forward to it

ArthurHawkins · September 2011

I'm running M3, got a little over 10TB of data on the pool and haven't had a problem yet. Not sure where/why anyone is running into performance issues.. GB ethernet/E-Sata drives I'm averaging 60M/bps.. Works awesome, pushing BR video to 5 machines concurrently - haven't had a glitch yet..

Only thing I have run into so far is "after-the-fact" balancing of the pool.. Not an issue, but after so many years on v1 and using DriveBalancer it is a little disheartening looking at those new 3TB hard drives I just added that don't have any data on them yet..

lee1978 · September 2011

I have asked the same question about balancing new drives or even replaceong failing drives. Alex has mentioned that it may be a upgrade after the main release but I do feel it should be included now as more and more people require the feature this is what I think needs to be added.

1. The function to remove data from a faulty or old drive to the rest of the pool in a 1 step process I.e click remove drive then get the option to either copy the data to the remaining pool or just eject

2 the option when adding new or replacement drive's to be able to balance them to the rest of the pool again 1 step process I.e insert new drive select add to pool then get the option to populate/balance the drive to the pool or just leave it blank

I think drivepool is a great program but I feel the above would be a great addition and as time goes by the question keeps getting asked "can we balance new drives"

steen · September 2011

I have tested the current version and really liked what I saw. I was ready to make the big plunge tonight and start migrating the less important data.

.... well right until drive balancing was mentioned, and "Alex has mentioned that it may? be a upgrade..."

If drive balancing and drive removal is not a part of the first release, I fear that the two mentioned features is far and away.

DrTone · September 2011

So right now when you remove a drive from the pool, the data isn't copied over to the other drives in the pool?

ArthurHawkins · September 2011

Drive removal is in.. Yes, when you remove a drive from the pool, the system migrates the data to the rest of the pool.. My only question about this is whether or not if that data is balanced across the drives like it is during a fresh install..

Shane · September 2011

DP should perform its usual balance-on-write routine when removing a drive. If not, it's a bug.

JohnBraham · September 2011

@ArthurHawkins: I wish I knew why I'm getting less performance than you, all my drives are SATA3 7200rpm, shiny new MB with Intel chipset and core i5 cpu, whole network is gigabit with a fairly decent switch, still the pools run at around 10mbs, and the non-pooled about 50, I just dropped a server grade NIC in it and the non-pooled have gone up to 60-70ish, there must be something particular about my hardware or drivers DP doesn't like!

daveyboy37 · September 2011

Yep , i think there is an issue somewhere...but youre not alone. Im fortunate to be getting speeds similar to ArthurHawkins.

Going from a W7 pc (Complete with crappy Realtek Network Chip) to the pool with a 6GB files im averaging about 60 M/bps.Doing the same thing witha folder of iso files (around 70GB) im getting a minimum of 40 M/bps.

Going to a non pooled drive on the server the results are 95- 110 M/bps for the single file and 75M/bps for the folder.

My household often have 3 or 4 films on the pool playing to various devices around the house and there is never a stutter.

All that with a cheap sagem router from my isp and a Ã‚Â£25 TP-Link Gigabit switch.

It really is difficult to fathom why some people are getting such poor speeds. Surely if the fault was solely with DrivePool then EVERYONE would have slow speeds...Your theory about it being hardware or driver related is the only possible thing i can think of.

ArthurHawkins · September 2011

I've got "server" running on a sempron processor with 8gb ram and "green" hard drives 5900 rpm in sans digital hard drive enclosures hooked up on sil3132 esata cards.. so hardware wise you should be getting better speeds than me..

daveyboy37 · September 2011

Well personally... and i know that speed improvements should be coming in M4... If i saw no speed increase, im still a happy bunny. I transfer my downloads from a non-pooled drive to my duplicated pool every couple of days. As long as my streaming is good i dont really care what my write speeds are. I do feel baffled and sorry for all the guys on here who are only getting 10-20 M/bps.

lee1978 · September 2011

I found power options greatly effect transfer speed if I set the server to power save and set the Asus(mb) green utility to power save my transfer speeds will drop to around 18 to 22mb/s but if I set all to performance it jumps to 60/93mb/s sometimes power save settings are set automatically might be worth cranking it up and seeing if you get the speed increase i do

speedownsie · September 2011

I think it's critical to understand that there is a x8 difference between M/B and M/b. Incidentally m/b isn't a unit. MiB is.

Sure it can be assumed that everyone is using windows and are therefore reporting the copy speeds displayed but understanding the basics gives a good place to start to solve a problem from.

Also just to be pedantic, data doesn't move any faster the better the equipment you have, you can just move more at the same time, once this is understood it is easy to understand that the construction of a particular file, physical location on a mechanical disk and target location on a mechnical disk all play a part in the 'BANDWIDTH' available to copy/move with.

Paramount importance should be paid to the WHS OS disk. Buy the fastest SSD you can afford and keep it only for the OS, so a 160GB - 250GB will suffice.

Also i have found a marked improvement on file copy speed, by using third party copy handlers such as Teracopy and Ultracopier.

Also with Windows 7 I was found swsitching off 'Remote Differential Compression' in windows features in the program section of control panel helps alot with speed.

daveyboy37 · September 2011

Mmmmm, your comments about the ssd are interesting. when i built my WHS 2011, i actually purchased an SSD for the install. When i asked for advice on WGS i was told that an SSD is a waste of time on a WHS, cos its always on(in theory.) So i reinstalled W7 with it on my main PC. For me the dashboard in WHS 2011 is VERY sluggish at loading. Recently i have read that an SSD is a must for my movies...ie(sql Server.) Which fits in well with what you are saying.Maybe i will go down the SSD road after all. On that note is there any reason the SSD would need to be such high capacity. As far as im aware the OS will only allocate 60GB. And im pretty sure that i have seen some tweak that can be made to install on any size disc.A 60 or 64GB SSD is reasonably priced at the moment... Up from that were talking a sharp jump in cost... Im not in anyway questioning what u say, im curious to the logic of a higher capacity SSD.

lee1978 · September 2011

Yeah I have 2 64gb SSd I had 1 in my main computer and I bought 1 for the server however like u say I could not get whs11 to install on the SSd at all I even tryed a work around installed whs11 on a 160gb drive sata drive made the main server partition smaller 34gb was lowest I could go made a backup and tried to recover the backup to the SSd it won't have it I guess it has something to do with how it splits the bigger drive it is a pain I would love to get my server running on the SSd I did read somewhere that a few people have had success using drive cloning softwhere I think norton do 1 but I already wasted money on the SSd so I thought I would just cut my losses so to speak lol

speedownsie · September 2011

Fair point, i hadn't considered I was being excessive with an SSD but it makes sense.

However, since a system is only as fast as it's slowest component, and because i don't know all that much about the path data takes, i'm happier knowing any problem i do have isn't the OS HDD bottle-necking.

I didn't have any problems installing WHS 2011 on an OCZ Tech Colossus LT 250GB SSD.

Maybe i've got it backwards but i was sure you had to have minimum 160GB HDD to install WHS 2011.

Testament to how often i've re-installed WHS.

Dashboard is instant.

I'm only using mine as a media server, with off-server physical 1-1 backup, so not using all available features.

ArthurHawkins · September 2011

Haven't tried it with WHS, but you can load SBS Essentials on a 60GB SSD.. You just have to put a cfg.ini (unattended install) file on a flash drive and boot up your system..

The main section is:

[WinPE]
ConfigDisk=1
CheckReqs=0
WindowsPartitionSize=MAX

You might try that and see if it will work.. Most anything that will work on WHS will work on Essentials.. not sure if that is necessarily true the other way around..

Howdy, Stranger!

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When will it be safe to jump into the pool?

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