Stablebit Drivepool Overview - Windows Disk Drive Pooling

[@nycfpv]

Drivepool is awesome, I have been using it on my Plex server for years. The read striping with duplication is great. Best thing about drivepool, is you can just pull a drive and your files are readable on any computer, same risk as having a standalone drive

[@bruceroberts529]

When Drive Extender was removed from Windows Home Server 2011 I was busy looking for solutions to replace it. I used RAID 5 for a short while but the hard disk sizes kept growing and I had dissimilar sizes. I looked further and found Drive Bender and Drivepool. I chose Drivepool and never looked back. At one time I had more than 20 hard disks on a server. I have no idea of their business and employee size but their support has never failed me and it is very prompt. I graduated from Windows Server series years ago and just use ordinary windows as a server. I keep looking at Linux as a windows replacement but I would not have Drivepool so that is out for now. Setting up a Linux server looks to be fairly easy but researching how to do things takes a lot of time. I love Drivepool!

[@htwingnut]

Yes! I had a nice Windows Home Server setup at one point too. Drivepool is a very good program and easy to use and I love that you can use them as regular NTFS hard drives as well. I now have a NAS setup for my files, but Drivepool is an excellent option for Windows.

[@stevevuoso8411]

Great video. Was having trouble understanding all the features of the software, but this covered them very well.

[@gvilleboy352]

Great breakdown of the software. My Plex server storage is simple, but spread across multiple drive and sizes, and this software looks to solve that problem. Best of all, it won't reformat drives with existing data! I was leaning towards Storage Spaces, but I'm glad I kept looking!

[@htwingnut]

Glad you found it useful!

[@MikeGormez]

Thank you! To the point explanation. Love it.

[@BenBilesBB-box]

great demonstration , I love the simplicity of this software , think I will use it !

[@clavicus]

Thanks a lot this answered a lot of my questions.

[@marcoantonio5662]

Great overview. Thanks for the video!

[@NeilHollomanDrums]

This is a great video. I’ve been using drivepool for 3 years and love it mostly. My only issue is that when sharing a folder from the drivepool as an SMB share, then accessing that share with a Mac, the files copy and disappear immediately on the Mac side. They are still there on the actual drivepool, but it has something to do with the way drivepool updates the folder location and Mac OS only reading the lowest disk in the pool. It’s almost like Mac OS sees through the pool and doesn’t totally view it as just “one drive”

[@htwingnut]

Weird. Thanks for the feedback. I don't have access to a Mac otherwise I'd take a look.

[@daniellundin8543]

Thanks, really nice demo! Subbed

[@shawn576]

I love this program. Have it on my server and my gaming PC. You can just throw random hard drives together and make 1 big drive. You can even add SD cards or USB thumb drives. Obviously that's not ideal, but it does work. Spend the extra money and buy a copy of Scanner to integrate with it. It'll automatically remove all data from a drive when it detects errors on the drive. I've lost tons of music and porn to hard drive failure and I would rather not go through that again.

[@hat4243]

Great introduction video on Stablebit Drivepool! Really helps me to understand it. There's not really a lot of videos about it available. Would you consider doing a follow up video on how to use Snapraid with Drivepool and using a good premade script ,maybe one from github, as a batch file to schedule and automate sync and scrub functions? I don't really understand a lot about using command lines so would like an easy step-by-step visual guide on how to use Snapraid with Drivepool.

[@htwingnut]

Hi. Thanks! Yes, I'm actually making a video about SnapRAID! Thank you for your comments. Hopefully will come up in the next week or two. Sorry for slow content, lots of other stuff going on.

[@hat4243]

@@htwingnut That's great news! Looking forward to it. I'm thinking about getting Stablebit Drivepool and using SnapRaid with it so your videos will really help me set everything up.

[@spacefarerx]

Very informative video. Thanks!

[@mattecrystal6403]

super great video and examples.

[@RaphaelTsavkkoGarcia]

I'm considering using it, but now I have 6 drives I wanna pool of different sizes, from 1TB to 12TB. What I do now is that I have almost everything backed up on my 6TB drive and everything backed up on my 12TB. Even if I pool, I want the structure of folders to remain the same, each folder on the drive they are currently in. So I have music on drive G and backups on drive A and B. I want it to keep the same structure (File Placement) but using the apps ability to automatically copy everything from the folders (Duplicating). I wonder if that's possible...

[@Dalimagnus]

Edit: Answered later in the video. This video was fantastic, thank you! Can the Pool drive be network shared?

[@htwingnut]

Yes, absolutely. It can be shared like any disk or folder can.

[@cmd_f5]

Here's a fun question: What happens in a traditional Windows setup if you have more than 25 drives? As unlikely as that is, will Windows just roll to a alphanumeric pair? EG, a1:, b1: and so on? Or will Windows simply refuse to mount the drive entirely? Just thought of it and figured I'd ask. I remember messing with something like this drive pooling back about a decade ago. There was a file manager I used to use that let you construct a virtual folder based on locations of other folders. It was handled by making a text file, a file or folder path per line. You could sort by whatever you wanted and either show each folder in that sort, or lump the items into one list. I didn't find a use for it then but it was interesting. You mentioned NTFS and REFS. Possible future vid idea could be a big drive format explanation or comparison of features would be pretty awesome. I remember when I thought EXFAT was not as cool as FAT32 as a format because more things were supporting FAT32 across Win and Linux/unix systems. That is, until I ran into FAT32's 4 gb limit lol.

[@htwingnut]

Windows can only manage 26 drive letters: A thru Z. Beyond that you'd need to create mount points.

[@dailyrider2975]

That is where Drive pool cloud come into play. You have another PC with more drives but Drive pool cloud will allow you show them as one drive. As I understand it.

[@tomaszbyczek7611]

You can use drives without letters in pool. Letters are not needed. Attach one letter for pool and use this.

[@dailyrider2975]

@@tomaszbyczek7611 Removing letters with drive management is easy, I do it often for backup drives I don't want anyone screwing with. But do non-letter drives show up in drive-pool selection? Because that would be hella awesome.

[@tomaszbyczek7611]

@@dailyrider2975 Yes. When letters are removed you can add / remove drive from pool. Drive is not visible in explorer but visible for software. There is dedicated function in software to remove when not needed.

[@frankdaeran352]

Thanks, very helpful

[@MegaSunspark]

Thanks for this excellent explanation. I have a question. DrivePool assigns a drive letter to the pooled drives, but the individual drives that are members of the pool still show up in Windows under different drive letters. Can the individual drives be hidden to prevent confusion and keep the drive clutter level down?

[@htwingnut]

YES you can! By using a mount point. Go into Disk Management, right click the partition you want to hide, and click "change drive letters and paths". Click "add", select "mount in the following empty NTFS folder", click "browse" and set one up preferably in a subfolder on your C: drive. I usually put it in a folder called C:\Mount\, so name it something like C:\Mount\Data1 and click OK. Now if you go to C:\Mount\Data1 it will be just like the drive letter. Now you can go back to that same process, except in the "change drive letter and paths" dialog click the drive letter and select remove. That's it. I may do a quick video on little things like this if it helps.

[@MegaSunspark]

@@htwingnut Thank you! Yes, please do a video on it.

[@strangelman]

Great video :)

[@htwingnut]

Thanks.

[@TomoyaOkazaki13]

Is it possible to do automatic duplication?? (I download something onto an existing drive and it automatically duplicates to a drivepool) and can it duplicate everything in that drive pool onto an external SSD that isnt in a drivepool??? (this one doesnt have to be automatic, I just want the convenience of doing one click to copy stuff) and lastly, when duplicating files from drivepool to the external SSD, will it overwrite stuff or will an option to "skip existing files" pop up?? (obviously so I dont copy ALL the data everytime I duplicte stuff into the external SSD)

[@htwingnut]

This won't duplicate from anything outside the drivepool, only within the drivepool. You will need a third party app for that. FreeFileSync is a good free open source utility with a real time sync option. But if you download a file to a disk, why not just have it download it directly to the drivepool instead in a folder that will automatically duplicate?

[@TomoyaOkazaki13]

​@@htwingnut fair point but its more of just me wanting to copy stufff quickly i will admit, im very disorganized with files. so its a lot more convenient if all the files i download are duplicated into one place (drivepool), and then i can just plug in my external SSD and just copy whatever is in the drivepool

[@bensmirmusic]

Can you assign different folders for different physical drives inside one drive pool?

[@htwingnut]

Yes. From Drivepool go to Manage Pool --> Balancing --> File Placement Tab. Then select a folder and choose which disk(s) you want it to reside on. If you have duplication on you need it assigned to multiple drives depending on duplication level.

[@user-mfsc-2024]

could i create a pool with hard drives without lossing existing data files?

[@htwingnut]

Yes, absolutely. You can add the disks to the pool with existing data. Then once they are added, you have to go to each drive individually and drag you files/folders into the "poolpart" folder then it will show up in Drivepool. Otherwise they will show up as "other" data not in the pool: stablebit.com/Support/DrivePool/1.X/Manual?Section=Adding%20a%20Drive%20to%20the%20Pool

[@rdsii64]

Are the read and write speeds of the drive pool faster than a single drive?

[@htwingnut]

Read speeds can be doubled if you use file duplication. It is an option that can be enabled.

[@jjlnguess7354]

What is the maximum amount of storage allowed in a pool with this software? Thanks.

[@htwingnut]

Whatever the Windows limit is, which I believe is several petabytes (1PB = 1000TB)

[@jjlnguess7354]

@@htwingnutvery nice 👍. Also what would the performance be of say an 80tb pool for something like PLEX? Thoughts?

[@undergod1987]

Very interesting.. Similar to unraid for windows. With a twist.

[@psychomaniac189]

i want to change the allocation unit from the default to 1024k is there a way to do this or a setting so that it does it automatically when i add a drive to the pool?????

[@shawn576]

You would need to format the drive with that setting. That happens outside of drive pool. Drivepool doesn't work on a hardware level or even a partition level. It just spreads files around and it doesn't care how each drive is formatted. You can have 1 drive formatted as 512k while 1 drive is formatted as 1024k, and drivepool can use both of them together without any issue. The cool thing about drivepool not being hardware or partition level is that you can take a drivepooled drive out of that computer, put it into another computer without drivepool, and you can read all of the data on that drive.

[@st4849]

I'm confused about this file based duplication solution. So if in RAID1 every even sector in a file gets damaged on drive1 and every odd sector of the same file gets damaged on drive2 I still got the file I understand. ...but if the same happens in DrivePool, I just got two damaged files don't I? ...or how is this situation managed if the entire thing is based on just two plain files written out to two disks? Thank you.

[@htwingnut]

Hard drives contain error detection and correction. It would flag a bad file as bad and just not use it, it wouldn't write a bad file to disk 2. Even in RAID 1 it really only protects you against a failed disk, not failed sectors necessarily. Failed sectors in RAID 1 can lead to it being out of sync and then would attempt to rebuild the array or kick the known disk out of the array. With Drivepool, if a file is bad, only that file is bad, but the copy of that file is still good as long as it's not also in a corrupt sector of the hard drive, which would be very unlikely.

[@st4849]

@@htwingnut Oh, I didn't know RAID1 was so primitive. Would RAID5 do what I expect I wonder? I need to keep offloading raw video files to cold storage on an ongoing basis. So I'd buy a pair of 4TB HDDs for RAID1/DrivePool/etc... or 3x2TB HDDs in RAID5 and fill it up, put into safe storage, then buy another set of new drives. I might swap an old set back in after a few years or decades and since these raw video files are huge, I'd expect that even if the drives work, different parts of the same files could have errors. So I don't want to settle for an expensive duplicate solution that will throw both copies away instead of leveraging the fact that I still do have all sectors across the drives. What can you recommend please? (optical, tape are out for cost, speed, impracticality - only HDDs are left) Thank you.

[@timmark4190]

How is this in comparison to windows storage spaces

[@htwingnut]

Good question, could probably do a full video just on that. There are many differences, but the most significant is that Drivepool keeps disks independent and accessible that can be read from any PC like any NTFS formatted basic disk. You don't need to rebuild a pool or have all disks present to access the files on each independent disk.

[@jonskitch8082]

Can you enable shadowing with this software?

[@AntonGumiran]

is it possible to use Cloud Drive as a parity drive with drive pool for off site redundancy?

[@htwingnut]

Drivepool does not use parity, just duplication of files. Drivepool technically only works with physically attached disks. But you may be able to create a disk from CloudDrive and use it with Drivepool. Good question, I'll give it a try.

[@AntonGumiran]

@@htwingnut tried it with the free trial and it works, you just need to be clever with the pool setup and take advantage of hierarchal pools.

[@htwingnut]

@@AntonGumiran thanks for following up on that! Good to know.

[@psychomaniac189]

so your saying that if i have 40tb of storage ill need 80tb just so i dont lose my data? there is no way around this?

[@htwingnut]

Disks can and will die, so you need some form of redundancy, preferably in the form of a separate backup or two. The golden rule in data management is 3-2-1 rule: 3 copies of your data, 2 local, one remote. I like to use something like SnapRAID with Drivepool. It will use fewer disks than having an exact duplicate. Plus it has the advantage to scrub your data for errors. But even then that is not considered a backup. A backup should be another copy of your data separate from your main data, incase of data corruption, loss from some form of physical disaster like electrical damage, fire, flood, theft, or even just user error. A separate local copy will let you recover that data, and the third remote will allow you to recover from a larger local disaster or if your local backup is also corrupted for some reason.

[@psychomaniac189]

@@htwingnut I just want it setup where if a drive dies i can just replace it and then the data is recovered via the other drives. is stablebit drivepool good enough for this on windows? it will only be used for media for a plex server.

[@htwingnut]

​@@psychomaniac189 The answer, unfortunately, is not that simple. In most cases disks give some warning before they start to die as long as you are monitoring them, particularly their SMART status. If you couple DrivePool with Stablebit Scanner, once it detects a failing drive, it will evacuate the data off the failing drive to the free space in your pool, as long as there's enough free space in your pool. If you want to increase your likelihood of not losing data in the event that a disk DOES die WITHOUT warning, then you have a few options: 1. Use DrivePool pool duplication, which will require you to have double the capacity. Or you can just choose to duplicate specific folders. 2. Use SnapRAID with DrivePool which can protect up to 8 data disks (or more) using only two additional disks for parity. 3. Have an external backup. This is the case whether you use Drivepool or any other RAID or pooled management solution. In your case I would strongly consider using SnapRAID. Using two disks for parity will give you the ability to recover loss of up to two disks simultaneously.

[@yamerojones]

Why windows never built this in i'll never know.

[@rickdevous9255]

Does Drive pool work wuth USB attached drives?

[@stefansondergaard]

Yes it does.

[@tomaszbyczek7611]

I have 4 x 3.5" 10TB Seagate USB One Touch Hub with two 5TB 2,5" on each hub. Working with any problems.