Hi, i am about to set up a windows server, and owuld prefer to use on of the drive tools listed above, this is because i like the idea of only having certain folders duplicated. Drivepool can set the duplciation levels to much higher than just x2. Software solutions like flexraid and snapraid will be slower since data isnt striped, but you can add. This tends to equalize the amount of free space across all the disks in the pool. Flexraid s storage pooling technology allows you to turn independant hard drives of various sizes, makes, and models into a storage pool, even if they already contain data. A word of caution, i too have a large pool, 27 drives, and recently moved from drive bender to drivepool. Over the years people have told us that they love our products and our customer support. I wanted to be sure i understand the repair process completely before starting, so i installed 2012r2 in a virtualbox machine and gave it six 5gb drives 5 for data and 1 parity. The parity drive is basically a checksum of each drives clusters. My intention is to gradually replace each lower capacity drive starting in around 9 months budget restricted until then however i would prefer to not waste drives which are still perfectly functional so would rather.
If youd like to perform a manual update, just download the setup exe from this web site and follow the installation instructions above. Last month volunteers on rseedboxes, rdatahoarder, across reddit, and around the world joined together to secure and preserve 2. Yes, you can use multiple disks with the ssd optimizer in drivepool. I spend enough time fixing pcs during the day that i dont want to mess around with my pc. Been waiting for this and really interested in trying this one out and migrating my raidf flexraid arary to it in the future possibly.
Drivepool requires that you install a plugin ordered file placement to have full controll of file placement. One of the reoccurring issues torrent users face when downloading to a flexraid backed storage pool is the issue of downloads sometimes timing out. Current flexraid pooling only user looking for an alternative. Ltt storage rankings servers and nas linus tech tips. May 04, 20 thought i would also mention that flexraid s parity protection will also work with drive bender and drivepool. A modified version of the linux reiserfs filesystem with realtime redundancy. Flexraid is a highly scalable and smart storage system that turns independent hard drives of various. For automatic updates, once an update is found you will get a notification bubble in the system tray indicating that a new version is available. Just a note to say a huge thanks from a very satisfied customer and longterm user of both stablebit drivepool and stablebit scanner. Why having a nas is better than a htpc all in one home. So far this has worked flawlessly except storage spaces has no way of checking health or getting automated alerts about drive health. It just balances data between them so that two copies are on different drives somewhere in the pool. Flexraid this is what im inclining atm, mostly out of a a lot of friend had good experience, seems also a very popluar choice for avsforums for a pure media server. In this video i show how to setup snapraid and drivepool to make a large volume with parity backup for storing files.
A opensourced flexraid seems like the best comparison. The outpour of support for the project still leaves me in total awe. It would be great if i could get a good opinion from some people on which one i should use. What worries me is development, the flexraid team seems to be putting a lot of effort into nzfs. Want to make the move from flexraidf to drivepool windows. And of course, also talk about those builds, ask their owners questions. As its marketed looks like it would be perfect for a lower power media server where the files are numerous but never change. With drivepool, you only lose what was one the disks. Additionally, if a raid5 array loses two disk, you lose everything in the array. My flexraid setup had a single share comprised of multiple directories. I couldnt get it to update properly before my trial expired which sent me to search for another solution. The storage thread raid, zfs, btrfs, unraid, flexraid.
Inside the archive there is crack folder wich contains everything you need to crack the software. Using stablebit drivepool and flexraid for parity and drive pooling. Server 2012 r2 disk storage pooling hdd sleep which software. I stumbled across flexraid just after i posted and it does indeed look ideal theyve also answered my post on there forums, settling my nerves and told me exactly how to setup my disks. When i reboot my windows machine my flexraid storage pool drive letter does not automatically appear. Drivepool is nice because it doesnt same sizetype or even remotely similar drives. Drivein monsterama 3 hours and 23 minutes movie 2016 when something on the drivein circuit is a smash hit, youve gotta move fast with a sequel.
Complete overview of installing flexraid in windows 7 ben. How to setup snapraid and drivepool in windows youtube. Snapraid is only one of the available not standard raid solutions for disk arrays the best known others are. A few weeks ago, i bought a 16gb flash drive for super cheap. Drivepool is file based, not block based like raid. Mar 31, 2011 hi pattyclub, make sure that you have permissions to write to that particular external drive or directory. To check this, open a new finder window and select the external hdd. Stablebit drivepool alternatives and similar software. This guide has been written for ubuntu lucid lynx 10.
Stablebit drivepool uses a custom written filesystem that was designed exclusively for file pooling purposes, and that filesystem does all of the. Ive been playing with drivepool snapraid in a vm in preperation for a migration from flexraid on win7 to drivepool snapraid on server 2012r2. Although you cant select the pool drive for backup directly, because drivepool stores all of your files as standard ntfs files on each disk that is part of the pool, you can simply select the pool parts for backup. Install and configure drivepool install ordered file placement. Drive bender, stable bit or flexraid for pooling drives. The final result was not great, it seems that drivepool does not handle large pools as well as drive bender, for me performance was very much reduced. Im looking for some advice on the best way to allocate files to drives. Stablebit drivepool or stablebit drivepoolflexraid raid. This is all cobbled together out of old hardware and has been serving me fairly well over the past year. Here is an older comparison about the differences between flexraid raidf which a lot of you are probably familar with raid over filesystem and the new traid transparent raid.
Right now it might be okay to just have a 2tb drive in your htpc, but sooner or later you will want to separate the two. Os windows 10 is running on a seperate 500gb drive. Snapraid is a free software application released with the gplv3 license. I really need to figure out whether i am staying with flex or moving to stablebit. You can tweak things such as os caching, tcq, etc that speed it up a little think 33 to 35mb per sec but still pretty slow. Stablebit drivepool is a state of the art pooling solution. I found documentation that explains steps on how to make a pool autostart, but i. I found documentation that explains steps on how to make a pool autostart, but i think it may be for version 1. The main one is that if a disk fails, and you havent recently synced, you may be unable to do a complete recover. Allows you to create a large pool with any number and any sized disks. A state of the art disk pooling application with file duplication. You have greater flexibility and can improve capacity efficiencyetc. Flexraid allows pooling, drive monitoring and the option to set up a landing disk. And now i have a few questions and hope i will find.
Stablebit drivepool does emulate a 2 tb virtual hard drive, and it will show up under disk management in windows, but its mostly empty. Drivepool forces you to put files in a folder instead of root level if you want to manually control file location. By default, stablebit drivepool always places new files onto the disk with the most free space. Looking to move off unraid alternative bulk storage os. My server is running windows server 2008r2 and im using flexraid to. Obviously this softwarebased solution isnt right for everyone, but it seems to me that for most of the common home server workloads serving media files and acting as backupcold storage space, its a better solution than raid. The solution is also perfect for data protection and data recovery. Drive extender update 2014 drive bender, stablebit. Flexraid also lets you add as many ppu parity protection units as you want. I think for me, given the horror stories on the net for storage pools, the thing that scares me the most, is that should anything go wrong there doesnt seem to be a way to access the data at. Coming from flexraid page 2 presales support unraid. More specifically, you may be unable to recover up to the. Drives are added in seconds, without having to format or forcing the disk to be used solely for the pool. All of the core pooling work is done in the kernel filesystem.
To better protect your privacy we provide this notice explaining our online information practices. The whole setup takes a bit of time to set up properly and there is a bit of learning curve with snapraid configuration file, but once its up, it works like a charm. Snapraid is in between a raid and a backup program trying to get the best benefits of them. I played a bit with flexraid before i moved to drivepool for my extender. If you have the money to buy all your drives up front, the go with a raid6 if you dont need what drivepool offers. Files are stored on normal ntfs volumes, so you can recover your data on any system.
Ive been running a win10 box as a server, but i needed a storage upgrade and more functionality from it. There wasnt anything to misdiagnose, flex raid and drive pool store the files in a way. Aug 30, 2015 for people who are constantly on the go, it can be quite convenient to download torrents remotely. Stablebit drivepool or stablebit drivepoolflexraid raidf parity. Flexraid s parity protection and storage pooling are an integrated solution but they are also available as separate products. Ive been using drivepool on my whs2011 box for a couple of years now, and the best thing i can say about it is that it just works. As the title says, drivepool shows 1tb too much of other files.
I think one issue you may have with the ssd caching in drivepool is that you cant use it with ordered file placement, so you end up with files just sprinkled across your disks with the most space, rather than grouped together on the underlying disks. Sep 09, 2015 one of the reoccurring issues torrent users face when downloading to a flexraid backed storage pool is the issue of downloads sometimes timing out. Its also easy to remove or add them without being destructive to the pool. And i can see other data on pretty much every disk in the dp ui, which varies from 200mb to 25. I have a windows job that runs every midnight to bring parity up to date.
Using a flash drive to seed torrents phoronix forums. The main share was titled media with individual directories for bluray, 3d, uhd, tv shows, dvd, music etc. At first i got frustrated the way sickbeard and torrent with flexraid. All your data is hashed to ensure data integrity and to avoid silent corruption. The service enables users to download torrents directly to their. Like an all in one piece of software thats easy to use and supported well by its developer who has a vested interest in its success. Moving your hdds out of your htpc and into a nas that you can throw into a. Look at either data duplication drivepool or parity solutions that work at the file level your data stays readable snapraid and flexraid both do this well, snapraid is free and highly regarded.
Then, the other day i had the idea of using my flash drive to seed torrents, so that my harddrive doesnt have to take the stress of reading and writing. Raid, unraid, no raid, storage spaces, drive bender. Although it also has some limitations that you should consider before using it. Less complication and most importantly, it allows you to use drives of varying sizes which most home users have a mix of. Donations are spent on stuffs related to snapraid development like to. Get answers to your questions in our photography forums.
Flexraid is the netgear version of raid for expertsgeeks. Former volume not mounted with external drive unattachd. You can add drives already in use and of different sizes to the array and only the drive with the file on it spins up during reads. I find all of them work quite well and if you have multiple disks, they are all fantastic tools. Drivebender announcement that development is endingor not. Stablebit drivepool comes with an automatic update feature.
The remaining drives are used as iscsi targets and one 2tb drive is for active torrents and usenet downloads uploads. Split stablebit drivepool setup info software discussion. I have been using flexraid for drive pooling for over 3 years and. One complaint i have is speed, it is slow writing to the disk in stock form im getting 2030 mbs per sec. I dont have any experience with flexraid or drive bender but ive read that drive bender seems to be more complicated to manage than drivepool. This is the older version of stablebit drivepool that was specifically designed for the windows home server 2011. This topic is now archived and is closed to further replies. It is the way to protect and recover their data from any disk failures. Clearly flexraid f can offer parity protection and pooling in one, and it seems like drivepool provides more data protection than flexraid in many ways once you setup duplicated folders. Drivepoolbender alternatives with parity protection.
Is it possible to restore to a folder on an existing drive or the drivepool. Thousands of people around the world joined our seeding effort donating bandwidth, storage. I dont think this last feature is unique to drive bender it seems like i read that drivepool works the same way. If you want that bump in read speed ala raid 0 or 10, you may consider storage spaces but run the risks of possible complete data loss if the array degrades beyond parity vs. So i was pretty set on unraid for my server upgrade with 4860tb of data. Thinking of moving from flexraid to snapraid anandtech. Looking to get as much space, as well as a 1 disk redundancy. X can also run on the windows home server 2011 and newer.
I find drivebender and drivepool about equal biggest difference is the. You can get one of those 5in3 drive cages to add more disks in limited storage bays. Drive extender update 2014 drive bender, stablebit drivepool, storage spaces home server show 251. Ive had stablebit drivepool running on a whs 2011 box for about 8 months and its been rock solid. My current setup is a windows 2008 server with a stablebit drivepool w scanner and a freenas server for backup. Apr 02, 2014 having a network attached storage nas device dedicated solely to serving up your media is much better than just throwing a bunch of hard drives in a htpc. Stablebit the home of stablebit clouddrive, stablebit. The pool in flexraid protects network deleted files. Snapraid is mainly targeted for a home media center, with a lot of big files that rarely change beside the ability to recover from disk failures, other features of snapraid are. Flexraid is a solution for home and commercial networking system for unifying and organizing the data of the system.
Flexraid s lack of speedperformance but only losing data on the individual drives if the array degrades beyond parity. Flexraid licensing is a pita to deal with, and the dev often disappears for months at a time. I need to do all the normal stuff data storage, sonarr, radarr, plex, etc. Nov 29, 20 page 1 of 3 a lot of questions in regards to. You could do the same thing by combining stablebit drivepool and snapraid, but the flexraid route is simpler. Stablebit drivepool stablebit the home of stablebit.
It wont be listed into the pool, until you move it there. So if you have a lot of disks, you will still retain at least some of the data. Why having a nas is better than a htpc all in one home media. I dont see entire files are always stored on a single disk as a con myself, but maybe it is for users who work with files larger their smallest drive. Flexraid is another i am definitely considering besides drivepool. If you want to show your appreciation, you can donate, or you can star it on github. Page 2 introduction at netgear we have received a number of questions regarding xraid2 and flexraid. The newest versions of drivepool also have integration with stablebit scanner, which is nice. Flexraid could possibly give me back the lost speed with the landing disk but isnt ideal since older files wont enjoy that benefit. The kernel transparent raid engine has no concept of files and only deals with storage devices. Both drivebender and stablebit drivepool support dupilcation of allselected content and some run snapraid or flexraid at the same time. I cant download torrent file with folder to external hard. Log raid a very special topic in transparent raid is the raid migration log configuration raid type or log raid. Flexraid is the most difficult to use, but gives you pairty redundancy doesnt chew up 50% of your disk with the mirror approaches of the others.
I have to open flexraid, open the pool and click the publish restart button then it appears. Adding it to the pool does not destroy anything on it. The issue is more of a torrent issue in how it sees and uses the available space in a storage pool. It stores parity information of your data and it recovers from up to six disk failures. Flexraid will make you able to merge all of your drives into a single place. Since a duplicated folder exists on 2 drives at once, and is written that way in realtime, you wont lose any data if a drive fails.