On Mon, 19 Oct 2015 23:24:48 -0400, Paul wrote:

Char Jackson wrote:
On Mon, 19 Oct 2015 19:37:18 -0400, "(PeteCresswell)" wrote:

Per Paul:
Read up a bit on it first.

http://arstechnica.com/information-t...en-it-works/3/
https://helgeklein.com/blog/2012/03/...-design-flaws/
Thanks.

Not exactly deal breakers - but enough to make me start looking at
DriveBender.

DriveBender? I just wrote about that in another post. I didn't think anyone
else had even heard of it.

I can deal with almost any level of poor performance because the use is
just as a backup for my NAS box. Only runs when I do backups and I
usually just fire them up and go to bed....

The ugly part for me is drive replacement.

At its core, DriveBender is a drive pooling tool. You throw any number of
any-sized drives at it and it seamlessly combines them into a single, very
large, volume. My pools/volumes are 28TB and 30TB, respectively.

Data redundancy, however, is quite secondary. You can designate any number
of folders that you want to be redundant and DriveBender will quietly create
two copies of those folders, making sure that the two copies reside on
different physical drives. I suppose you could designate every folder to be
a redundant folder, but that halves the storage space.

With any drive pooling method, or at least with this one, keep in mind that
as your drives begin to fill up, you're limited to saving files no bigger
than the amount of space you have on a single drive. To put it another way,
files are *never* split across drives. You can remove a drive from the
DriveBender pool at any time, connect it to another PC, and read the files
from it without any problem. No special drivers or software are needed.

Here's another peek behind the scenes: with a DriveBender pool, whenever you
create a new folder, DriveBender creates that folder on each drive in the
pool. That's an intentional design decision, as they feel it's better to
create folders that might never be used than to need a folder later and not
have it when it's time to write a file.

I'm still not sure what has to happen when a drive fails - wasn't sure
under WHS either...

- Can I just replace the failed drive by swapping a new one into
it's physical location/SATA connection?

- Or do I have to have another SATA connection available at all times
to deal with adding the replacement drive first ?

If it turns out that DriveBender runs under Windows 7 and doesn't have
any bad reviews, I call it a slam dunk..... even under 8.1....

DriveBender has the capability to replace a failed drive, but data will only
be preserved if you have designated the folders on that drive to be
redundant. If yes, then there's another copy of the data on another drive,
so when you replace the failed drive, DriveBender will quietly recreate a
second copy. If the folders on the failed drive weren't designated as
redundant, then the data on the failed drive will be lost. Even so, you can
still pop out a failed drive and pop a new drive in. You will have lost any
non-redundant data, but DriveBender will immediately start using the new
drive.

I give DriveBender a thumbs up.

If you need additional data protection, SnapRaid would be my choice. I
mentioned where to get it in my other post.

Good luck and please follow up with what you decide. I'll be curious to see
which way you go.


Does it have redundancy (parity) to handle
drive failure ?

If "it" is DriveBender, then redundancy is on a 'per folder' basis, rather
than a 'per file' or 'per drive' basis. So you can get to a point where the
entire drive is redundant, but you'd do it by carefully managing your folder
redundancy.

If "it" is SnapRaid, then yes. SnapRaid can be configured to handle any
(within reason) number of simultaneous drive failures.