On Tue, 20 Oct 2015 19:44:52 -0400, "(PeteCresswell)" wrote:

Per Char Jackson:
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.

One appeal of both of these products is that I can probably run them
under my old WHS license or one of my spare XP licenses - i.e. I don't
have to spring for another Windows 7 or 8.1 license.

True. At their core, both are just Windows-compatible programs, happy to run
on consumer versions of Windows as well as server versions. DriveBender gets
its hooks into the storage subsystem, but SnapRaid runs on top and doesn't
care about the underlying architecture.

At what level does DriveBender mirror redundant folders to different
physical drives?

When you designate a folder to be redundant, all of its contents get
mirrored to another drive. So not just files in that immediate folder, but
also any sub-folders and their contents.

Note that you won't see any hint of this mirroring in any Windows file
management tools. You'll see it in the DriveBender management GUI, though.

e.g. Suppose I have a folder called "B" with subfolders "DVDs_NetFlix",
"Streamed_HBO", "Streamed_NetFlix"... and so-forth.

And under each of those folders are hundreds of individual folders - one
for each movie....and maybe multiple subfolders per movie.

Obviously "B" is going to be huge - as in tens of TB.... and the average
movie's folder is going to be about 4 gigs.

There's more, but you get the idea....

Given redundancy for all folders, are those huge top-level folders going
to be a problem ?

Not a technical problem, but keep in mind the double disk space required. If
I were building a large storage pool today, I'd be tempted to build it on
these WD 6TB drives, just so that I wouldn't need so many. At about $190
each, they're a pretty good deal. I have no info on their longevity, though.
http://camelcamelcamel.com/Book-6TB-Hard-Drive-Backup/product/B00KU686HI?context=browse

I am looking at SnapRaid right now.... Trying to find some feature that
makes it preferable to DriveBender for my use. But, for something like
this, I think I am partial to paid applications (i.e. DriveBender) over
freebies like SnapRaid.

Understood. SnapRaid does have a competitor that costs money, but I ruled it
out long ago and don't have a link at hand. If I think of it, I'll post.

Edit: FlexRaid, I think. My gripe at the time was that program development
consisted of a single person working part time, and he would drop out of
sight for months at a time. That may have changed now so give it a chance.

Do you know anybody who uses SnapRaid ?

No one personally, just forum members over at avsforum.
http://www.avsforum.com/forum/gtsearch.php?cx=partner-pub-7865546952023728%3A4039054045&cof=FORID%3A11&ie=UT F-8&q=snapraid&sa=Search&siteurl=www.avsforum.com%2F forum%2Findex.php&ref=www.avsforum.com%2F&ss=1897j 583275j8

58 Terabytes ??? Wow....

Are you using redundancy in your implementation of DriveBender ?

Only on our digital photos, scanned docs that we think are important, and
some home movies.

How are you physically managing all those drives?

- Multiple SATA cards ?
- Some sort of backplane box ?

I use a couple of these cards:
SuperMicro AOC-SASLP-MV8 PCI-E x4 8-Port SAS/SATA

The card has a pair of SAS connectors, but using SATA breakout cable turns
each SAS connector into 4 SATA connectors, so each card adds 8 SATA ports.

I have a server case that holds 16 drives, (15x2TB for the storage pool and
the smaller 16th drive for the Win 7 OS.) The other system is a mid-tower
that holds 10 drives (a mix of 2TB and 4TB totaling 28TB, plus a smaller
drive for the Win 7 OS)

All I have right now is a large tower case and have it maxed out with 13
drives - but changing drives is a chore and I'm stuck at 13.

I feel your pain! When I bought the server case, I almost dropped another
$100 for drive hot swap capability, tool-less and without opening the case.
It would have been sweet, but that case held 24 drives and I thought it
would be overkill. I thought to myself, who needs 24 drives? Little did I
know, eh?