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Drive Extender replacement due out in 2012. It's called Storage Spaces.

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superboyac:
@SB - I don't know of any general purpose pooled storage system that recommends you add and remove drives as a matter of course. That's more what external USB drives are intended to be used for.

Because these systems need to compute parity data or take snapshots to work their magic, arbitrarily pulling drives out isn't a good idea - even if you can get away with it. Nor is it going to work they way you'd want it to since the minute a drive disappears from the pool, the system will begin reconstructing the missing disk's files on the drives that are still installed. The other thing is the pool manager uses all the resources in the pool. So there's usually no telling on which disk a specific file or directory is located. It could be spread over several physical drives.
 8)
-40hz (July 17, 2012, 12:26 PM)
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What do you recommend as the best way for me to create an enormous 10+ drive pooled system?  I'm trying to avoid RAID because I don't really understand it, and I have disks of all different sizes and models.

How about this?  Do you see anything wrong with this setup:
--don't pool, don't raid, all drives are just regular drives
--let's say i have a "video" folder on two drives and i want them to appear as one, I'll just use the Windows Libraries feature.

That's my ideal setup because then I have regular drives without the headaches of raid or pooling complications.  But I also get to group folders from different drives together.  But if I'm overlooking anything, please let me know.  I'm in the middle of creating my server architecture diagram, so I'm doing this as we speak!

superboyac:
As I'm reading more, another option to consider is Distributed File System (DFS):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_File_System_%28Microsoft%29

So I'm currently debating:
DFS
Drive Bender
Standalone normal drives
RAID

I'm leaning towards DFS, but I now have to learn how it works.

Stoic Joker:
I'm leaning towards DFS, but I now have to learn how it works.-superboyac (July 17, 2012, 12:53 PM)
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Not the way you want it to. The DFS root contains links to discontiguous shares in a single namespace. You don't want to be pulling and swapping drives with it, because as the drive letters change your data will be playing peek-A-boo (and with very little peek...).

I love DFS for a server for its flexibility in letting me modify storage access within a single drive mapping. But the targets really need to be static. Effecting redundancy via distributed DFS will take way more hardware that you want to/need to/should buy.

40hz:
I've heard good things said about SnapRAID but I can't personally vouch for it since I've never installed it. (Warning: it's CL so it's a little geek.)

This page on their website also lists several alternatives to Snap RAID that might be worth investigating.

Q: Is data protection or media pooling the more important feature for you?

4wd:
I mentioned a couple of things here.

SnapRAID - Filesystem agnostic parity based data redundancy, (Linux/Windows).
Elucidate - A GUI for SnapRAID (Windows).
Liquesce - Drive pooling for Windows.
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