Drivepool and why I like it so much.

You’re mad, you’re telling me I should be using FreeNAS or OMV.  I get it.  Wait, not I don’t why are you mad? Go outside for a walk and calm down. 

So about 5-6 years ago I wanted to setup a NAS.  What I had was knowledge in Windows Server 2012/2016 and a dream.  Also mismatched HDs.

Now we all know by now that RAID is not a backup.  However, RAID is a very useful thing to have running in your system from performance gains or some security with mirroring or a parity drive.

Back to my story, back then I was aware of RAID but buying a hardware RAID card was out of my budget. Also Linux seemed daunting to me then. I wanted to set something up within Windows.

Drivepool to the rescue. What Drivepool provides is everything I’d want to get a powerful system going but have flexibility and comfort of knowing I can do this in a Windows based system.  I’m much more comfortable with Linux now but I still will not chose to move away from Drivepool.  Partly because I paid for a license and other partly because I enjoy the whole suite.

What does Drivepool do? Well it takes a JBOD (just a bunch of disks) of all sizes, pools them together.  Uses NTFS so you can access each drive as you wish, provides duplication to a granular folder level.

Its as easy as plugging in your drives to a expansion card/ports onto your motherboard.  Hell USB drives can be pooled (though I suggest against mix and matching).  As you see there I have one of my NAS drives sitting there ready to be pooled.  Just click on +Add and you’re good to go!

Whats the catch? I really haven’t found one yet. It works.  There may be some data rot that I’ve experienced but I’m not entirely sure.  The HDs are allowed to rest and read striping improves the performance enough where its fine.  I’m not sure how this would work with a high performance large DB server but for home lab use its great.

With this server I have my secondary AD (Active directory) running, my Linux ISO downloading applications grabbing the latest Theatrical Ubuntu image.  For that its perfectly fine.

That all being said, I do have a set of USB hard drives that I connect, which are pooled together as a separate drive.  I use FreeFileSync to backup everything to the external mirror.

Well that’s it for this edition of why I like something.

-Sumit