Topic: Drive Bender - jmone? (Read 24908 times)

marko · « **on:** June 14, 2012, 04:24:11 pm »

Hi Nathan,

In this post, you made mention of Drive Bender...

I've had a look at this, and am pretty close to running with it as my 5 x 2Tb drives are filling up, and pooling them all together puts all the available space together, which is nice, and means I could put off buying bigger drives for a while longer.

I have a problem though... Drive Bender pools do not support volume shadow service, and Genie Backup kind of relies on it... in my tests, backups are failing.

Drive Bender has a file duplication feature which on first read, sounds as though it would cover me the same as my backups do at the moment. My media backups are 'mirror' backups, performed once a week to local, but separate drives. If I bin the mirror backups and enable the file duplication in drive bender, am I right in thinking I'm equally covered?

Do you use file duplication? Have you tested it at all?

What's the resale value of 5 x 2Tb drives these days? If I could get a reasonable price for them I might consider getting replacement 3Tb drives... I hate running out of disk space

-marko

struct · « **Reply #1 on:** June 14, 2012, 06:13:17 pm »

I too would love to hear how you are both going on drive bender. I too followed the lead and bought a copy as I was getting sick of adding drives. My start to drivebender has not been pretty (mostly my fault) has I had a crash during adding a drive. drivebender seems to add every drive's directory to every other drive and somehow when I went to redo the pool, it had a couple of subdirectories of all of the disks directories. So I am currently trying to clean away all the directories.

It does seem to have a problem with spanned drives. I know, which sort of moron uses spanned drives anyway:) I am also in the process of copying these over also. It did seem to me that you really must reboot after adding each drive to avoid any glitches. There was one blog somewhere that harped on this (but did I listen:)

Other than that, it did seem to do the trick, and will try again tonight once the drives are tidy.

Do you intend using the balancing? I was going to turn it off as was scared of having multiple albums scattered to a variety of drives and if I lost one drive I would loose a lot of completed albums?

Craig

marko · « **Reply #2 on:** June 14, 2012, 06:35:15 pm »

I went the more cautious route...

I added a single drive in "test pool" using the getting started wizard, then added all the rest to this pool. I added them, not merge.

This adds all the free space on each drive to the pool, and also removed the assigned drive letters.
I then went back into disk management and reassigned all the drive letters.

I can now see the existing files on the drives, along with the GUID folders that drive bender will use to store the files.

The new drive bender drive was also there, currently empty.

I went all out and lobbed 1.6Tb of movie files onto the newly created bender drive. It coped well enough with this, and as I could still see and monitor the actual disks, it was interesting to watch as drive bender distributed the files evenly amongst the drives, keeping the free space on each around the same. This is why I asked about backups vs file duplication in drive bender.

Currently, while everything else is geared around the old drive letter set up, if I download a gigs worth of stuff directly onto a drive that's in the pool, the stuff is not available on the pool drive, but the pool drive dynamically adjusts its available free space. I'll be running this way while I decide which way I'm going to go with this...

The backups have to come from the virtual drive, which is causing me problems. Other than that, I can see what it's doing, and if I do go wholesale with it, I'll take out the drive letters and just leave myself the one drive bender drive for everything to work off.

It seems a remarkably clever concept, and at $20, not a bad price either.

-marko

marko · « **Reply #3 on:** June 17, 2012, 03:21:42 am »

So, File duplication in drive bender will protect you against drive failure, but will not protect you from yourself!

If you accidentally delete or otherwise corrupt a bunch of files, the drive bender duplication system immediately kicks in and mirrors the changes.
If the drive with the original files becomes unavailable, drive bender makes new copies from the duplicate files it has backed up.

I need protecting from myself too, so will need to have a careful think about this....

jmone · « **Reply #4 on:** June 17, 2012, 03:55:49 am »

Sorry Marko I missed your post! Here is what I do:

Main PC: One Drive Bender pool
WHS PC: Another Drive Bender pool

I monitor the drive heath in each pool using Hard Disk Sentinel http://www.hdsentinel.com/

I use SyncToy to manually sync the two pools periodically and it has a preview feature so I can check what changes I'm about to commit to the WHS pool. It is a life saver as I had 5 x WD20EARS that have all been reporting bad sectors etc all at once after a couple of years use. I just purchased new 4TB Hitachi Deskstars that I then added to the pool and then removed the WD20EARS. All this worked perfectly till I managed to blow two of the PCB's on the WD20EARS when I managed to put a Molex plug in back to front on my main PC Hot Swap Sata bays

. I was then missing about 3TB of data that once the new 4TB were added to the DB pool I used Sync Toy to copy back the missing content.

So for me the lession was
1) Nothing beats a full backup!
2) The preview ability of SyncToy lets you preview any changes before your commit them to the second DB Pool
3) You need to monitor the health of your HDD and remove them as soon as they start showing errors
4) The DB add and remove drive function works perfectly!

jmone · « **Reply #5 on:** June 17, 2012, 04:09:20 am »

Here is a pic from the WHS box of my setup

jmone · « **Reply #6 on:** June 17, 2012, 04:12:47 am »

Here is the one on my Main PC - where you can see I'm currently removing my WD20EARS for the pool

struct · « **Reply #7 on:** June 17, 2012, 07:08:40 pm »

Quote from: marko on June 17, 2012, 03:21:42 am

So, File duplication in drive bender will protect you against drive failure, but will not protect you from yourself!

If you accidentally delete or otherwise corrupt a bunch of files, the drive bender duplication system immediately kicks in and mirrors the changes.
If the drive with the original files becomes unavailable, drive bender makes new copies from the duplicate files it has backed up.

I need protecting from myself too, so will need to have a careful think about this....

I am really glad you took the time to type this in. I hadn't given it much thought and was thinking of the duplication as a local "backup". All it is is HDD failure insurance.

Craig

Daydream · « **Reply #8 on:** June 18, 2012, 01:48:18 am »

What happens if you change your mind on DriveBender? Uninstall the program, the services, the whatever (Windows version, not WHS). Do you get your drives back or you get drives in limbo?

Can you remove a drive from the pool and get it back with it's individual files/folders? What happens if DriveBender 'server' or whatever it is, crashes as you add a drive to the pool (which has happened in my test, and some stuff that was on the drive it's not there in the pool).

I'm coming off FlexRAID where you can have your cake and eat it too (individual drives and the pool). Only that it got too expensive for my taste once it switched to being commercial.

jmone · « **Reply #9 on:** June 18, 2012, 02:06:01 am »

Drive Bender just uses NTFS Mount Points so the files are all on a normal file system on each drive just buried down a couple of layers. So you can infact just add a Drive Letter...(or swap to another PC - etc etc). In the Pic Below, in Drive Bender I just added a Drive letter to one of the drives in the drive pool (F:) and as you can see the file structure is the same as what is on this drive + the other ones in the pool.

To me this is a good thing as there is no striping - no parity calcs, just presents normally data on multiple physical drives as 1 logical drive system. One drive dies and you just lose the stuff physically stored on the one drive. This is where I then add a new drive and SyncToy any missing stuff back from my other pool.

Daydream · « **Reply #10 on:** June 18, 2012, 04:38:39 am »

See, there's something not clear. First, as an aside, if they are mount points why are they not showing the disk management console in Windows? Just curious. Windows is oblivious to these mounting points.

Of much more importance - that's why I'm puzzled - is that if I make my own mount points in windows, for each physical drive, when I go to inspect those drives I see... the same contents on each of them! The pool's structure with everything. Is there more than one way difference of creating/utilizing the pool? (obviously these me operating on gut instinct and not really reading much, just rapid testing)

jmone · « **Reply #11 on:** June 18, 2012, 04:52:52 am »

The disks do show in Computer Managment --> Disk Managment they just don't have drive letter. Each disk contains the physical objects but the combined contents is shown as a single drive pool. Eg Disk1 may have ABC and Disk2 has DEF so you see one drive pool with a single drive letter with ABCDEF

jmone · « **Reply #12 on:** June 18, 2012, 04:59:08 am »

Here is a pic from my WHS box showing each of the physical 4x2TB HDD (DB1 to DB4) and the resultant 8TB drive pool (Media E:). Of course in Windows Explorer etc you just see the single 8TB E: Drive and not each of the individual physical drives (unless you also assign a drive letter to them but you normally would not do this).

InflatableMouse · « **Reply #13 on:** July 12, 2012, 12:46:51 am »

Being sorely dissapointed in the NAS I purchased recently I have emptied the drives and will do what I wanted to do initially: combine htpc and homeserver on one box. Drive Bender is on a budget these days, 50% off and lifetime support/upgrades. So that's 20 bucks for the home version.

Now here's an interesting thought. Drivebender does not use redundancy or parity or any kind of raid system. All it can do is mirror the files in a folder to a separate disk(s). Since DB is using individual disks with NTFS, you can simply add driveletters back to the volumes its using in the pool, and access each drive individually, is this correct?

If that is so, you could use SnapRAID. SnapRAID basically creates parity over drives on a schedule (snapshots). It supports several RAID schemas including 5 and 6. The nice thing is is that it shares many of the features that make DB flexible; it works on NTFS volumes, does not require entire disks or same size disks, parity is saved to a folder, etc. It does not render drives or volumes unusable, it does not require install. Just configure the disks, the folders, exclusions and run a sync. If a drive, folder or even a single file requires recovery, simply run the command and it is recovered. I tested this over 3 and 4 volumes under Vmware and it works like a charm and its very fast - I was impressed.

For now SnapRAID is a commandline tool, pretty straightforward but its output can be useless (too much, too fast). There is a GUI in the works and I think this tool will become more friendly and more popular fast.

I haven't tested it with Drive Bender, I will try to do that today. This will just be under Vmware with 3 and 4 10GB virtual disks. If this works well together, that would be perfect.

raym · « **Reply #14 on:** August 29, 2012, 01:34:42 am »

Quote from: marko on June 14, 2012, 04:24:11 pm

I have a problem though... Drive Bender pools do not support volume shadow service, and Genie Backup kind of relies on it... in my tests, backups are failing.

Thought I'd chime in on this one Marko as thanks to Nathan's advice, I'm also using Drive Bender now. First thing I noticed is my automated backups started failing due to the lack of VSS support (as you've pointed out). There is now a documented workaround however described here: http://support.drivebender.com/entries/20993291-volume-snapshot-service-vss-support

I found I also needed to explicitly enable shadow copies on each drive external to the pool. This may be unique to my system though. In any case, my backups work now.

jmone · « **Reply #15 on:** August 29, 2012, 04:05:16 am »

WOW, You guys do more stuff than me with DB. I have two pools with a very simple setup (eg no duplication etc):

1) Main PC: 6x4TB HDD = 21.8TB (in Windows) shared as one UNC called "Media"
2) WHS : 4x2TB HDD = 7.27TB (in Windows) shares as one UNC called "Media Backup"

I copy files to "Media" and import them into MC that then servers the Library Server Clients. I then manually run (so I can check what is being changed) Robocopy first Preview then push any changes to "Media Backup" ... less the 11TB in a single "Discs" sub folder that holds my BD Rips as my backup for these are the physical discs themselves.

marko · « **Reply #16 on:** August 29, 2012, 11:47:06 am »

That's really all I'm trying to do too, except the second, backup pool here is on the same system. As soon as I create it, the main pool begins to suffer serious delays in loading at Windows startup.

I've taken InflatableMouse's advice and currently have an active support ticket on the go. A bit like walking through treacle at the moment though due to the time difference between us!

jmone · « **Reply #17 on:** August 29, 2012, 03:56:50 pm »

FYI - I've posted on the DB Forum to see if they are interested in participating in an "Official" BD thread over her at Interact - lets see ...

InflatableMouse · « **Reply #18 on:** August 30, 2012, 08:12:16 am »

That would be cool, but when I scanned their forums virtually no official DB employee was active. There forums seem to be community support only, not official support.

jmone · « **Reply #19 on:** August 31, 2012, 05:42:03 pm »

I think you are correct, no bites over on my post on their forum about this thread, a very traditional MFR hands off approach on forums. Anyway - shows how well JR gets involved by comparison!

I see they have a 20% off offer going at present.

marko · « **Reply #20 on:** September 01, 2012, 01:56:19 am »

My DB support guy tells me that my D: pool is correctly mounted at boot time, but he says that Windows is unmounting the drive, which would be about the point I get to see stuff, and DB has to make a few mount attempts before the pool mounts correctly. He doesn't know why, has asked me if I have any ideas, and kicked it further up the chain as a bug. All has gone quiet.

As the only pool, D: loads just fine. Weird.

I think they may be a bit like those sofa/carpet retailers with the summer sale that morphs into an autumn sale, then a winter sale... They've been at 20% off for a while now!

jmone · « **Reply #21 on:** September 01, 2012, 02:13:28 am »

Right, seems to be an industry trend then as I see Slysoft has a 20% off promption most times.

Support is certainly more "traditional" and far less interactive than what we have come to expect from forums like this one!

rjm · « **Reply #22 on:** September 01, 2012, 07:16:39 am »

When I was exploring the DB site I read that DB until recently was one guy who did everything.

InflatableMouse · « **Reply #23 on:** September 02, 2012, 04:33:19 am »

Well unless this guy poses as different people there must be at least 3 because I had replies from them

Marko, did you create a support account to track the status of your case? You could post a reply for a status update?

I can imagine if it was indeed a bug it could take a while to debug it and trace it, especially if its something they cannot reproduce because its something unique with your configuration.

InflatableMouse · « **Reply #24 on:** September 09, 2012, 04:09:51 am »

How is it going Marko? Any news from the support team?

marko · « **Reply #25 on:** September 09, 2012, 10:17:50 am »

They say:
"This is still being investigated... we are running a number of tests to see if we can replicate your issue."

raym · « **Reply #26 on:** September 09, 2012, 09:39:35 pm »

I had to restore my DB pool on the weekend (long story but I finally ditched my aging 2003 Server). Before I started, I "released" my DB license and made sure the drives were detached until after I installed the new O/S. Once that was done, I re-attached the drives, re-installed DB, activated the license and then did a "restore" on the pool (in the DB manager under Advanced options for "Pools"). Reboot. All done.

jmone · « **Reply #27 on:** September 10, 2012, 12:02:10 am »

Bet you were apprehensive!

raym · « **Reply #28 on:** September 10, 2012, 07:02:13 am »

Quote from: jmone on September 10, 2012, 12:02:10 am

Bet you were apprehensive!

Yep! The process was pretty straight forward and gave me a lot of confidence should the need arise to repeat this again in the future. This thing just works.

InflatableMouse · « **Reply #29 on:** September 10, 2012, 07:24:07 am »

I actually had to this too this weekend but ran into some minor trouble.

When I did a restore from the disks it restored several old pools and all mount points I had ever used but the pools I was actually using where not there (they did show in the console application, not in the Manager). After careful matching names with pools and disks and making sure mount points were actually really empty, I deleted some mount points (ticked including data). DB needs a restart and remounts everything. Eventually I ended up with my 2 pools, but one disk was missing from 1 pool and was showing up with an exclamation mark on a pool that didn't exist (only showed up in that console app, not in the manager). I couldn't delete/remove the disk from the pool, DB would crash. I deleted the pool, that worked and the disk popped back to the correct pool again.

A bit of sweat and annoyance, but got it all working properly again.

jmone · « **Reply #30 on:** September 20, 2012, 06:35:13 am »

New Beta Version is up with some nice additions...http://forum.division-m.com/index.php?topic=1081.0

Daydream · « **Reply #31 on:** December 09, 2012, 07:09:43 am »

Any hands-on experience (or bad luck, depending how you look at it) with DB (ver 1.3.x) and bad blocks?

In my case it dropped one drive from the pool completely and the HDD remained unusable to Windows ("You need to format the drive..." etc). Upon further inspection - 6 hours later - it was all because of 100KB of bad blocks that messed up exactly one single file (1 episode). The rest of the HDD was successfully read/backed up to a new location.

Isn't it DB's reaction somewhat excessive?! Especially since it messed up the partition.

InflatableMouse · « **Reply #32 on:** December 09, 2012, 11:37:28 am »

Are we talking about bad blocks becoming visible for you during a drive scan, or are we talking about a S.M.A.R.T. counter increasing?

A harddrive should not have bad blocks. Drives have relocation areas to which bad blocks are moved. A drive always verifies its write actions (independent of the operating system) and if it can't verify a write-action it will retry and then relocate the block. Only if a drive runs out of blocks in the relocation area will you start seeing bad blocks on the drive. If that happens you should RMA or replace the drive, it will be unusable because it has become completely unreliable.

So if DB dropped the drive from a pool because bad blocks started appearing I would not at all consider it an excessive action. If it dropped it because the bad block relocation counter (S.M.A.R.T.) increased from 0 to 1, then yes, it is excessive, considering a drive often has hundreds of blocks reserved for relocation.

A good tool for checking S.M.A.R.T. counters is Sentinel. The trial version would show you what you need to know.

jmone · « **Reply #33 on:** December 09, 2012, 02:16:15 pm »

+ 1 regarding Hard Disk Sentinel, it will tell you what is up with the HDD (up till then I was just guessing and found all on sub model type of the WD 2TB hdd were all failing).... You can do various Surface Tests on the Drive (they all take hours however!). You could start with the READ test as it will then report what sectors are Good, Bad and Weak.

Regarding why DB is kicking it may be worth reporting at their forum. They have only recently started adding SMART (and only for some controllers) but I thought it was only for info and did not think it took any action based on the info. I've not had a drive kicked out of the pool (by DB anway!) but have done plenty of "remove" and "add" as I upgraded and changed HDD.

Daydream · « **Reply #34 on:** December 09, 2012, 04:17:05 pm »

I'm talking about a surface scan, post-disaster. 12 bad sectors, 17 weak sectors and other pleasantries like that. It's obviously the drive's fault, I'm just not exactly at ease with the fact the partition on the drive was not visible once out of DB, and I needed advanced tools to start recovering things. In other funny details, the drive has exactly 10 days of warranty left.

How do you (best) use HD Sentinel, I imagine you configure it to send you emails when thresholds are hit?

InflatableMouse · « **Reply #35 on:** December 10, 2012, 12:52:15 am »

RMA the drive ASAP if its in warranty.

Even in its trial, HD Sentinel will show you the drive health and it will tell you if its bad enough to replace it. I went for the pro edition and I'm letting it mail me a report every day. I've setup triggers for alarms for low health too. I'm saving the reports and I can see exactly when a counter has increased so I can watch it for trends etc. For instance last month I had one drive see an increase in spin up errors to 3

. I'm currently not using the emergency backup features as I am making daily backups with Macrium Reflect.

jmone · « **Reply #36 on:** December 10, 2012, 01:13:13 am »

Drive Bender does not do "anything" to the drive that prevents it being seen by Windows. Unlike RAID, the DB drives are just bulk std NTFS drives that normally have no Drive Letter (but even then you can assign them and I do on one pool). You should be able to see all the HDD info in "Control Panel --> Administrative Tools --> Computer Management --> Storage --> Disk Management" even if you don't see it in explorer.

If the HDD will not be seen by Windows it will also not be seen by Drive Bender and hence it will be out of the pool. This is where HDS can tell you more what is wrong, as it may not be bad sectors, it could be other issues like spin up time etc etc. HDS tracks all this stuff. Once you have your stuff off the drive (if you can) and don't want to RMA it, try the "Reinitialise" (it is the "low level format") and see how it goes. It will take about 12 hours to do this however.

Attached is a pic of all the various views I see of my HDD from Explorer, Drive Bender, Disk Mgt, and HDS.

JimH · « **Reply #37 on:** December 10, 2012, 06:16:28 pm »

I split the non DriveBender discussion here:
http://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php?topic=76315.0

INTERACT FORUM

Author Topic: Drive Bender - jmone? (Read 24908 times)