How does everyone feel about StableBit DrivePool?

[flibberdipper]

I've been a long-time Storage Spaces user as my file server is based around Windows, and while generally speaking I've always really liked Storage Spaces (and software RAID in general) for the simplicity, I am finally fed up with SS and the dogwater performance it brings to the table. Even after going down the rabbit hole for hours and eventually figuring out how to format it in PowerShell to get the best possible performance out of it, I know that when I eventually add another drive to the pool the already lack-luster performance is going to go completely out the window.

 

Which leads me to my question: how do we all feel about DrivePool? I know it's had a strong following for quite a while, and on paper it looks like a really super solid idea. The only nitpick I have after playing with it in a VM is really stupid, and that's that it essentially just drops files onto the drives as-is and then makes a "master fake drive" with everything on it. To me that's a little odd but something I could learn to get over, but I'm not really sure how that would play with my Plex array since obviously there are going to be bigass files that have to spread across multiple drives at some point.

[Electronics Wizardy]

What performance are you seeing with storage spaces? Are you doing parity or mirrors? 

 

It works fine, but its file level, and probably not gonna be a big performance jump.

[flibberdipper]

1 hour ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

What performance are you seeing with storage spaces? Are you doing parity or mirrors? 

 

It works fine, but its file level, and probably not gonna be a big performance jump.

Performance in Storage Spaces is wildly variable. Sometimes it'll hold 200-300MB/s just fine, other times it'll drop into the 20's. It's configured for parity with a single drive failure to maximize how much space I actually get. I did everything in PowerShell to try and make it work best for how many drives I have right now, but clearly something somewhere ain't right and once I add another drive it's just gonna go to hell in a handbasket anyways.

[Electronics Wizardy]

1 minute ago, flibberdipper said:

Performance in Storage Spaces is wildly variable. Sometimes it'll hold 200-300MB/s just fine, other times it'll drop into the 20's. It's configured for parity with a single drive failure to maximize how much space I actually get. I did everything in PowerShell to try and make it work best for how many drives I have right now, but clearly something somewhere ain't right and once I add another drive it's just gonna go to hell in a handbasket anyways.

If you set storage spaces to mirror basically all the performance issues should go away, and you should get the same usable space as drive pool as its only mirrored setups.

 

What disks do you have? Maybe it would be better to get an array of identical disks and use hardware raid for good raid5/6 performance

[flibberdipper]

56 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

If you set storage spaces to mirror basically all the performance issues should go away, and you should get the same usable space as drive pool as its only mirrored setups.

 

What disks do you have? Maybe it would be better to get an array of identical disks and use hardware raid for good raid5/6 performance

I actually gained space configuring Storage Spaces through PowerShell, partially due to typically having an odd number of disks (currently have 3 6TB drives and 5 8TB drives).

[Electronics Wizardy]

2 hours ago, flibberdipper said:

I actually gained space configuring Storage Spaces through PowerShell, partially due to typically having an odd number of disks (currently have 3 6TB drives and 5 8TB drives).

Your gonna have a lot less usable space with drivepool then as you can't use parity. You could add snapraid to the config, but then it has its own limits but might work well for plex stuff.

 

I'd be tempted to get all new drives and get something like 4 24TB drives for less power and more space.

 

Or go with something like unraid and run windows in a vm for the windows stuff.

[flibberdipper]

On 4/29/2025 at 7:22 PM, Electronics Wizardy said:

Your gonna have a lot less usable space with drivepool then as you can't use parity. You could add snapraid to the config, but then it has its own limits but might work well for plex stuff.

 

I'd be tempted to get all new drives and get something like 4 24TB drives for less power and more space.

 

Or go with something like unraid and run windows in a vm for the windows stuff.

So maybe you'll know what the hell the issue is here. The last time I set Storage Spaces up, I was able to do this just fine and now the same commands that I used about a year ago are no longer working. Now I get one of these dumbass errors and I don't really know what the deal is. I want a smaller AUS because this array has a lot of smaller files, and the default size is fucking horrid.

 

[Electronics Wizardy]

7 minutes ago, flibberdipper said:

So maybe you'll know what the hell the issue is here. The last time I set Storage Spaces up, I was able to do this just fine and now the same commands that I used about a year ago are no longer working. Now I get one of these dumbass errors and I don't really know what the deal is. I want a smaller AUS because this array has a lot of smaller files, and the default size is fucking horrid.

 

Is there space on the pool? Does it work if you don't set a interlave size? How many disks do you have? 

 

Are you running it as admin?

 

 

[flibberdipper]

16 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

Is there space on the pool? Does it work if you don't set a interlave size? How many disks do you have? 

 

Are you running it as admin?

 

 

There is space on the pool as I haven't created the space yet. It does work if I don't specify an interleave, but then it uses the default 256MB size which is fuckin atrocious for space efficiency because then I have to make my AUS absolutely gargantuan so performance doesn't shit itself. Disk count is 3, and of course I'm running it as admin lol

[Electronics Wizardy]

15 minutes ago, flibberdipper said:

There is space on the pool as I haven't created the space yet. It does work if I don't specify an interleave, but then it uses the default 256MB size which is fuckin atrocious for space efficiency because then I have to make my AUS absolutely gargantuan so performance doesn't shit itself. Disk count is 3, and of course I'm running it as admin lol

Try different values and see how small you can set it?

 

Do you only have 3 disks in this pool?

 

 

[flibberdipper]

19 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

Try different values and see how small you can set it?

 

Do you only have 3 disks in this pool?

 

 

16KB is as small as I could set the interleave without it bitching about it being out of range, but either way it doesn't work. If I completely remove the -Interleave part then it formats, but again with the rather ass 256MB default interleave I'm trying to avoid. Also yes there are only 3 disks in this pool which has always been fine (ideal, even) with the parity pool type.

[Electronics Wizardy]

3 minutes ago, flibberdipper said:

16KB is as small as I could set the interleave without it bitching about it being out of range, but either way it doesn't work. If I completely remove the -Interleave part then it formats, but again with the rather ass 256MB default interleave I'm trying to avoid. Also yes there are only 3 disks in this pool which has always been fine (ideal, even) with the parity pool type.

Didn't you say earlier you have a mix of drives, with something ilke 8 total disks?

 

How small are your files? 16k should be fine for most uses.

 

Do you have to use windows? This feels like a user ZFS raidz if you have 3 identical drives. Or use a mirror setup to remove the issues with parity and storage spaces.

[flibberdipper]

6 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

Didn't you say earlier you have a mix of drives, with something ilke 8 total disks?

 

How small are your files? 16k should be fine for most uses.

 

Do you have to use windows? This feels like a user ZFS raidz if you have 3 identical drives. Or use a mirror setup to remove the issues with parity and storage spaces.

They're on different arrays, one is just for the 6TB drives (which will always only ever be at 3 drives) and the other is for the 8's I use for Plex. Also the problem is that the file size for a LOT of the stuff on here is single-digit KB territory because of documents and various portable application files.

As far as OS goes, I am unfortunately stuck on Windows. I've had Windows as a base for so long that everything has grown around it and switching to something like TrueNAS would be an incredible pain in the ass, especially where I can't just take a few days off work to deal with it. Granted for the most part I could get away running some of this shit in a Windows VM (Ezeep might even have a native TrueNAS option, not sure)... The problem however is Snipe-IT. I've always had a hell of a time getting it to work and currently it's at a point in Hyper-V where it just lives there unbothered even though I would love to upgrade it to a newer release. The rest I could suffer through, like transferring my Plex database on over.

[Electronics Wizardy]

28 minutes ago, flibberdipper said:

They're on different arrays, one is just for the 6TB drives (which will always only ever be at 3 drives) and the other is for the 8's I use for Plex. Also the problem is that the file size for a LOT of the stuff on here is single-digit KB territory because of documents and various portable application files.

As far as OS goes, I am unfortunately stuck on Windows. I've had Windows as a base for so long that everything has grown around it and switching to something like TrueNAS would be an incredible pain in the ass, especially where I can't just take a few days off work to deal with it. Granted for the most part I could get away running some of this shit in a Windows VM (Ezeep might even have a native TrueNAS option, not sure)... The problem however is Snipe-IT. I've always had a hell of a time getting it to work and currently it's at a point in Hyper-V where it just lives there unbothered even though I would love to upgrade it to a newer release. The rest I could suffer through, like transferring my Plex database on over.

Can you put a hardware raid card in? That seems like the best way to make parity raid work well here. 

 

If you want to use a different OS, you could use something like proxmox with ZFS as the host, then clone the windows OS to a VM so its the same windows config.

 

But windows really don't have a good config for parity raid in a lot of uses. 

[flibberdipper]

21 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

Can you put a hardware raid card in? That seems like the best way to make parity raid work well here. 

 

If you want to use a different OS, you could use something like proxmox with ZFS as the host, then clone the windows OS to a VM so its the same windows config.

 

But windows really don't have a good config for parity raid in a lot of uses. 

I have a pair of China special 9211-8i's but they're functioning as HBAs right now. Also pretty sure that the one the 6TB drives are on just died so that's cool too lol