To RAID or not to RAID, that has always been the question for me. We
all want to have our data backed up somehow. Lose a drive full of personal
stuff, your movies or music etc, and the pain can go from simply time consuming
(re-ripping your CDs or DVDs), to excruciating if you have lost data that is
unrecoverable. I have to be honest; I have not been too good about keeping
reliable backups of all of my stuff.
So then it comes to the question of what method you are going to use. You can manually copy your data to another drive, perhaps an external that you just plug in for backups. You can setup a simple scheduled backup that just copies your data from one drive to another at a defined interval. You can use actual backup software that tracks files that have changed and then backs them up with version control. And then of course, you can step up to the more technical strategy of building a RAID system that gives you redundancy if a drive dies. I won’t go into how RAID works here, as there is more than enough information on that topic available to you. I will say though that when you do get to that stage, have bought the hardware (either a controller or an enclosed raid array device that has the controller and bays for your drives), you still have to decide the level of RAID you plan to use. Are you going to mirror drives, or stripe your data across multiple drives with additional parity data? And just to confuse the situation a little bit more there are proprietary systems like Drobo that have similar features to standard RAID but use their own file system technology. It can get pretty confusing, especially if you are just looking for a little file redundancy.
Even with all of this, a major malfunction on the computer running
your RAID array could blow out all of your drives and you could still lose all
that data. For those anal retentive home users and IT Professionals that really
need a guarantee of data security, you would have a RAID setup in case of a failed
drive, as well as backup at a different location. Wow, that’s’ a lot of work
and most of us home users don’t have the time and money to sink into this type
of security, and probably don’t have that many critical files that you cannot
just copy them to a USB drive for backup. Tough to justify an expensive setup
to make sure your music is backed up.
So my crude backup method has been the most basic. I take a directory
full of files, let’s say music, and I then manually copy that to another
computer. Pretty basic. If I am being good and somewhat attentive, when I rip a
new CD or buy some more music, I make sure to place a copy of the music on both
the drive that I use for actually playing the music, and place a copy on the
backup drive. Sure it works, but it requires that I actually do it, and there
is not automation. I needed a new plan.
One of the issues with RAID, is that when one of your drives dies, you
need to replace the drive. The files on your hard drives are not held in a
standard format that allows you to take a drive from your RAID solution, and
just plug it into another computer to get to the files. To me this is counter-intuitive
for home use, and not what I was looking for. That may work great for Data
Centers, but for home use, I really wanted my files to be in a format that I
could access from any computer if I had an issue. This is where a software
based solution came in. My goal, have a series of drives, some internal, but
mostly external USB, that I could pool together and would contain two copies of
each file on separate drives. One drive dies, I could either replace it in the “pool”,
or I could just take the working drive and plug it into whatever machine I wanted
and have full access to the files.
There are several programs that will “Pool” your drives, and after
reading reviews for several days, I went with Drive Bender. I could have gone
with a program that copied my files automatically from one drive to another,
but I was also looking for some additional features. Drive Bender is a software
based Pooling solution for Windows made by Division-M. What DB does, is take a
series of physical hard drives, and present them to windows as a single drive. You
can configure a many drives or parts of drives (partitions) to be pooled
together. Before we even get to the backup aspect, this allows you to “Bend”
your drives by adding them together. Have a bunch of older small drives? You
can have them all added together so windows sees them as a single drive letter.
For example, many of us have old computers that we are no longer using, or
older external USB drives that are anywhere from a few gigs upward. With multi
terabyte drives now available, and most software getting larger and large with
each release, those old 40GB or even 350GB drives just don’t cut it anymore.
Well that brings in Drive Bender. Let’s say you have a 40GB drive, a 120GB
drive and a 250GB drive. Instead of having windows see those all as
independent, Drive Bender will pool those for you and give you a single drive
in Windows that is 410GB (minus the overhead as always). Pretty nifty, and a
great solution for a bunch of smaller drives. Now, you may have larger drives
and still want to pool them. Four external 3TB drives can be configured to make
a 12GB virtual drive to use in Windows, so you don’t have to split you movie
collection across multiple drives. Anyone ripping Blu-Ray DVDs can attest to
the need for space when you have single movies at 15-50GB in size! It’s pretty
easy to fill up a disk at that rate. DB allows you to add drives to a pool to
enlarge it any time giving you unlimited options on size. Add another external
USB drive, add it to your pool and now that additional space is available in
Windows under that drive letter.
Okay, I loved that idea, but back to the original problem I was
attempting to solve. Drive Bender allows you to flag individual folders for
duplication, meaning that the files in that directory will also be replicated
onto one of the other drives in the pool. You will not see the second copy when
you are looking through your drives in Windows, but can tell that they are
being replicated through the DB interface which we will look at a little later
in this post. That solved my main issue. I did have to decide how may drives to
put into each pool, as with two drives, you are guaranteed that there is a copy
of your file(s) on each drive. If you have three or more drives, you just now
that your file(s) is duplicated onto one of the other drives. For my use, I
wanted a mirror style setup, so I built pools of two drives. I took my external
drive full of music and added it to a new pool. I then added an empty drive of
the same size (which is not necessary), and flagged the directories that I
wanted duplicated. Not a fast process copying the files over USB from one drive
to the other, but once completed, I had a backup of all of my music. If I add a
ripped CD to the drive in windows, DB automatically replicates the file. This
would be very similar to a mirror on a RAID controller. I won’t go into actual
file access read/write times, but I can say that I see no delay when reading
from the pooled drive. My music and movies are on pooled drives attached to a
Windows 7 computer. I have no issues streaming files from the pooled drives
through the computer, across my network to my WD Live Hub and onto my TV and
Stereo. You are of course restricted by how your drives are connected to your
computer. I am using USB 2.0 for the majority of the drives and it works fine.
If you were to use USB 3.0 or SATA drives you would of course see a rapid
increase in disk access times. Point being, that Drive Bender does not appear
to be slowing me down in anyway. I am restricted by the speed of USB 2.0 as I
always was.
Testing:
So of course once I was up and running, I was ready to test the
redundancy that I was getting form DB. First
I unplugged one of the drives in the pool (of two drives) to see what would
happen. Drive Bender’s interface alerted me that I was running in “Fault Tolerant
Mode”, but Windows still saw the drive letter and I had no problem getting to
my files and streaming them to my TV. Next, I hooked up the unplugged drive to
another machine to take a look at the file system. One of DB’s assets is that
the files system is kept in a standard NTFS format ( they call it
non-destructive) and your files are accessible. Hooked up to the other machine,
the drive came up immediately as a good external drive should (A WD 3TB My Book
in this case), and my files were all there. Sure, there are a bunch of extra
files the DB uses to identify it as part of a pool, and the data had been put
into a new root directory and been named to a DB specific name, but wandering
through the file system, everything was there.
A quick search and delete for Drive Bender’s files and removal of its
directory names and the external was back to a standard windows drive with my
movies on it in about ten minutes. This was exactly what I was looking to do
with this software. No proprietary structure that did not allow me to get to my
movies. At anytime you can remove a drive, do a few quick fixes and have your
standard drive back. I then cleaned out the drive and added it back to the
machine with the DB pool and started the replication process again. Yes, it
takes a while over USB 2.0 but I wanted to see what would happen if I removed a
drive, and added a fresh one back, simulating a drive failure. It worked great.
Management:
Drive Bender’s management tool has multiple screens that help you
either setup or manage your pools and drives. Until you understand their terminology,
it is a bit confusing, but I am will show a few screens so you can look at the
interface.
Pool – A grouping of drives
that is presented to Windows as a single drive
Mount – The mount point or
drive letter that is associated with the above pool of drives
Drive – Physical hard
drives that you are configuring, not to be confused with the drives that you
see in windows
Pool Dashboard:
The Pools Dashboard allows you to look at and manage the various pools
of drives you have built. Here we have a pool called “Windows Pool”. From this
screen we can see how much space there is in the pool, and how much free space
is left. We can also check out how many file are duplicates vs. the amount of
primary files. This is really a
monitoring screen as your main option here is to delete the pool if you no
longer want it. For me, the most important part of this screen is the current state,
which is “healthy”. If one of the drives in the pool were down, we would see it
here. There are some advanced options below which you cannot see, that allow
you to repair a pool that has issues or restore a pool by reading info off of
the drives.
Mounts Dashboard:
The Mounts Dashboard shows you the virtual drive that you have created
out of multiple physical drives. Basically you are looking at the drive letter
for the pool above. Again we can see the space allotment, but most importantly
this is where you can enable duplication. From here you can flag any folder
from the root on down for duplication, and it will stay continually in-sync
with a replicated copy of those files.
Drives Dashboard:
Lastly the Drives Dashboard shows you the physical drives that are in
the pool. We can view their status, remove a drive, swap in a new drive, and
below we will see a list of available drives that are not currently associated
with any pool that could be added if you like.
Advanced Options and
Configuration:
Drive Bender does have a series of advanced options for power users. You
can look at your disk access logs and see what Drive Bender is doing. There are
some very serious configuration options for things like CRC validation, drive
balancing and performance enhancement for certain types of file access. The one
advanced option which is well worth looking into is S.M.A.R.T. (Self-Monitoring,
Analysis and Reporting Technology) which will monitor and check your drives,
and even send you a notification over email if you have a failure. I have yet
to test too many of the advanced options and configuration capabilities, but
the product is currently doing exactly what I want, so other than sheet
curiosity, I have no reason to modify any of the settings
It Ain’t Easy:
I will not tell you that this is a simple process. I did have a few
odd issues with my original setup, and needed some help from folks on the DB discussion
boards and eventually even opened up a support ticket to get some help from one
of the techs at Division-M. The documentation is seriously lacking, and a
decent amount of knowledge of Windows was certainly required in my case to get
my pools up and running. I really like this product and it does exactly what I was
looking for, but Drive Bender is not for everyone. It took me several tries and
about a week to get everything up and running. That’s a lot of time, and not
something that you want to get involved in if you are a basic end-user. There
are a lot of backup software programs out there that can give you data security
that are a lot easier to use. If you are not looking for backups though, but
redundancy that will allow you to keep running when a drive dies, Drive Bender
will give you that without the cost of a hardware RAID solution.
PROS:
- Price: I got the product on a deal for $17. It’s really hard to argue about that price to protect your data and stay up and running in the case of a drive failure.
- Software based: no need to crack your machine to add and configure a RAID controller
- Standard File System: To me this is huge. If all fails you can take that drive and plug it into another machine and be off and running in a very short amount of time
- Expandable drive space: you can very easily add another drive to an existing pool and increase the drive space available.
- Rebuild: You can install DB on another machine, move the drives over to the computer and DB will rebuild your pools based on the information that it has placed on each of the drives.
- 30 Day Trial: Division-M will allow you to download the software and give it a test run before you purchase a license. Kudos to them for this having this type of program. I did not buy my license until I was running perfectly, and I was able to get support from the techs at Division-M during the trial period.
CONS:
- Documentation: Extremely limited and only speaks to the basics. Many questions that I had to ask on the Db user boards were things that I felt should have been in the manual.
- Computer Expertise: I would say that a fair amount of computer savvy is required to implement this solution. If you do not know how to add and remove drive letters in diskmgmt.msc or other things of this nature, this is definitely not the solution for you. I never feared that I would lose my data, but I did spend a lot of time, ask a lot of questions, and look at a lot of performance logs for disk access before I had it all down.
- It is not RAID: DB is a great way to pool drives together, as well as replicate files for backup, but is does not have the speed of hardware RAID, and cannot provide you with option such as Striping with Parity. It is simply a pool that allows replication.
I am currently running a Windows 7 computer with two internal drives,
and six externals for my Drive Bender configuration. Four of the drives are
split into two pools of two drives, essentially giving me two mirrors, one for
movies, and one for music. Some may feel that duplicating your movies is
overkill, but after the time it took to rip close to a thousand DVDs when I first
converted all my media to hard drives, I am not sure I would have it in me to
go through that again if I lost the drive that was holding them. The rest of
the drives are pooled together without any duplication. They are smaller drives
that I have now found a use for, pooled together to make one usable sized
drive.
Final Thoughts:
Now that I have had Drive Bender up and running for a while I can
truly say that I am very happy with the product. It does exactly what I was
looking for, so a huge advantage for me. For your home network needs, DB will
give you the capabilities to both enlarge drives, and have file replication at
an extremely low price. It may not be the easiest product to install and get
running, but for the cost I was willing to put in the extra time and ended up
with the data security I was looking for.
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