I have been a long term user of StableBit DrivePool although there are many other solutions that do the same thing, even Windows itself can manage Pools, its just a bunch of drives, any sizes, any model or brand holding data as if it was one drive, the app itself is great for this reason but it lacks other features like parity or redundancy.
My journey with StableBit Drive Pool started back on 2015, it was $19.95 USD
Back in the day applications like Unraid were not that popular or easy to use probably, I never try it during those times and the most popular software raid solution was FreeNas but it would not allow to have different size drives which is the main point of StableBit Drive Pool, the highest storage capacity was 8TB and those drives were not cheap although I was cheap since didn’t have much money to spend on hardware, to be honest I have never had enough money to throw away on high end hardware so I’m always looking into DIY solutions or software work arounds for hardware, Drive Pool look like a solution to one of my problems, not having data around multiple hard drives, safe folders on multiple drives with different data, balancing space between drives, was though to try to build up a library.
My only problem was that Drive Pool had no redundancy or parity feature, you can mirror drives one to one but that was it, I kept using it until a drive failed so I lost a bunch of data, second drive failed lost data again until one day I decided to stop building my library and take a break so I sold the computer and the drives that I had left, I was moving to another apartment, smaller, cheaper, things got tight, it was until about three years LTT release an Unraid video so again I took interest on building up a library using something similar but I didn’t want to buy Unraid that is still around $59 Basic license and $89 Plus with some limitations, this other solutions were way more than what I was looking for, they have way more features but that’s not what I was looking for so I’m not going to talk about what’s better or not.
I went back to StableBit Drive Pool and years latter, around a year from today after lurking around asking the wrong question to Google I did what I should have done long time ago, send a support ticket asking if there is a redundancy solution on the app or what’s the next possible solution. The answer to my support ticket was very fast and straight up
https://community.covecube.com/
There a community of people around this apps that Covecube have develop, going through the forum post is when I found SnapRaid and it took me a few minutes to find probably the best possible StableBit Drive Pool + Snapraid tutorial from @ElectronicsWizardry
Since then I have never look back, no days my Storage “Array” is much bigger, using second hand drives from eBay for about $45 each, HGST HUS726060ALA640 3.5″ 6TB SATA 7200RPM, this drives are from 2014-2015, most of them were used on servers, from the outside they look very clean although they are not the most power efficient probably compare to new models, if electricity is not very expensive where you life you wont see any much difference, I’m running eight of this drives for storage and two for parity for a total capacity of 48TB using a PCIE Hard Drive Controller 9211-8i 6Gbps HBA LSI FW:P20 IT Mode that I also bought on eBay for $36.88.
My setup
- i7-3770
- ASUS Motherboard P8Z68-V PRO/GEN3
- 32 GB DDR3 Ram
- Nvidia ASUS GeForce GTX 1070 8GB ROG Strix OC
- EVGA 750w B5 Power Supply
- 8 x HGST HUS726060ALA640 6TB SATA
- HDD Controller 9211-8i 6Gbps HBA LSI FW:P20
- CPU Cooler – Hyper 212 EVO
- Windows 10 Pro
- APC UPS Pro BX1500M-LM60
- Disk Test Bench Case Bracket Rack (Google It)
- Air Open System
The computer runs on a Open Air chassis, the drives on a Disk Test Bench Case Bracket Rack, if you look it up on Google or eBay will find an acrylic hard drive enclosure, mine is a ten drive capacity, since the system runs air open it runs very cool and quite but the down side is dust even though its on a rack stand so I take apart the system every time I do an upgrade or every three months to clean up all the components and keep them dust free.
This is not the fastest or more power efficient setup but most of the parts I have been collecting from other builds, most of the money I recently spend is on hard drives and the HDD controller, Snap Raid also does Pool but it doesn’t have a graphic interface, I run it exactly as it shows on the previous video, Windows 10 Pro, StableBit Drive Pool and Snapraid, I only use Snapraid for the parity feature, I run sync the first Sunday of every month over night since this computer is not on 24/7, to save some money on the power bill I just it down and turn it back on through Home Assistant but that’s another story, this computer is also protected by an APC UPS Pro BX1500M-LM60 / 900w, nothing fancy neither just to keep it protected, so far only one drive died and it was at a time I didn’t have it plug to a UPS, after the UPS was hooked no damages so far, my oldest drive in the arrive is over a year now and I plan on buying another HBA Controller and build that Pool with 10TB Hard Drives, second hand drives too, for the 6TB some of them I got dirt cheap at $35 so if they last three years I’m cool with it, cant ask for more.
After this pool I will make a short tutorial of how I have my pool setup with a few more details than just the description of my setup and experience with the software so far.
I hope this post turns useful for someone looking for a Hard Drive Pool solution on the cheap plus parity option.