# Drive Bender: It's Pretty Awesome



## AshleyAshes (Oct 9, 2011)

http://www.drivebender.com/drive-bender/

I discovered this in the early spring but while I did register for the beta, I didn't make use of my account until RC1 came out a few days ago.

Basically, Drive Bender is for Windows and it'll take multiple drives, internal and even external drives, it will manage them and then have windows present these drives as a single large drive.  You can even specify certian folders to store redundant data and the data will be stored redundantly on multiple drives, similar to NTFS.

Why not use RAID1, RAID0 or JBOD?  In my case, I don't need MUCH redundancy, just redundancy for 'warm' backups of my film projects.  The rest of the data on my NAS/HTPC is media storage.  DriveBender is also non-destructive and flexible. With any form of RAID, you'd have to rebuild and reformat your array when you make a change to the number of drives.  DriveBender can just toss new drives into the pool and quietly rebalance the storage between them all and DriveBender can be asked to move all data off a drive so it can be removed.  The file structure on the drives remains standard, DriveBender just interprets them and then presents the pool.  So, you can rip out any drive from the pool and the file system is standard and intact.

In my case, I have a NAS/HTPC that ran a single 2TB drive which reached capacity.  I added a second 2TB Drive and installed DriveBender RC1.  Voila, it merged the full and empty drive and presented a 3.6TB single drive E:\.  Since the original single drive was mapped to E:\, XBMC didn't even know it's files changed.  I created a redundant folder for film projects and then DriveBender quietly moved the data so that each drive held about 50% of it.  I'm impressed and this means I can keep tossing in new drives and growing the pool.  Right now, if you're in the beta you can get DriveBender for $20 and while I want to do some more testing, I think they're getting my $20.


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## Sai_Wolf (Oct 10, 2011)

That's not bad for $20 (But will it stay $20 when released?), but how's the performance? It sounds like it's implementing something close to software RAID, and that usually takes a heavy toll on system resources.

I'm curious to know how your machine performs.


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## Captain Howdy (Oct 10, 2011)

So this doesn't have anything to do with Futurama :c


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## AshleyAshes (Oct 10, 2011)

Sai_Wolf said:


> That's not bad for $20 (But will it stay $20 when released?), but how's the performance? It sounds like it's implementing something close to software RAID, and that usually takes a heavy toll on system resources.
> 
> I'm curious to know how your machine performs.



$20 will not be the retail price, no, he doesn't seem to have any information on the retail price.  Today I tossed in my $20 however.

Performance actually seems to be pretty good, however, since this is just managing files on multiple drives I'm not suprised.  It doesn't have to think about parity or stripes or anything, at the most, it has to make sure it writes one file to two drives if it's a redundant folder.  It seems to use a minimum of bandwidth to balance drives if there's an unbalance, it took about 36hrs for it to go from a 2TB drive full and another empty, to roughly 50/50 on each drive.  I imagine this is done to limit the system bandwidth used.  New files are just put on the drives in a way to make things balanced to start with.

That said, my HTPC/NAS system is an Athlon 64 3200+ piece of crap running SATAI controllers on the PCI Bus, so it's performance is slow to start with.   But it hasn't seem to have gotten any WORSE.  Writing non-redundant files seems just as fast and writing redundant files seems to take twice as long, or half the speed, however you want to see it.  This makes sense since the SATA controller and the ethernet controller are on the PCI Bus, there's just no more bandwidth to go around when writing to two drives simultaniously so the system slows down.

The machine is primarily an HTPC running XBMC.  I havn't found that XBMC is running any slower than it did before.  I was even able to unmount the main 2TB from E:\ and mount the new drive pool as E:\ with all the files in the same locations.  XBMC has no idea that anything changed, it just thinks that E:\ suddenly got 1.82TB larger.


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## Sai_Wolf (Oct 10, 2011)

AshleyAshes said:


> $20 will not be the retail price, no, he doesn't seem to have any information on the retail price.  Today I tossed in my $20 however.
> 
> Performance actually seems to be pretty good, however, since this is just managing files on multiple drives I'm not suprised.  It doesn't have to think about parity or stripes or anything, at the most, it has to make sure it writes one file to two drives if it's a redundant folder.  It seems to use a minimum of bandwidth to balance drives if there's an unbalance, it took about 36hrs for it to go from a 2TB drive full and another empty, to roughly 50/50 on each drive.  I imagine this is done to limit the system bandwidth used.  New files are just put on the drives in a way to make things balanced to start with.
> 
> ...



Nifty.

It sounds like ZFS in concept. And ZFS is always sexy for drive pools.


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## AshleyAshes (Oct 10, 2011)

Sai_Wolf said:


> Nifty.
> 
> It sounds like ZFS in concept. And ZFS is always sexy for drive pools.



I was looking at Zpool, unless I read it wrong though, each drive in a pool is treated as the same size, similar to traditional RAID options.  That's a limitation if growth of the pool won't be symetrical.  For my system for example, I'll toss in more drives as the demand arrises and install whatever drive gives me the best GB/$ ratio.  Right now, that's 2TB Green drives, but I imagine soon it'll be 3TB drives and maybe 4TB a year+ from now.


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## Sai_Wolf (Oct 10, 2011)

AshleyAshes said:


> I was looking at Zpool, unless I read it wrong though, each drive in a pool is treated as the same size, similar to traditional RAID options.  That's a limitation if growth of the pool won't be symetrical.  For my system for example, I'll toss in more drives as the demand arrises and install whatever drive gives me the best GB/$ ratio.  Right now, that's 2TB Green drives, but I imagine soon it'll be 3TB drives and maybe 4TB a year+ from now.



It's all in the partitions, believe it or not. http://www.cod3r.com/2010/04/zfs-on-different-sized-disks/ does a decent job at explaining it.


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## AshleyAshes (Oct 10, 2011)

Sai_Wolf said:


> It's all in the partitions, believe it or not. http://www.cod3r.com/2010/04/zfs-on-different-sized-disks/ does a decent job at explaining it.



Yes, I think I much prefer DB's far more idiot proof methods. :3


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