Romex Software Forum

I'm almost ready to retire our old household server, which is using old hardware -- a Q6600 Kentsfield processor, an NVidia 680i Striker Extreme motherboard, and 8GB of DDR2 RAM. Truth be told, it was always fast enough for us, but the support for WHS-2011 (or Win Server 2008 R2) is coming to a close. And -- yes -- I'm using "desktop" hardware for my servers. There has always been some little irritation over getting the right driver for the server OS, but so far I've jumped all the hurdles. For instance, the motherboard Intel Pro NIC would not configure to the new server's 2012 R2, but someone discovered how to edit the INF file to make it work.

The "new" server -- a Z68 Gen3 motherboard and an i5-3470 CPU -- has 16GB of DDR3 RAM and PCIE v. 3.0 slots. I added a SuperMicro 8-port Marvell PCIE x8 card for storage.

People would tell me that buying the $100 license to PrimoCache Server is bad economy. But with the extra RAM, the size of my planned drive pool (10 TB) and disk access speed, I thought I could just take advantage of those features even if I'm squandering a Franklin note. Why not?

Even so, I want someone to confirm that this approach will work. As I said, I have a drive pool with StableBit DrivePool, which integrates seamlessly with the 2012 R2 OS and its dashboard. Typically, assigning drive letters to component disks is optional, but I do it anyway -- in cases where I want some amount of disk space excluded from the drivepool which uses the drive.

I'm pretty sure you can't cache the virtual disk created by StableBit DrivePool. And I'm pretty sure -- pretty sure indeed -- that you WOULD cache the individual disks, and that would effectively cache the pool.

Support? Anyone? Does that sound like a winner?

I'm planning a new drive array this summer (3-4 months) using DrivePool and Snapraid. From what I understand, Primocache will cache the physical drives *underlying* the DrivePool virtual volume, so that they both work. I'm less sure of whether or not Snapraid will work with Primocache, but I'll cross that bridge when I come to it.

In your case, I'd consider the $100 purchase of Primocache Server version well worth it. The only other option you have is to use one of DrivePool's features and put a large SSD inbetween DrivePool and the physical disks to act as a sort of read/write buffer, to speed up operations on all your physical volumes that DP uses. It won't be nearly as fast as Primocache would, and would inevitably be more expensive, simply because a SSD of enough size will cost you more than $100. From that perspective, using Primocache and your RAM might be the better option.

I normally don't assign drive letters to physical disks that I add in to DrivePool - instead I mount them as folders under a special C:\ folder. That way I can get to them quickly if I need to, and they don't clutter up the drive display of those with letters.

As a sidenote - this is the add-in SATA port expansion card I'm going to be using: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0085FT2JC It supposedly performs very well, and is expandable to a total of 256 drives.

Overall, sounds like a solid plan. Only thing I'd recommend (if you don't plan on mirroring ALL your files using DP's mirroring), is to install something like Snapraid to protect against drive failures. Together they work very well.

Since we're talking about DrivePool (and Snapraid), perhaps @Support would be kind enough to let us know if both pieces of software are fully compatible with current versions of Primocache. Both are going in my new NAS/Media Server system, and I'll buy another copy of Primocache for it if it will work seamlessly with both.

Not familiar enough with Snapraid, but I could almost say that I know you can cache drives including both AHCI and RAID modes, that you can cache RAID volumes of any sort -- and probably include them under a single PrimoCache caching task.

With Drivepool, you can do file & folder duplication across the pooled disks, or even choose triplication or -- further replication. So with triplicate duplication, two drives could fail at once and you would still have your access to the files. And you would not lose your files or even part of them.

But you should also be able to include a RAID volume in a drive pool. I'm . . . fairly sure of that. . . .

So we had discussed RAM caching in the server situation versus and SSD cache. I've got a spare SSD of either a 128GB or 480GB size. And I can still purchase either a RipJawsX, RipJawsZ, or HyperX Savage 32GB 4x8 kit of DDR3-1600 or 1866. The price on the Savage kit is over $300, due to today's RAM market.

Looking at a practical-spending money constraint for that choice.

Then, I have gigabit Ethernet. I thought there might be some configuration with full-duplex that effectively gives it near-2Gbit speed, but I hadn't looked into it further. But the network speed caps my throughput between computers at 125MB/s anyway. I'd have to either Team two network adapters per system, or move up to the big money game for 10-gigabit Ethernet.

After that, one would be looking at the value of having an (already paid-for) SSD caching the disks in an array or pool to just reduce wear, tear and temperatures.

Now the other angle I was seeing related to deferred-write configurations, in a server situation with several nodes. I don't have several nodes, but it's more to think about.

Here's the controller I'm using over the Intel motherboard controller:

https://www.amazon.com/Supermicro-AOC-S ... B00DTZYQAI


It doesn't offer RAID, but only JBOD or AHCI. I have another 4-port controller and also with Marvell chip which does RAID0, 1, and 10. If I need a RAID volume, I can always have one, and still have AHCI SATA ports on the SuperMicro.

Yes, Primocache can cache RAID volumes. But I wouldn't recommend hardware RAID (or Windows software-based RAID) to anyone. I have moved away from a 4-bay RAID 5 solution onto DrivePool+Snapraid, for some very good reasons. Here are a couple of interesting articles to read about RAID in today's mass storage solutions:

• Why RAID 5 stops working in 2009
• Why RAID 6 stops working in 2019

Largely the problem with hardware RAID solutions stems from expected failures during rebuilds. Snapraid is an on-demand style RAID solution, with options up to and including Hexa-Parity (6 parity drives). The software has successfully protected a user from a simultaneous 4-drive failure, where they had 4 parity drives to recover from. And the best part - it's completely free.

Windows' failure where software RAID is concerned (specifically Storage Spaces) is that it can only handle single parity, unless you want to pay for Windows Server 2012 or beyond. Those are the only dual parity versions of Storage Spaces (Direct).

From those perspectives, I'll settle gladly for running nightly syncs and weekly scrubs on a dual-parity solution, without having to pay $1k+ for Windows Server in addition to all the hardware.

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I was partially mistaken about using a SSD for read/write buffering in Drivepool. After digging through their documentation a bit more, I found it only works as a write buffer. You'd still gain by having Primocache as a read cache for the Pool.

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I'd think your RAM purchasing decision is mostly based on whether this system is an Enterprise production platform, or a gaming rig, or just a file server. Primocache isn't particularly sensitive to faster RAM in it's benchmark numbers. I've overclocked my RAM significantly while benchmarking, and didn't see gains of more than 1-2%. So unless you have a need for faster RAM from the perspective of just the Operating System and other apps you run, you can get away with a large amount of RAM of lower speeds. That's what I did on my NAS/Media server - 32 gig of 2400 2T RAM.

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The NiC teaming for throughput is a nice idea, but to do it right I usually found you had to purchase a nice Enterprise level card which aren't cheap. Or a special motherboard that has the feature, also more money. It's a good idea but I haven't personally found a need in a small business / home environment for that much network throughput. That doesn't mean I wouldn't love to have a 2, 4 or 10 gbit network layer. So it depends on your needs - if you're running heavy disk access apps on the pool, or something like a large game, it might help.

I recently checked the pricing for 10g Ethernet, and it's still ridiculous. Not going to go that route myself.

Edit: I did find mention of how you can do independent NiC teaming in Windows 10 using Powershell, if you want to go that route: https://superuser.com/questions/955825/ ... w-possible

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Snapraid is a software based RAID solution that runs on top of your drive pool, contrary to the historical use of RAID underlying the volume. When I first read about it I had to take some time wrapping my head around the idea, but it's quite nice. It simply computes parity across your existing data volumes, and saves that parity to a directory on a normal volume (NTFS, etc). If you then lose a drive/folder/file, you can tell Snapraid to restore the contents based on the parity.

In that regard, the parity snapshot acts like a backup. If you delete a single file by accident, you can just tell Snapraid to restore the lost file. Since the file existed in your pool on a single drive, it uses parity+other drives and restores the lost file.

Snapraid runs on a schedule that you define, for syncs and scrubs. If you're paranoid, you can have it sync a few times a day. Or as little as once a month if you aren't doing many large changes to the data. That's where Stablebit Scanner comes in nicely - it'll monitor and tell you when it thinks a drive is starting to fail so you can move the data off and replace it.

And as I mentioned up above, it can handle up to six (6) separate parity drives, protecting your data against six simultaneous drive failures. Just pop in another drive, edit the config file, and re-sync.

Here's a video someone made that uses both Drivepool and Snapraid, and which (after watching a couple of times) helped convince me that Snapraid is a worthwhile solution: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kDCMpVgZb4g

My current plan on the new array this summer is to add in 2 Parity drives with Snapraid, ensuring I can recover from the loss of multiple drives simultaneously. Basically RAID6 without any of the rebuild failure issues mentioned in those two linked articles. In the future, I can expand the Pool and/or the number of parity drives dynamically - you can't do that with hardware RAID without re-creating the volume.

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I don't think using a SSD in the pool to defer/cache writes will reduce wear/tear on the physical drives either way, since they still have to write the same amount of data with or without the SSD.

A good option to monitor wear and tear however is Stablebit Scanner (mentioned above), which I also use. You can purchase it and Drivepool in a single package from their site, and it's gotten nothing but good reviews.

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I'm a bit torn about the choice of controller. Some are older and support hardware RAID. Some just support JBOD, or just individual drives. Usually RAID controller cards are more robust and have on-board cache, but I think many of the affordable models (non-Enterprise) are being phased out. It's something I haven't settled on yet, since I value stability and quality over affordability. Thanks for the link, I'll use it as another option when the time comes to choose.

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And of course - back to the primary reason you made the topic: I still think Primocache is a worthwhile investment (either version) provided you can spare the RAM for it to use. The only concern I still have is if Snapraid is 100% compatible with it. But I'm considering running some tests against my current Pool with the trial version installed, to find out first hand.

Just coming back in here to "report."

At the moment, I'm wondering why I spent so much on 2012 R2 Essentials when I might have built a server with limited function using Windows 10. But I was looking forward to possibly hosting a web-site, so at least I have options open. Besides, I like the way the server OS works, and I like the Dashboard. So -- the money may be "water under the bridge," and I'm sticking with this.

I found some 3TB Hitachi UltraStar 7K3000 hard disks, supposedly "refurbished," for about $50 each:

https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product. ... 5AD5YT9272

and bought four for a 12TB drive pool. I also had a spare 250GB Crucial SSD to use for an L2 caching volume. I first experimented with caching the virtual drive of the pool, but "no cigar." When I cached the underlying volumes and queried my PDF document database from a workstation, the hit-rate on those babies shot up to 30%. Of course, the limitation of gigabit Ethernet should be approximately equal to the sequential throughput spec of those drives, so anything faster might not show more speed where it counts. But if this remains stable, I may just buy the license key to the trial server version of Primo anyway.

The discussion about the origins of these refurb Hitachis can be found at the AnandTech forum at the moment under "Memory and Storage" and a thread about a new helium-filled HGST UltraStar. It would seem that I sort of hijacked the thread with my question, and it spawned a discussion of how unused disks new in anti-stat wrap would show up under a reseller refurbished option. Whether they are "never used" or used to end-of-warranty, they all run at temperatures between 34 and 38C, are quiet, and test out well under diagnostics. For that price, if one of them goes bad, I can replace it with a new Barracuda or Barra__ Pro drive. But these were "Enterprise" class disks.

Jaga wrote:Since we're talking about DrivePool (and Snapraid), perhaps @Support would be kind enough to let us know if both pieces of software are fully compatible with current versions of Primocache. Both are going in my new NAS/Media Server system, and I'll buy another copy of Primocache for it if it will work seamlessly with both.

A little off-topic now, but I answered my own question, and thought I'd put the information out here for anyone running Drivepool, Snapraid, and/or Primocache together - they are all fully compatible. Primocache runs at the Kernel level (when Windows boots). Drivepool runs at the service level (virtual disk services). Snapraid runs at the application level. I haven't seen any problems with any of them, including syncs/scrubs in Snapraid. Even Covecube's Scanner (a companion product to Drivepool) is working without any issues.

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Nice to hear about the cheap drives BonzaiDuck. I'm planning on re-tasking my 4TB WD Reds into teamed-parity drives when rebuilding the array in a couple months. They're 4.5 years old, but running like champs. Good disks are very worth the cost.

Not sure if you said you're going to go with actual RAID, or some other type of redundancy/parity?

I'm absolutely sure, that if you were asked, you could summarize the history of drive caching from 2011 and the Z68 chip forward.

Even if I chose not to discontinue RAID configurations after 2007 with my 3Ware 9650SE card, you're stuck with one storage mode or the other (AHCI versus RAID mode) unless you have multiple controllers. Then Samsung came along with their RAPID feature. Intel ISRT requires RAID; RAPID required AHCI.

So Stablebit seemed to offer the perfect solution, and I don't bother with the Hyper-Duo-enabled feature of my Marvell controllers on top of Intel. You can have AHCI; you don't have an array where you can't read or use the data from a single drive if you pull it from the array. There might be second-class performance with a virtual pool disk, but then redundancy at the file and folder level still speeds things up. You can pull a disk and unhide the folder "Pool-Part" under Stable bit, then read the data as you would read it from any single NTFS disk. So I only duplicate a small number of movies and TV DVR captures. I duplicate all of my "essential" data -- personal files, document archives, financial, pictures and so forth, together with a Music folder. This latter part of files and folders is maybe 500GB, so redundancy costs me 1TB. Redundancy or not, it's all backed up with daily incremental backups excluding the Music, Movies and DVR -- which get a simple monthly backup refresh. I've been using SyncBack SE from 2BrightSparks software for my server, as opposed to server imaging software from Macrium or AOMEI, which have an ~ $200 +/- pricetag as opposed to SyncBack with its license of $40.

And everything, for all the controllers of my server and workstations, is configured for AHCI mode.

Here's an observation or two.

It appears that the same glitch I experienced on the workstation with version 2.x.x arises with 2.4.0 trial server version.

This resulted in a Stablebit Scanner warning of an "uncorrectable" error leading to an unreliable disk among the four Hitachi "refurbished" drives I bought three weeks ago.

I swapped out the drive with indications, erased it to DOD standards, reinitialized and reformatted it. It is now finishing up the extended SMART test, and there are no warnings or indications, either with CrystalDiskInfo or WinDFT.

So I installed the 3.0.2 Beta version.

I had 30 days left on the trial 2.4.0, and expected I'd get 30 days remaining on the Beta 3.0.2. But I get 60 days.

I'm going to buy it, and I like to budget my money so I know a month in advance where it is going. We'll see if we have any problems. If not, the indications show that it is more or less worth it to a performance junkie. And that's me . . . .

Intermittent controller or drive failure maybe? I usually pay attention when Scanner says something's not quite right. A full reformat like you did can help though with untrustworthy sectors.

It's good you have Scanner running on those 'refurb' drives. I don't think I'd run a pool without that software now, it's just so damn helpful.

Edit: I posted this topic over on Drivepool's forums the other day after doing some Primocache + DrivePool testing. The products worth together very well, surprisingly.

Finally got back to this thread, and I read your thread over at Stablebit.

There was something weird in a positive way about the trial Beta version of PrimoCache Server. I am quite sure that somehow I managed to squeeze more out of it than the trial period. It had been showing 12 days left for the last week or so. Can't figure it out. But now it's August and I can tap the credit-card payoff budget for September without changing anything else in my monthly plan.

All this time, I watched the PrimoCache configuration on my Server 2012 R2 Essentials. It's as slick and trouble-free as any workstation installation I have. The server seems as snappy as the gigabit LAN connection would allow.

Whether it was worth the $119 to me, it's a pretty close evaluation. The server is working great. Caching the individual drives in the Stablebit pool works great. I can tell myself that I didn't "need" PrimoCache Server, but -- that's the way trial period experience works.

I'm fully licensed as of today.