I have beating my head against the wall trying to install FlexRAID on Windows Home Server 2011 since the beginning of the year. I spent the first month trying to install using several Sans Digital port expanding towers. I kept having errors/crashes when the system tried to calculate parity on the initial install. I thought it might be the slow access to the port-multiplier set-up, but I finally ran scan disk on all the drives and found one parity drive (out of 4) had disk errors that were probably causing the problem. Then, the initial install was taking over 4 days. I found this unacceptable and kept looking for a reason and whether this was typical. I upgraded to a hardware RAID care (?), with multiple SAS ports. The Create process was still very slow. The Parity Update took a similar length of time. As did the Validate Parity procedure. And I assume the Verify procedure would take a similar period of time. The suggestion is to run the Update every night, the Validate weekly, and the Verify monthly. With the length of time for an Update, it would be impossible to keep up with this schedule.
The program seems to be in a period of flux, with the developer not sure of its direction. There is no firm documentation, just the wiki, forums, and some how-tos. It is easy to find the how to do the general set-up, but I believe most are going with small RAID sizes. Now, my storage needs are more for convenience and video access rather than any important, can't be replaced files (for the most part). My business and personal files are saved to a different system. The attraction of FlexRAID is its ability to combine multiple hard drives into a "single pool" to the user. This is what attracted me to the software. Also, removing FlexRAID gave you access to the individual drives and contents, unlike most traditional RAID setups. Its T(infinity) parity was an added bonus. With multiple parity drives, it was reported that you could lose multiple drives and still be able to reconstruct the missing drives from the parity drives. It is just that the time involved in parity creation and checking, as well as the amount of time it would take to reconstruct 1 missing, let alone multiple missing, drives just seems to great. The RAID would wear out the drives creating, validating and checking the RAID contents! Right now I am using the software for drive pooling only, and am fairly happy with the results. Are there any FlexRAID users, experts or fan bois out there in HardwareGroup land? I have several questions I have not been able to answer by reading the forums, wikis and how-tos. The most pressing is that it seems that you cannot create more than a single pool? I wanted to make several pools which would allow parity validation to be more easily managed. TRUE? Although I paid for FlexRAID with Parity, I am not married to the software. Other suggestions and why would be appreciated. So, what have you been working on that you have neglected the HardwareGroup? I always find the discussions interesting and useful. Jim Maki jwm_maill...@comcast.net
