Drive Bender is one of the new alternatives to the classic Window Home Server Drive Extender. It does not offer a parity storage option, but it does offer automatic duplication on 2 drives and disk pooling. Drive Bender is available for every version of Windows since Windows XP. In the Server environments, it does have a Dashboard integration for seamless management. Otherwise it is available as a client/server management interface, so it can be managed remotely. Drive Bender does include S.M.A.R.T. disk monitoring.
Ease of Use
Creating the pool is pretty straight forward. Simply follow the prompts in getting started. The interface offers the ability to add a new drive, or to merge the contents of the existing drive into a new or existing pool.
It was odd that the control panel would report the duplicated files as free space. It would report how many files and what percentage of original vs duplicate files were stored on each drive. Since I merged in two drives with data, then added 2 empty drives, the distribution started out with the 2 original drives with 100% primary files, and the other 2 files containing 100% duplicated files. Duplicates were spread across all remaining drives as they were made.
Another positive point is that Drive Bender does not lock in the data. The original files are still available directly on the drives without Drive Bender, so they can be recovered under any system that can read the underlying file system. Drive Bender does disable the direct mount points of these drives by default so that they can be accessed only through the Drive Bender virtual drive mount point. This ensures that nothing on the disks changes that Drive Bender can’t manage. This contrasts with DrivePool, which manages access through the Windows Server shares and continues to allow direct use.
The individual drive mappings can be restored if desired, but it is not recommended. The DriveBender pool is stored inside of a GUID directory that contains the pool folder structure. Inside each folder is a child folder named FOLDER.DUPLICATE.$DRIVEBENDER. This contains the duplicates where the originals are not on this drive. This folder will not show up when accessing the drives through the DriveBender mount point. Drive listings from the command line will not show things in the normal alphabetical order, instead listing by drive order. Windows Explorer will still order things as expected.
Drive Bender did occasionally have trouble accurately reporting free space as the array was initially being built. It would not count the duplicates against free space. At some point, this was corrected and free space started showing accurate space, and I did not see any further issues.
Notification and Rebuild
Notification is handled through Windows Events and are captured in the Windows Home Server Dashboard. When I took a drive offline, the entire pool went offline. The pool mount point is not available again until the missing drive is replaced and rebuilt. Though all the files are present, they can only be accessed directly, which will require manual effort to deal with original vs duplicated files.
The failed drives can be easily rebuilt by replacing the failed drive and then utilizing the Pool Dashboard option for Repair Pool. The mount point is restored when the process is started, but unfortunately not all the files are available until the repair is complete. Unfortunately, this could result in the array being offline for days as a drive is ordered and rebuilt.
Performance
It was unexpected, but good performance improvements were actually observed. Surprisingly the read speeds seemed to improve by close to 50%. This can be explained by the underlying disk duplication, but when watching the performance charts in Pool Management. It was odd since the dashboard was reporting all of the read performance coming from a single disk. The improvements on random write seem to suggest that a buffer may be used in the implementation.
Merging in an existing drive with data took about as long as would be expected to manually clone the data on the drive. Removing a drive, or merging in an existing drive, will require dismounting the pool for the time of the transition. Removing the drive requires evacuation of the drive. There is no option to quickly remove and duplicate later. While removable drives can be used, they should not be treated as such when used as a pooled drive, so this shouldn’t be an issue for real world usage.
Drive Bender does have service that can be observed utilizes resources during file copy operations. This process under heavy load with duplication enabled was about 20-25% utilization, and under 30MB of memory. Explorer and System would run another 5-10% between them. Load was distributed evenly across all cores.
Verdict
Ease of Use: 4/5
Drive loss limit: 1 (minimum, assuming duplication is enabled).
Performance: 5/5
Expansion / Upgrade options: Simple
Efficiency: N/2
Cost: $25 for WHS, $40 for other Windows OS. At time of publishing, on sale 30% off.
Viable: Yes
I wish this solution had a Parity option, just for storage efficiency. However, it possible to determine at a folder level what gets duplicated and what does not. This solution performs surprisingly well, and it is pretty straight forward to manage and very flexible. Additionally, while my data was protected, I was displeased with the array being unavailable until the repair was completed.
Hi, thanks for your informative review of Drive Bender. I’ve been researching a solution like this for a while, and Drive Bender has me interested. I just wanted to clarify some things before I jump in:
Right now I have 9TB of drives of different sizes, with a little under 8TB of data used on them. If I use Drive Bender to pool my drives, how does the data redundancy work exactly? In order to have all of my data backed up (right now approximately 7.5TB of data), does this mean I’d need to have another 7.5TB of free space (which would mean adding more empty drives) in the pool? Basically what I’m saying is; if I want, say, 10TB of usable pooled storage, and also want this storage to be redundant in case of a drive failure, do I also need another 10TB of free space for file duplication in case of a failure?
Yes, DriveBender works via duplication, so you’ll have to have at least twice as much drive space as you want to back up. Depending on your drive configurations, you may have to have more. (For instance, 2x 500GB drives and a 3TB drive gives you 4TB, but only 1TB is available for duplication, and, while 2 additonal TB’s could be used for non duplicated data).
In general, as long as your largest drive is no bigger than the sum of the rest of your drives, you should be fine for complete duplication.
Right now I have 2x 3TB and 3x 1TB drives. I attempted to set up a drive pool on one of my 3TB drives but it got hung up when it tried initiating the drive so I had to remove it. I tried it again with autoplay disabled for mounted drives with the same problem “unable to initiate”. Any thoughts on what could cause this issue?
Not sure, I don’t recall having any issues with mine, but that was over a year ago. It may be that a pool requires 2 or more drives. Have you tried setting up with 2+ drives?
No, I haven’t yet. I was kind of put off by that error and didn’t want to risk losing any data by trying again with two drives. I have a spare 1tb drive I will test it with later, since I haven’t tried starting a pool with an empty drive yet.