Thinking of moving from FlexRAID to SnapRAID

[smitbret]

Has anyone had any experience with both SnapRAID and FlexRAID? Could anyone prep me for any potential difficulties in moving my array over from FlexRAID to a similar SnapRAID setup? Would it just be as simple as uninstalling FlexRAID, installing SnapRAID (with Stablebit DrivePool) and then just rebuilding the array or would it be more complicated than that?

I have been using FlexRAID for about 3 years on my home server. I had to replace the motherboard so I figured that I would upgrade the CPU while I was in there because my server does On-The-Fly transcoding of video and the extra horsepower would come in handy. I also changed the form factor from mATX to ATX so that I would have more expansion slots in the future. In doing so I had to also add a video card because the ATX boards don't have onboard graphics.

In the process of making these changes, I apparently crossed some "Threshold" with FlexRAID. They consider their product to be similar to OEM versions of Windows where if you change enough components then it is considered a new system. Now I can't activate FlexRAID. I have had a few e-mails back and forth with them over the last 18 hours and they won't budge even though everything else in the server is exactly as it was when the MB went down 5 days ago. Even the OEM version of Windows 7 activated without an issue but they say that it is a migration to new system and not normal maintenance.

They offered a fairly decent discount on a new license but for less than the cost of the new license I can get SnapRAID and Stablebit DrivePool to do the same thing.

Plus, I like that SnapRAID can detect silent errors before they propogate into the parity. I'm just a little worried about how Pooling would be handled.

 

[monkey333]

I have flexraid, never new about that. Now I'm leery about upgrading. Come to think of it, i swear I did a complete upgrade and had no issues.

 

[fleshconsumed]

I use SnapRaid + DrivePool at my home server. I have a windows job that runs every midnight to bring parity up to date. The whole setup takes a bit of time to set up properly and there is a bit of learning curve with SnapRAID configuration file, but once it's up, it works like a charm.

Just so you know, SnapRAID does not offer realtime parity protection like flexraid does. You need to update parity manually or on a schedule. So theoretically you can lose some of your data if one of your hard drives goes down between the time you modified your files and next parity update. Also, FYI by default SnapRAID will ignore system and hidden folders and the way DrivePool works is it creates DrivePool.GUID folder on each hard drive that is both hidden and system. You will need to remove system/hidden attributes from those folders in order for SnapRAID to actually scan and back those up. This is what I did because IMO it was the easiest option to SnapRAID protect the entire hard drive including what's inside the DrivePool. If you're going to do that you will probably want to disable data duplication features within DrivePool since that would be redundant (unless you want more redundancy than SnapRAID provides).

Also, DrivePool also uses some sort of hardware signature, I tripped it when I upgraded BIOS on my motherboards, but I had no problem "transferring" the license to the same system with the new BIOS. There is actually a FAQ on StableBit website about it and they recommend "unactivating" StableBit products before moving it to new system to prevent problems. I totally did not realize upgrading BIOS would do that, but it worked out in the end anyway.