Windows Storage Spaces / Drivepool / options?

I'm looking at ways of sorting out storage on my new Ryzen build. I've got a plex machine running 24/7 off an 8TB store, so this isn't something that needs to be huge so will make use of existing drives. Data protection and redundancy for data backups is the aim.

I did a test with Storage Spaces but didn't like how 'invisible' it all ways in as much as it wasn't obvious what was going on below, so was uneasy about whether it would ever tell me if the drives were failing... or even if they had failed.

So next (and now) I've got a test Drivepool running on a set of old 1TB Samsung Spinpoints (2 of which have slightly sketchy SMART readings). But other than me needing to rotate a few drives around and ditch the bad ones I think drivepool & scanner will do the job. I like how I can control folder by folder whether data is mirrored / duplicated and how many times.

But are there any other alternatives / recommendations? I'd like something that can make use of a series of drives from 1TB to 4TB (as I have these), and something that can at least give me mirroring for a bit of data security in case of drive failure.

The 'pool' on these drives is as a backup location for data in other places and as a location for steam games that aren't used often enough, or aren't important enough to live on the SSD(s).

Your thoughts are welcome

 

Drivepool, scanner & cloudDrive makes ane awesome setup.
Create a pool with Drivepool then map the location using CloudDrive (with an SSD as cache) and you get a poor man's tiered storage

 

unRAID? Can handle multiple drive sizes, support for dual parity drives and cache drives to increase write speeds. It also runs Docker, so you can have your Plex Server running as a Docker object.

 

My cloud storage (100GB Google) has to be accessible on my Macs too, so I'm not going down the cloudDrive route. Looks nice though.

My plex server is 24/7 running on an old MacBook Pro so it's not relevant to this.

Plus, if I went down the unRAID route I'd have to install windows on top of that right? I don't think virtualising Windows is a better option than installing a drive pooling solution within windows. This isn't going to be a NAS / VM server hybrid.

 

Apologies, my bad. I didn't pick up that you were talking about a desktop machine.

 

Update: Still using drivepool and so far it's lived up to my expectations.
I have it running with 2x4TB, 1x1TB & 1x250GBSSD. My steam 'overflow' goes on the SSD first and everything I care about is x2 duplicated. Speeds are fine with a noticeable boost when data is mirrored. Seems to 'just work'
All in all, a happy bunny.

 

You dodn't need to point CloudDrive at the cloud. You can point it at the local Drivepool drive (+ add an SSD as a cache) and map to that

 

Not sure that's gonna help over what I've got right now.
I have plenty of space on c (Fast PCI M.2) for the entire google-drive, fast uploads to google and near continuous file history backups to the pool.
I feel a little bit vulnerable only have one cloud backup at the moment since crash plan ditched their non commercial offerings and can't justify the expense of adding another paid tier.