About a month ago, I installed DriveHarmony from DataCore and created a protected disk. Today, I am updating you with the results of my unprotected disk testing and giving you a short summary of the DriveHarmony product. Read on for details!
As a refresher, I installed WHS2011RC on a VMWare Server installation on my HP HPE390t desktop. Here is the test system summary again:
- VMWare Server version 2.0.2;
- Host machine is a HP HPE390t running Windows 7 Ultimate 64 bit, two cores from my i7-980X and 4GB of memory allocated to the VM;
- One 400GB IDE drive harvested from my old 2001 era Gateway desktop, loaded into a ThermalTake Silver River DUO Enclosure using USB 2.0; and,
- One 500GB Seagate drive that was originally in my HP EX475 MSS, loaded into a RocketFish USB 3.0 3.5” SATA Hard Drive Enclosure.
My installation process was as follows:
- Add the external enclosures to the HPE390t;
- Allocate these USB drives to the host machine in VMWare Server;
- Allocate these drives as new virtual drives in the virtual machine that is running WHS2011 RC;
- Install DriveHarmony;
- Create an unprotected drive.
Since I added the drives to the VMWare Server instance when I performed my protected drive tests, I’ll just document the process of adding the USB drives to an unprotected pool in this article. See my last post on DriveHarmony for details on how to add the drives to the VM.
Click on Create Unprotected Drive.
Next, click on drive(s) to add. Click on Create Drive.
36 hours later, the format had not completed so I killed the job. DataCore advised me that USB 2 drives are too slow for acceptable performance of DriveHarmony and advised ensuring that external drives are connected either via ESATA or USB 3. Once that drive format would have completed, I would have had an unprotected pool created from the available space on both drives.
This concludes my testing of DataCore’s DriveHarmony.
