DriveBender has left its beta phase and is now available as a released product in version 1.4.0.0. Read on for details.
DriveBender has left its beta phase and is now available as a released product in version 1.4.0.0. DriveBender was developed for Windows Home Server to add drive pooling features, and it is also available for Windows. Here are the product features:
Drive Bender is state of the art, single point storage pool technology for all versions of Microsoft Windows. From Windows XP through to the new Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012. There is even a Windows Home Server 2011 specific version that is shipped with a native WHS dashboard addin.
Drive Bender presents multiple hard drives as a single pool of data storage, either as one or more drive letters, or a network shared drive. Drive Bender is able to do this with any drive recognized by Windows, including external drive such as USB, Firewire etc.
Management
Drive Bender for Windows is shipped with a metro style management dashboard client. This client allows for the remote management of the pool, mount point and hard drives. The dashboard also provides real-time information on file type usage, primary and duplicate file usage and read and write rates (for both the pool and the individual drives within the pool).
Drive Bender for WHS is shipped with a metro style WHS addin that allows for pool, mount point and drive management (classic WHS interface also available). Built upon the same platform as Drive Bender for Windows, the WHS edition offers a “best in class” WHS experience.
Performance
Drive Bender is built upon an enterprise grade driver that allows for high I/O throughput, and unlike some of the competition, Drive Bender continues to perform well even as the pool grows. In addition performance is further enhanced through our Smooth Stream technology. Smooth Stream is a feature that can improve file streaming performance (i.e. file coping or video / music streaming etc.) by caching a certain amount of the file being read.
Expandable
Drive Bender also provides the user with the ability to seamless expand their storage pool by simply adding a new drive. Adding a new drive expands the pool by the size of the new drive. Existing data within the pool is redistributed to the new drive to ensure the pool remain balanced.
Drive Merging and Converting
Drive Bender also offers a merge capability, allowing users to take a drive that contains data, and merge that drive (and its data) into the pool. In addition there is also a drive conversion feature. This can take and existing drive letter (mounted against a physical drive) and convert this into a pooled drive. Once completed, new hard drives can be added to expand the once fixed drive.
Drive Swapping
Drive Bender offers a drive swap feature that allow a user to seamlessly swap a drive in the pool for a new hard drive… thus making the upgrading a pool easier than ever.
Data Redundancy
To further ensure data safety, Drive Bender uses file duplication (optional down to the folder level) as its primary means of file redundancy. This means that any files written to the pool, is written to two physical hard drives simultaneously. And unlike software based RAID product, there is no major performance hit when writing to the pool.
Non-destructive
One of the key Drive Bender features is its non-destructive file system technology. In short, this means that all drives within a Drive Bender pool utilize the standard NTFS format, and can be added to the pool without being formatted. Again unlike RAID, all pooled drives can be removed and read on any machine capable of reading the NTFS format (this includes all modern Windows platforms).
Easy to Try
Because of our non-destructive file system, taking Drive Bender for a test drive is easy. Simply specify the drives to be included in the pool, and you are ready go. The drives are not formatted (unless specified), the only change made to the drive is the addition of a folder that holds the contents of the pool and a small number of configuration files.
Check it out here if you are looking for a drive pooling option for Windows Home Server or Windows systems.
DriveBender Website