Tips: FlexRAID Storage Pooling under Windows

There are a number of considerations to take in order to successfully use the Storage Pooling feature in FlexRAID.

1. Avoid opening up the same files from both inside and outside of the storage pool (opening up the same files from the source drives and the storage pool at the same time). If a file is opened both outside and inside the storage pool, some operations (such as delete and rename) could lead to lock contentions.
2. Whenever the storage pool is stopped, take care to close all application holding a handle to files in the storage pool before restarting it. Although most applications should recover just fine, some application page-read their data. Once the storage pool is stopped, most memory pages become invalid and applications attempting to access those pages would lead to page fault and often BSOD (blue screen of death).
3. You should never need to start and stop the Disk Manager. The FlexRAID service will automatically start it if it is not yet started. Stopping it is also unnecessary and will cause more page invalidation with issues similar to bullet number 2.
4. If you hibernate or put you computer into sleep mode, take care to close all applications having an active handle to the Storage Pool. Windows will at times restore the applications before restoring the Storage Pool. When that happens, the application will be referencing an invalid memory location which will lead to a page fault and BSOD. On Windows 2008, disabling (or setting it to run manually) the Oobe.exe (Windows Server Initial Configuration Tasks) has resolved BSOD issues after resuming from a sleep for some users.