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Technical overview

The idea of this section is to give an overview of how Drive Bender hangs together, and how a user can “see under the hood”.
The Drive Bender pooling technology is based upon providing a single point of access (a mount point) to one or more hard drives. These hard drives are collectively known as a pool. Drive Bender receives file system requests and then directs the file system calls to the appropriate drive. The drives themselves utilize the standard NTFS file system and when added to a pool, are not modified, with one the exception – a pool folder is created on the root of the drive. This pool folder has a GUID as a name, this is to ensure we do not end up with two or more pooled drives with the same folder name (for more information on GUID, see Wikipedia).
Each one of these pooled drives is mounted against Windows using their fully qualified file path as the mount point, you can see this by opening Windows Disk Manager (under computer management) and selecting “Change Drive Letter and Paths” on a pooled drive. The default mounting location of all pooled drives is “C:\Program Files\Division-M\Drive Bender\System\Mounts”. What this means is that each drive added to the pool, ends up in this folder, and has a GUID as its name.
 
 
The above image shows our pool having 3 pooled drives.
From here you are able to enter the root of each pooled drive. The root of the pooled drive contains a number of files and folders. These are
§     A “{ *guid* }.PI.$DRIVEBENDER” file. This text file details information about the pool this drive is associated with. Open this file is an easy way to determine what pool instance owners this drive.
§     One or more “{ *guid* }. PI.$DRIVEBENDER” files. These text files detail the mount points that this pool contains. Each of these files should have a corresponding folder of the same name (minus the”.MI.$DRIVEBENDER” extension). Opening this file is a good way to determine the folder / mount point relationship.
§     A “{ *guid* } folder for each mount point in the pool.
 
 
The above image shows a pooled drive with a single mount point folder - {EB8FF66F-451C-4834-9697-EA1843449907}
So to summarize, the Drive Bender folder structure is :-
“…\Mount\{ *pool guid* }\{ *mount point guid* }\... user data
This structure means a drive can be pulled from a Drive Bender pool and read on any system. It also means that a pooled drive can be re-mounted easily, and mount point can be restored.