Free Version - no physical disks?

splark · Wed Jun 06, 2012 9:30 am

Hi I am just trying to get started testing out the free version but instantly I've hit a roadblock.

Trying to Add Device -> Hard Disk -> Physical - tells me I am not licensed to use physical disks. Is this a problem with my installed free license or is this by design? I can not find any mention of a restriction like this in any of your web pages or guides or any mention in the forums.

Am I wasting my time trying to test the free edition or has something gone wrong here?

If this is by design, then you need to update your Starwind Free VS Microsoft iSCSI because that is certainly a massive X against your product.

Wed Jun 06, 2012 10:32 am

1) It's by design. Layering anything on top of a physical disk is a performance bummer. We don't want people doing this and wasting our time checking their complains about speed and damaged file system when they wipe or mount the physical disk with local access. Espesially in a free version. Microsoft had also dropped mapping partitions for a reason and not just for fun.

2) Matrix here:

http://www.starwindsoftware.com/starwind-free

Is 100% correct. There's no claims we support what we actually don't.

splark wrote:Hi I am just trying to get started testing out the free version but instantly I've hit a roadblock.

Trying to Add Device -> Hard Disk -> Physical - tells me I am not licensed to use physical disks. Is this a problem with my installed free license or is this by design? I can not find any mention of a restriction like this in any of your web pages or guides or any mention in the forums.

Am I wasting my time trying to test the free edition or has something gone wrong here?

If this is by design, then you need to update your Starwind Free VS Microsoft iSCSI because that is certainly a massive X against your product.

splark · Wed Jun 06, 2012 10:58 am

Ah I see. Thanks very much for clearing that up. I guess I was looking at it from the wrong point of view.

I still don't understand how the matrix tells me that though? Is it the entry "Disk Bridge" which is one of the only entries that does not link to a description of the term?
I've searched for that term but don't get much in the way of results.

I'll rethink how I want to use this. The idea was to replace a HP N36 Mini server running Solaris + Napp-it with something Windows based since this is just for home playing.

Thanks again for the quick and helpful response. Hopefully my post at least helps anyone silly like me that doesn't understand what they are doing

Wed Jun 06, 2012 4:18 pm

The matrix is there to show how StarWind Free is different from Microsoft iSCSI target. As they both support placing iSCSI volumes inside files placed on top of a file system there's no need to highlight they can do the same.

It's doable. You'll have to format raw volumes with NTFS and put iSCSI volumes either as a allocated files (IMG) or growable dedupe images.

splark wrote:Ah I see. Thanks very much for clearing that up. I guess I was looking at it from the wrong point of view.

I still don't understand how the matrix tells me that though? Is it the entry "Disk Bridge" which is one of the only entries that does not link to a description of the term?
I've searched for that term but don't get much in the way of results.

I'll rethink how I want to use this. The idea was to replace a HP N36 Mini server running Solaris + Napp-it with something Windows based since this is just for home playing.

Thanks again for the quick and helpful response. Hopefully my post at least helps anyone silly like me that doesn't understand what they are doing