Create a sort of Drive Extender on WHS 2011?

Skeeter · 3 Jan 2013 at 10:06

I love my WHS v1 box, but Server 2003 is getting old and I'm always concerned about compatibility with new drives.

Im thinking of WHS 2011, but the lack of DE is my main concern. I love the fact that all the HDDs in my server (6 currently, soon to be 7) are treated as one big disk and the shares are stored and duplicated across them automatically. As I understand it in 2011 you are limited to actually using the drives themselves, therefore limiting your share size to the size of your largest disk (I have a movies share of 3.2TB, while my largest actual HDD is 2TB).

Would there be a way to use something like RAID or JBOD to create a pool of drives with some sort of mirroring, and then present that to the OS as a single large disk? That way it thinks it just has a ~6TB D drive with the shares on it, but under that there is actually 12TBs of assorted disks with mirroring on it?

Can it be done simply?

Cool Breeze · 3 Jan 2013 at 10:14

I use drive bender and it runs flawlessly, ok you have to pay for a license but at $17.50 about 10 quid its well worth it.

have been running on my WHS now for almost a year without issue.

Skeeter · 3 Jan 2013 at 10:20

Looks good, but can it also do mirroring or redundancy in case of a hardware failure?

Edit: It does. This looks ideal! Thanks!

Cool Breeze · 3 Jan 2013 at 10:24

Yes you can set up folder duplication and it will duplicate data in full across the physical drives so you have a full copy of the data on more then one physical drive It has some parity checking but not like raid 5. I have moved the pool of data to and from different PC's while settlling on my hardware and the data integrity stayed intact and the pool re-built without issue. U can also merge existing data into the pool etc.

It's proper drive pooling just like WHS v1 but on steroids and once set up just forget it.

Skeeter · 3 Jan 2013 at 10:26

Does it use a custom file format? With WHS v1 if the server goes belly up (which I have had happen once when the system drive failed) you can just plug the drives from the pool into any Windows machine and copy over the contents of the hidden DE folder. Does Drive Bender allow this too do you know?

Cool Breeze · 3 Jan 2013 at 10:29

Yes it allows this, it uses your existing file system, what it does is create a folder on the drives where it holds the data and if you pulled a drive and put it in another computer you would see that folder and all the data held within in its original format, drive bender makes no changes to the data or file format. And it also use's a hardware level driver for the pooling technology it uses, which I've heard is best as opposed to software.

Skeeter · 3 Jan 2013 at 11:39

Amazing. Sounds spot on!

Many thanks Cool Breeze.

PhillyDee · 3 Jan 2013 at 11:41

Handy, i might upgrade mine then! DE is the one thing I use from WHSv1. Well, backups happen.

Skeeter · 3 Jan 2013 at 11:45

PhillyDee said:
Handy, i might upgrade mine then! DE is the one thing I use from WHSv1. Well, backups happen.

DE was the reason I haven't upgraded too. Its just so blissfully simple that the thought of going back to normal drives and having to set manual backups felt like a major step back.

WHS 2011 also does something about backing up its System drive too, doesn't it?

Cool Breeze · 3 Jan 2013 at 13:07

Forgot to mention , Drive Bender has a proper snap in for the WHS console too. WHS 2011 allows back up of the system OS drive yes but I think it's to USB / external drives only.

geuben · 3 Jan 2013 at 13:09

I use StableBit DrivePool to do the same.

platypus · 3 Jan 2013 at 14:13

Another vote for Stablebit here. Have been using since release with out issue (other than one of my own making), and the extra features of WHSv2011 make it worth the upgrade.

unleashed · 3 Jan 2013 at 15:21

I'm now using WSE 2012 with storage spaces - fantastic....so far.

Skeeter · 3 Jan 2013 at 16:52

Cool Breeze said:
Forgot to mention , Drive Bender has a proper snap in for the WHS console too. WHS 2011 allows back up of the system OS drive yes but I think it's to USB / external drives only.

Thats fine, I was going to just use a small spare drive I had lying about anyway. Its just to protect against the System drive failing as I had that happen in WHSv1 and its a pain.

geuben said:
I use StableBit DrivePool to do the same.

Cheers, I'll have a look at that too.

unleashed said:
I'm now using WSE 2012 with storage spaces - fantastic....so far.

WSE doesn't have the seemless and brilliantly slick centrally controlled backup of WHS, does it?

unleashed · 4 Jan 2013 at 07:45

Skeeter said:
WSE doesn't have the seemless and brilliantly slick centrally controlled backup of WHS, does it?

Yes WSE 2012 performs a full image backs up each client once a day and full server back ups twice a day by default, all automatically. It also backs up remote clients over VPN.

Skeeter · 8 Jun 2015 at 18:22

Necro thread revival. I never did get Server 2008 or 2012 derived solutions, my 2003 box is still chugging along.

But I've decided to repurposed a spare Windows 7 license and put Windows 10 on my server when it's released.

So, is Drive Bender still a decent bet for turning what will be 7 or so physical drives into one large storage pool, with duplication and redundancy built in? Is there any news on it being updated to support Windows 10?

Kidge · 8 Jun 2015 at 20:05

I'm +1 on Stablebit as i have both DrivePool and Scanner on my WHS2011 box unsure whether they will support Win10 but i would imagine they will.

Skeeter · 9 Jun 2015 at 06:53

I've spoken to Drive Bender support and Windows 10 is already supported in the latest version. I've not found out if/when Stablebit will support it.