Create a sort of Drive Extender on WHS 2011?

[Skeeter]

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?

 

[Skeeter]

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

Edit: It does. This looks ideal! Thanks!

 

[Skeeter]

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?

 

[Skeeter]

Amazing. Sounds spot on!

Many thanks Cool Breeze.

 

[Skeeter]

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?

 

[Skeeter]

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.

I use StableBit DrivePool to do the same.

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

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?

 

[Skeeter]

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?

 

[Skeeter]

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.