Dumped RAID5 for WHS

Pandobear said:
Quite correct, where a manager is employed to manage an array. However in the home enviroment how many people do you think have a 'hot spare', how many even have a spare drive on the shelf to replace a defective drive? I would place a bet that it is less than 10%.

Perhaps anyone reading this thread that uses RAID 5 currently could post to say whether they have a 'hot spare' or a drive sitting ready to replace a failed drive, or perhaps whether they would rely on Overclockers excellant next day delivery service?
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4 drive RAID5 array here, I have a hot spare but no immediate replacement drive.
 
Pandobear said:
You would be wiser to install it on one of the 500GB drives that you intend to use for storage. WHS works by saving all your data to the second partiion on your OS drive, and then moving the data to your storage drives when it has time, replacing it with a 'tomestone' file. There is a possibility that you will temporarily run out of space when copying large amounts of files to your server, by having too small a main drive, meaning that you then have to wait for the files to be moved across. Microsoft thus recommend that you use the largest drive available to you for you OS.
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Yep, WHS will partition the 500Gb drive and take 20gb for system, leaving you the remainder. I have 3x500gb in mine and it gives me 1.36Tb of space. (Half that for folder duplication). I would look at installing the Advanced Admin Console add-in (Not by microsoft). Greatly increases what you can do when logged in remotely (When you are not using remote desktop that is).
 
How many home users have RAID 5 arrays? It's a silly question really. The tiny number of people who do so are those well aware of what can happen so they manage their arrays in a way that they're comfortable with. Most people won't have a hotspare or spare drive around so they will just shutdown the array.
Of the things that can destroy RAID arrays multiple disk failure is the least worrying IMO as it's very unlikely to happen as a result of the drives themselves going bad, and it's the whole point of a redundant array of disks; exploding PSU's, issues from power outages and corruption are much bigger concerns.
 
How many home users have RAID 5 arrays?
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Well reading the questions on here it seems to be the standard solution to anyone asking how to protect there valuable files, be it on a media server or similar. It seems that more and more people are interested in providing a single storage place for all their music and movies and from reading posts lost of them are even looking at Areca and similar hardware raid solutions that are a ridiculous overkill, however there has been little alternative to date, other than a software raid array that are pretty much derided by all sides.

So what I was saying is that for a media storage application, hardware raid is overkill in terms of speed and 'uptime' with a serious lack of insurance should multiple disks fail for any reason, and I take your point that drive failure can be brough on by a multitude of other failures that can, and indeed are likely to effect more that one drive at a time.

This brings me to the conclusion that RAID5/6 is wholly unsuitable for data protection in the home, with WHS should you lose 5 out of 12 drives due to power supply failure, you still are able to easily retrieve the remaining 7/12ths of your data, not ideal, but a whole lot better than losing it all. If you have duplication turned on, then you may not lose any data. This is reason enough for me to rule out RAID 5/6.

Of course you can't beat backing up your data on a second machine just to be sure....
 
Pandobear said:
You would be wiser to install it on one of the 500GB drives that you intend to use for storage. WHS works by saving all your data to the second partiion on your OS drive, and then moving the data to your storage drives when it has time, replacing it with a 'tomestone' file. There is a possibility that you will temporarily run out of space when copying large amounts of files to your server, by having too small a main drive, meaning that you then have to wait for the files to be moved across. Microsoft thus recommend that you use the largest drive available to you for you OS.
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I think the 160Gb will be quite enough tbh. Id rather keep all the 500Gb drives seperate for storage (And I have a paranoia about installing windows on the same drive as data storage) When you say about the 'tomestone' file, does the data stay stored as this file? and if so, what filetype is it? Ie, if the windows install was to go belly up, can you still access the files in the data storage drives from and XP install say? Windows will take up 20Gb? That leaves me 140Gb for temp transfer space which should be plenty enough for me. Initially i'll be moving quite a lot of data across to the server, but after that the most i'll move at any one time will be 2-3 1.5Gb files.

PhillyDee said:
Yep, WHS will partition the 500Gb drive and take 20gb for system, leaving you the remainder. I have 3x500gb in mine and it gives me 1.36Tb of space. (Half that for folder duplication). I would look at installing the Advanced Admin Console add-in (Not by microsoft). Greatly increases what you can do when logged in remotely (When you are not using remote desktop that is).
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I'll definately look at the Advanced Admin Console add-in. One of the reason im very tempted by WHS is due to the add-ins available for it. I have seen a very cool utorrent one that would fit in very nicely with what im intending. :)
 
does the data stay stored as this file?
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The tombstone file is basically a file that appears to have all the properties of the original file, however is really just a 'redirect' to where the actual file is stored, once the file has been migrated. This is why it is important to have the maximum size of hard drive for this partition. When the server is busy all of the files are copied directly to your data partition, and then when it is able the server migrates the data across to the storage drives, and leave the tombstone file behind.

There was a problem when moving large amounts of files to the WHS from Vista, where Vista will check whether the storage drive has enough space to store the data before the operation commences. So if you try to move 800 GB of data to a server with a 140 GB data partition, Vista will not let you, saying there is not enough space. You can get around it by using robocopy or similar to do the job, or breaking the move into smaller chunks. This may have been corrected in Power Pack 1, not sure. But Microsoft do recommend using largest drive you have for the OS, presumably for this reason.
 
Messiah Khan said:
I'll definately look at the Advanced Admin Console add-in. One of the reason im very tempted by WHS is due to the add-ins available for it. I have seen a very cool utorrent one that would fit in very nicely with what im intending. :)
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Any links to some of the cool add ins you have seen?
 
Pandobear said:
Ah, Marscay, still 'selling' the Perc 5/i ? I am still selling WHS.
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lol :)

we could both happily trade the pros and cons of each setup for hours i'm sure ;) .....WHS through mirroring has better fault tolerance than raid 5 for sure but also equals a lot of drives for an 8TB setup :eek:

all my important stuff is backed up so if the R5 server goes down yeh i'd be jacked but i'd move on pretty quick, i have much faith in the GP RE2 drives :p

but yeh horses for courses!!!!
 
antc said:
Thanks for that, much appreciated. :)

Have you got your server up and running yet Messiah Khan ?
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No problem.:)

Nope, just waiting for the rackmount case now. I've preordered it, and it should come in stock on Monday. The 16port sata controller, system drive, ram and psu have all arrived, so hopefully if all goes right (and city link don't mess up too badly) then I should get it together next weekend. :)
 
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