Migrating from WHSv1 to 2011 help needed.

hawker1986

hawker1986

hawker1986

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Hey guys,

Not sure if anyone has done this yet or has any experience, but im having problems with stutter from my WHSv1 streaming vids, so im planning on heading to WHS2011. I need some advice on how best to retain my redundancy on the new OS without Drive extender. Also bear in mind im running this on 4 mobo ports + 2 SATA add in card.

ATM I have to 2x2TB HDDs duplicating all my data across each of them. Now im sure that im going to upgrade to 6x2TB when I make the move. So how do I go about arranging my drives. As I see it these are the options.

All the drives running in pairs in RAID1. Should give me good and easyt redundancy but this does limit my storage to 6TB

OS drive running RAID 1 and then 4 drives running in RAID5, should be 8TB storage, advantage of good data transfer, total 8TB

Finally all 6 drives running in software RAID 5, not sure if this is even possible using 2 controller cards as I am, presumably also good transfer speeds, should be 10TB storage.

Any advice, thoughts and help would be most welcome.

Cheers,

Hawker
 
There are several replacements for DE in beta for 2011, however im not a fan of DE to be fair, I would probably go for

OS drive running RAID 1 and then 4 drives running in RAID5, should be 8TB storage, advantage of good data transfer
 
Yeah im planning on dragging the data to an external drive then doing a fresh install. I also agree with the sentiments of not using DE like software given that that is what is causing my stutter problems and also relying on beta software for redundancy is a bit more than I can stomach. Not so concerned with data backup outside of the machine for media.

Hawker
 
IIRC you'll need to do a fresh install of WHS 2011 anyway as there's no upgrade path due to going from x86 to x64.

If i were you I'd probably go for the RAID1 OS Drive & RAID5 for the rest.
 
I'm currently using DriveBender as a DE replacement, not lost any data and duplication is pretty good as well...
 
If your looking at starting fresh may I also recommend unRAID.
Its Linux based, runs off a usb stick so all your ports are storage and you only lose 1 drive to redundancy as apposed to half your total space with WHS.

You can even throw VirtualBox on there for any of your windows needs :D

http://lime-technology.com/
 
If you go raid 5 route you won't have 8tb storage using 4x 2tb drives, it'll be more like 6tb due to parity. Also it's slower to write to but faster to read from. How much the speeds will affect a home server I don't think they would.

I'd be tempted for raid 5 and live with 6tb of space. If one drive fails then you can stick another in and it will rebuild. But if 2 drives fail you loose the whole array, very very slim chance. I've only had that happen once in 12 years working with servers.
 
Thanks for the input guys, having mulled this over I think that redundancy is the priority atm, given that im using 1TB atm and its taken me a number of years to accumulate this quantity of data. So ill probably go with 3x2 drives in RAID1. By the time I max this storage things will likely have moved along, ill probably be in my own home where I can run proper network cable and migrating the data from one machine to another will be less of a chore.

Hawker
 
Hi,
I have 4 x 2TB drives running WHS2011. I have one drive for boot and the three remaining in a RAID 5 configuration giving me 3.63TB of storage for data. I think I will use the drive that came with the system as a boot drive at some point which will give me another 2TB.
Note that the software RAID 5 takes about 4 days to fully initialise. Appears to work well but I want to remove a drive to test at some point soon.
 
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