WHS 2011 disk question

Vertigo · 15 May 2012 at 15:12

I'm currently using WHS v1 but considering moving to WHS 2011. I'm aware that the drive extender functionality is not longer supported and thus I'll need to provide my own redundancy using RAID.

My question is what control I have over folders and drives in WHS 2011. What I liked about DE was that I could select only certain folders to be duplicated for redundancy. Of all the data on the server, I don't really want all of it made redundant as it's unnecessary and wasteful.

If I was to add multiple drives to the system, some individual drives and some RAID mirrors with redundancy, and add each of these volumes to the WHS 2011 server, can I control which folders are stored on which volumes, so I can put some on the RAID array and some on the individual drives, or is WHS 2011 left to its own devices and decides where stuff will live?

Ta for any info

Vertigo · 15 May 2012 at 15:45

Yeah will be using hardware RAID, I just don't want every single piece of data on the server to be on the RAID array as I'd need to buy a shedload of extra drives to cope with the space requirements.

I want to mix RAID mirror arrays with individual drives and then choose what data goes on which drives, so I only use up precious space on the mirror where I need it. Is this possible?

Vertigo · 15 May 2012 at 17:09

Actually, it looks like Stablebit Drivepool might be a better bet. Going to do some playing in a VM I think.

Vertigo · 16 May 2012 at 14:20

Been playing a bit with DrivePool and I really like it - seems to replicate exactly what DE did in WHSv1 but implemented better.

I also like that files are accessible directly on the drives that form part of the pool, so if the machine or the OS dies, I can just pull one or more of the drives and access the files easily. Does beg the question of what would happen if you wrote directly to one of the underlying drives but that would just be bloody-minded and I won't try it

Vertigo · 16 May 2012 at 15:36

RimBlock said:
I was happy to purchase a license for it but I do find it slower than writing to native disks or a Windows software raid setup.

Oh of course but it's a fair trade in my opinion, as it's far more flexible than using RAID if you don't want or need all your data to be made redundant.

Vertigo · 16 May 2012 at 18:57

Penguin said:
To answer your original question you can choose where/which drive each separate "Server Folder" goes and you can add multiple "Server Folders" for whatever content/purpose you want.

Hope this helps.

Yeah thanks, I worked that out during my investigations. So, even without the Drive Pool add-in, I could have separate RAID volumes and individual drives and store different folders on each.

It would work but it's a bit less flexible as I'd have a fixed amount of space on each volume/drive, so if the stuff I wanted made redundant or non-redundant exceeded the space on the RAID volume or individual drives respectively, I'd have a problem.

Gonna go with the Drive Pool thing for now and see how I get on

Vertigo · 17 May 2012 at 09:06

Essexraptor said:
of course you could always make use of the 30 day trial before committing any money to a full purchase

Using that at the moment, but will almost certainly be buying it, only $20.

Vertigo · 21 May 2012 at 11:08

Well spent the weekend rebuilding my server with WHS 2011 and DrivePool and have to say I'm impressed with it.

Does exactly what I need, and replicates the functionality of Microsoft's old Drive Extender pretty well. It's much better in fact, in that the constituent drives remain fully accessible, none of the **** you had with DE where accessing the folders directly rather than through the shares could cause problems. With DrivePool you can view, access and even write to the constituent drives at any time and it copes with it fine. It's good value too at around 13 quid at current exchange rates.