WHS functionality in Windows 7?

Tunney

Tunney

Tunney

Soldato
Joined
11 Oct 2004
Posts
14,551
Location
London
I've been looking into buying a Windows Home Server recently and one feature in particular piqued my interest - the ability to add hard-drives to an storage volume.

It sounds like a great feature. I've got quite a large media collection (no, not porn :p) so being able to expand a volume when I fill one hard-drive would be ideal - especially with WHS's ability to automatically back-up individual folders.

I'm probably not going to buy a WHS but I'd really like this functionality. Does anyone know if this functionality is in Windows 7? If so, which versions?
 
Your best bet is to use a RAID controller which supports extending an array whilst preserving the data. That way you can set up an array of disks which are presented to the OS as a single drive (via striping, mirroring or simple JBOD) and then add more drives to the array as required.
 
Vertigo1 said:
Your best bet is to use a RAID controller which supports extending an array whilst preserving the data. That way you can set up an array of disks which are presented to the OS as a single drive (via striping, mirroring or simple JBOD) and then add more drives to the array as required.
Click to expand...

Sounds expensive. :)

Oh well, maybe I'll look at turning an old machine into a WHS the next time I upgrade my main rig.
 
Tunney said:
Sounds expensive. :)

Oh well, maybe I'll look at turning an old machine into a WHS the next time I upgrade my main rig.
Click to expand...

I did this with an old SFF I had. Toyed with the idea for ages but now I couldnt live without the 2TB networked storage and 24hour PC. The way it handles backups is excellent and the management of storage is very simple. Id highly recomend it if you have old hardware lying about (I got mine on an Athlon XP 2100+ and 512MB of RAM).
 
Vertigo1 said:
Your best bet is to use a RAID controller which supports extending an array whilst preserving the data. That way you can set up an array of disks which are presented to the OS as a single drive (via striping, mirroring or simple JBOD) and then add more drives to the array as required.
Click to expand...

Thing is, WHS is much more idiot friendly, and it just works! You can choose all the folders you want to mirror, ones you dont, automatically duplicates on failure, unmatched disks dont bother it. Cheaper too . . . .
 
Zap said:
You can use dynamic disks in windows 7 ultimate
Click to expand...

This is the exact thing you want to do. Using dynamic discs, you can add discs to the volume as you get them.

On my main PC, I have 2 750GB drives spanned together. To add additional drives, you just delete a volume on a new drive, so it's a raw drive with no FS, and you can then choose to expand your spanned drives in to it.

On my server I have 4 samsung F1 1TBs spanned together using dynamic discs.

My main PC uses Windows 7 and my server is Windows Server 2008.

They don't have to be the same type of drives either, they just need to be raw drives with no FS on them, I think anyway :p I haven't added a drive to any of my arrays for quite a while now.

On my server, my drives all show up as one 3.63TB drive, and my 2 750s show up as a 1.36TB drive.

It doesn't use any RAID hardware either by the way, as far as I know. :D
 
Last edited:
What no, dynamic disks are horrible and not at all like what WHS does

WHS has a service that rebalances files between the drives and spreads them between the available disks when you copy to the volume, if you copy a 1gb file to the volume then it will be put in its entirity on one of the volumes, if its mirrored it will create a full copy on another volume, each disk has its own ntfs file system and should you have an issue you can plug any of the drives into a PC and retrive those files directly with relative ease, it uses basic/simple volumes and not dynamic so is compatible with standard disk recovery/undelete tools. When you add a disk it will automatically move some of the content over, when you remove it takes the content and spreads it amoung the other drives (will tell you if theres not enough before you go ahead)

Dynamic disks is completely different, one file system. If you spread it across drives in an extention method then the individual drives are no good. Most recovery tools cannot handle dynamic

The setup described by kyle is very risky, failure on one drive would result in a lot of lost data and guess what, you cannot remove an individual drive from the volume. The way you would do it with dynamic disks is to move the data out, shrink the volume till it no longer extends to the last drive, then reformat the last drive as extra storage space and move more content off, shrink again etc. Very long and laborious. If you have 4 disks and need to remove the 2nd one because its reporting SMART errors then you have a long task ahead

Id honestly advise against dynamic disks unless you are doing software mirroring and hardware mirroring is not an option, considering even basic boards come with hardware raid nowadays it would be a rare case

btw, im running W7 RC on my pc and have an HP EX470 next to my desk
 
Old PC bits and WHS will be cheaper than W7 Ultimate too, and you will be surprised how usefull a small server can be
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom