WHS newbie question

daz.wallace · 15 Jan 2010 at 13:14

I have a pc running windows 7 RC which I just use to store my music, photo's and movie collection. It consists of a 120Gb ide hard drive which has the OS on and 3 sata drives, a 1Tb and 2 1.5Tb drives. As the RC is about to run out soon I wanted to give WHS a try out before commiting to buying another copy of Windows 7. It provides files for my main PC, laptop, PS3 and NMT and I am likely to add another PC for my daughter and an HTPC for our bedroom. I am aware that WHS allows regular backups of my PC's on my network, this is something that appeals to me

My question is this:Which HDD should I use to install WHS on? Do I continue to use the 120Gb disk and it will see all the other Hard disks as 1 lot of storage space or do I have to use 1 of the larger disks for the OS. I think I read that somewhere a while ago you needed to have a large disk for the OS as that is where it will back up the other PC's too.

Thanks in advance for any help and please free to leave any other tips I may find useful :cool:

Qu3 · 15 Jan 2010 at 13:28

M$ used to recommend and may still do using a large hard drive, not always the largest but a large drive (750GB / 1TB) as the DATA partition was used for the landing zone. This was where data was first put before WHS moved it on to other drives.

As far as I am away this concept is no longer used so it shouldn't really matter. My WHS main HDD is 250Gb drive.

I'd put yours on the 1TB to be honest.

daz.wallace · 15 Jan 2010 at 13:39

Thanks for the input

Will I still have use of the rest of that drive for storage? I really need all 4TB for storage

Thanks again

Deathwish · 16 Jan 2010 at 12:07

I've used a 300Gb disk for the OS and it seems fine. It won't use the DATA partition on the SYS drive until all the other drives are full, might want to take that into consideration.

PhillyDee · 16 Jan 2010 at 12:12

It partitions the system drive as 20gb for system and the rest storage. So no, you do noot lose it all. However, it is the only drive which is not upgradeable. Put it on the biggest drive (Or 1tb)

daz.wallace · 16 Jan 2010 at 15:20

Ok thanks for the replies

I think I will use the 1tb drive and stick the 120Gb drive in a caddy

ali825 · 19 Jan 2010 at 18:24

dont use the 1 tb drive, as they have change the way that whs works now, the system drive is the last to be used so you may run in to problems later on, also the reason for this is that it has the highest chance of breaking due to most use, there now such thing as a landing zone anymore since sp2 i think

jbloggs · 26 Jan 2010 at 22:50

You could use Drive Balancer if you want to use the 1TB HDD for Sys + use D:\ for storage...

eden188 · 28 Jan 2010 at 14:48

Couple of things to bear in mind when moving to WHS:

i. Any anti virus you have will "probably" not work as it requires a server version. WHS is pretty much a fancy interface over Win2k3. I have bought the AVAST for WHS.
ii. You'll probably want to think of some data redundancy setup (e.g. RAID 1, 5, 6, etc) due to the amount of data you have. Imagine any HDD failure, you'll spend ages to recover, obviously that you do have regular backup of the WHS as well.

jbs · 28 Jan 2010 at 20:31

eden188 said:
ii. You'll probably want to think of some data redundancy setup (e.g. RAID 1, 5, 6, etc) due to the amount of data you have.

I thought WHS provides redundancy by making sure the data exists on multiple drives without the need to do anything specific.

eden188 · 28 Jan 2010 at 22:03

jbs said:
I thought WHS provides redundancy by making sure the data exists on multiple drives without the need to do anything specific.

That would be the duplication feature of WHS. I'm not 100% sure on this, I think it copies the selected folder (that has duplication on) to multiple hard drives, so yes, it would give you redundancy, I'm also guessing it would take up more storage space as well as the duplication would be X times the amount of data to duplicate.

PhillyDee · 28 Jan 2010 at 22:12

jbs said:
I thought WHS provides redundancy by making sure the data exists on multiple drives without the need to do anything specific.

Correct. Select Duplication on your folders, and it automatically balances all storage across multiple discs. I have had a drive failure with this, and its just a case of pulling out the knackered drive, delete from pool, then bung another in. Or if you have plenty of space it just balances it to ensure 2 copies again. Easy and simple.
And it does duplicate everything in the particular folder, and folders are not on one disc only. It spreads the files across multiple discs. When using WHS only ever copy to and from the shares network folder and never to the D: drive.
WHS is NOT set up to work with RAID. Its unsupported and can cause problems.

jbs · 28 Jan 2010 at 23:06

Thanks for clearing that up PhillyDee. I'm not using WHS yet but looking into it.