Windows Home Server

Hi all

Forgive me if these questions have been asked before, but there is a whole load of info on this thread!

1) Can WHS be run from a USB drive?
2) Does WHS support RAID 10? I have an HP ProLiant MicroServer with 4x2tb disks in, plus a system disk hooked up to the DVD port.
3) How do I know which version of WHS has drive extender? Is the one without still in BETA?
 
Thanks.

On Q2) Can I setup a software RAID or is there another way to do it? Or am I missing the point with WHS and the DE software?

How do you deal with the added security that disk mirroring in RAIDs offers?
 
WHS's DE technology is meant to be used instead of RAID. I have all my folders mirrored so they are on at least a couple of different HDD's

It works perfectly. I have had both a pool drive and a system drive fail in the past and haven't lost anything. It doesn't care about drive sizes either like RAID does. I have a 1TB, a 1.5TB and 2x2TB, and all 6.5TB are available to me.
 
theboyfold said:
OK, so rather than having duplicated disks it does it at a folder level? So you can specify stuff that you want duplicated across different physical drives?
Click to expand...

Yes.

It treats all the drives as one large pool with no mirroring or anything, but if you select Folder Duplication on a shared folder it will ensure that phyisically the contents of that folder are stored on 2 seperate hard drives.

Its like RAID mirroring, but much simpler to manage. Adding and removing disks of any size or format is also a piece of cake. Plug in new disk, click 'add to pool' and your done.

The only issue is is only duplicates folders within the drive pool, and not the system drive, so if the HDD that has your system partition on it dies, you will need to reinstall the server. However, there is a reinstall mode that searches for and preserves all your data in the pool shares. And if that doesnt work, or you would rather do it manually, the drives are readable on any Windows PC so you can just whip them out, plug them into another machine and copy the files from the DE folder.

Like I said, I have had 2 drives fail, one of them the system drive, and not lost anything, except and evening of my time to fix the system drive failure.
 
You can always raid your system drive, but keep the rest in the 'pool'. This is by far the best feature of WHS. (Version 1 only, will not be in version 2). It has the facility of backing up the system drive as well.
 
Skeeter said:
Yes.

It treats all the drives as one large pool with no mirroring or anything, but if you select Folder Duplication on a shared folder it will ensure that phyisically the contents of that folder are stored on 2 seperate hard drives.

Its like RAID mirroring, but much simpler to manage. Adding and removing disks of any size or format is also a piece of cake. Plug in new disk, click 'add to pool' and your done.

The only issue is is only duplicates folders within the drive pool, and not the system drive, so if the HDD that has your system partition on it dies, you will need to reinstall the server. However, there is a reinstall mode that searches for and preserves all your data in the pool shares. And if that doesnt work, or you would rather do it manually, the drives are readable on any Windows PC so you can just whip them out, plug them into another machine and copy the files from the DE folder.

Like I said, I have had 2 drives fail, one of them the system drive, and not lost anything, except and evening of my time to fix the system drive failure.
Click to expand...

Ok, so that sounds interesting. So in effect I could use all 8TB if I wanted to? However, by duplicating shares across the pool of disks I will of course eat into my space.

As another poster mentioned up above, I can duplicate photos and other things like rips (which aren't as important) I will only have on 1 disk, thus conserving space?
 
This is the default screen for your folders, you can add as many as you like. As you can see, I duplicate all of my folders. I have enough disk space, so why not!

whs2.jpg


This one is an add-on, and shows you the disk capacity, the temperatures, activity and how much is used.

The wireframe on the side is especially useful if you have a lot of drives. I haven't set it back up since my board failure!
whs3.jpg
 
Thanks, that's useful to see it.

This is going to sound like a stupid question, but I'm going to ask it anyway! The Disk Duplication, I'm assuming that it duplicates stuff across different physical drives? :)
 
I think both Skeeter & PhillyDee are right here. WHS formats disks as NTFS, with the shared files stored under \de\shares, so in an emergency can be accessed by transferring the disks to another PC.
However, WHS can put a shared file on any of the pooled drives, and you won't know which. So if you did want to copy all of the files from the WHS shares you'd have to copy from each disk in turn. For folders with duplication enabled then each file is held on two disks.
Hope this doesn't confuse things further!

Edit: Microsoft's description of how DE works: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=40c6c9cc-b85f-45fe-8c5c-f103c894a5e2
 
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Yes, as Wonko said.

When my system drive failed I pulled the other drives and coped the DE folder contents to my PC. Some drives had my pictures on, some had my documents, but the net result was that accross all drives there was atleast 1 copy of every file.
 
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