use of laptop hard drives in raid 5 array for WHS system drive. opinions please.

[Asposium]

one thing i don't like about WHS is the lack of failure protection for the system drive. if the system drive dies the WHS is toast.

i have an adaptec 3805 hardware raid card ( 8 x internal SAS/SATA ), and am considering putting the OS on a raid 5 array. doesn't need to be be particularly big in capacity, but small in physical volume occupied by the drives and low power consumption.

to this end i am considering a supermicro 8 2.5inch drives into 2 5.25inch bay module, and a set of seagate 7200.3 laptop harddrives, probably 4 500gb in a raid 5. the 7200 drives don't use much more power than the 5400 drives ... i checked the data sheets.

data is currently on 3.5inch seagate drives

how crazy is the idea of using laptop harddrives ( 7200rpm or otherwise ) in a raid array?

the raid array would be transparent to WHS as it would be done in hardware.

cheers all.

[farscapesg1]

Well, I've been running my WHS box with two 250 GB (desktop) drives in a RAID1 config and haven't had any problems. Just using the onboard SATA RAID controller.

I don't see any problem using the laptop drives vs standard desktop drives. I know Microsoft doesn't officially support RAID setups, but after having to reinstall from the loss of the system drive I personally wouldn't ever set up a WHS without at least RAID1 again.

[geiger]

The key to WHS is a fast "landing" drive. If you are looking at optimizing a WHS, do a hardware raid 10 of the system > the largest storage drive/ one time data push.

akaonly use laptop drives for storage drives :)

[farscapesg1]

Well, the "landing zone" isn't really used anymore since PP1. That is the reason that I went with smaller hard drives in a RAID config. Before PP1 everything was written to the landing zone first, but now it gets written directly to the drive pool... so I still don't see any issues with using laptop drives for the system drive.

[DougLite]

Just go with two drives in RAID-1. That way you're cool even if something crazy happens to the RAID metadata or your RAID controller.

[Asposium]

hdd---hdd---\\
......................\\
.......................\\
.........................---array
.......................//
......................//
hdd---hdd---//

am i correct in the presumption that the above represents a raid 10 array?

[DougLite]

RAID-10 arranges a pair of mirrored drives in a stripe. This gives you the throughput boost of running RAID-0, while at the same time protecting you from physical disk failure as RAID-1 does. Only downside is the pretty high overhead of requiring four drives.

[jay2472000]

I believe you have it correct. One thing to point out, raid 1+0 and raid 0+1 arent the same. If I am not mistaken raid 10 ( 1+0 ) is safer because it does the 1;1 writes, then the stripe writes, whereas a 0+1 will write the stripe first. And you can recover from a partial 1;1 write, but cannot recover from a partial stripe write. Someone please correct me if I have wrong information.

[SockMan!]

Laptop hard drives will lack TLER (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time-Limited_Error_Recovery), so a bad sector could cause a drive to drop out of an array. This is generally true with most desktop hard drives as well.

[ShockwaveVT]

Pretty sure WHS supports backing up the system drive to an external drive (viaUSB, etc).

[farscapesg1]

Pretty sure WHS supports backing up the system drive to an external drive (viaUSB, etc).

You can backup the "backup files" and some other information, but as for creating a true backup... nope it isn't supported. If your hard drive crashes you have to do a "reinstall" and I haven't had any luck trying that option the two times I've already rebuilt my WHS box.