Help me Select an OS for my little server

J

Justintoxicated

[H]F Junkie
Joined
Apr 10, 2002
Messages
14,519
Open Filer?
WHS?
Windows Server 2008?
Linux?

Specs G48 Foxcon MB 6 sata ports raid/5
E7300
4GB Ram
6x1TB drives
1 62GB IDE drive

This server will be for backing up Data on a few computers and running a light weight Development Environment / Web Server. Also I want some kinda raid fake-raid, Software raid, flex-raid....Something that will allow me to expand the array later and preferably mix drive sizes. I feel Raid-5 is probably good enough, since the data ont he dives will be jsut be backup anyways. I probably will not need to expand on it anytime too soon. Is it better to stick with my onboard raid (6 drives in Raid 5) with this motherboard? or let the software handle it?

I like the idea of Open Filer, and the ability to mount the server as a physical volume and have easy access to it from anywhere as if it was a giant drive connected my my machine. (work/Home/another country?)
However its much to hard to install all the stuff needed for Apache, Tomcat, PHP, MSQL etc because the OS is too bare. No Gui or anything. The other problem is I have not been able to figure out how to set it up. I have worked with linux but when it comes to setting up LDAP etc I'm clueless. Also it did not recognize my raid array (created using on board raid) and instead identified the drives individualy...But it can software raid the drives itself (or so I hear if I could figure this thing out!).

WHS, sounds like a great OS for me. But it requires a 65 GB Hard Drive and mine is only 61.8GB :( Damn you windows!

Windows Server2008 beta, I guess it's an option it does not need 65 GB of space to install and will utilize my 64 bit CPU, but its not out officialy yet?

Will WHS utilize a 64 bit CPU? I installed with VM ware and could only get it to run in 32bit mode on my Q9450.

I do have the option of running a VM on either this little server, or my gaming rig, but I prefer to not have too many services running on my main PC...Drags it down.

Is there any way to get WHS to work with my 62GB hard drive?

Thanks for looking!
 
If you are willing to ditch the IDE drive, WHS seems to fit the bill perfectly fine for what you want to do. There is no needs with WHS to have a dedicated "OS/boot" drive, in fact it wouldn't actually work with a drive that small, even if it did meet the size requirement. WHS will create a 20GB system partition on one of the main drives, and the rest is added to the storage pool.

The next version of WHS is specualted to be 64bit only, which is nice. http://www.wegotserved.co.uk/2009/01/15/whats-next-for-windows-home-server/
 
criccio said:
If you are willing to ditch the IDE drive, WHS seems to fit the bill perfectly fine for what you want to do. There is no needs with WHS to have a dedicated "OS/boot" drive, in fact it wouldn't actually work with a drive that small, even if it did meet the size requirement. WHS will create a 20GB system partition on one of the main drives, and the rest is added to the storage pool.

The next version of WHS is specualted to be 64bit only, which is nice. http://www.wegotserved.co.uk/2009/01/15/whats-next-for-windows-home-server/
Click to expand...

Why couldn't it work on a drive that small? Call me old fashioned, but I kinda like the idea of having the OS installed on a seperate disk than the raid array is.

I guess I'd be best not using the onboard raid and going with software raid?

I suppose 64 bit isn't too much of an issue for now. It would be nice to utilize all 4GB of ram but it's not that important since I hopefully won't lose too much...That is...if I would not need VM ware to run my webserver. If I need VM ware, then I think I will certainly need all 4GB of ram. Is there any advantages to Windows 2008 over WHS?
 
The second part of your question has been discussed ad nauseam here so I won't even begin to go there, but with WHS you wont be using any type of RAID at all. You should probably read up on how WHS works first. All your disks just get plugged into the controller/mobo as standalone disks.
 
criccio said:
The second part of your question has been discussed ad nauseam here so I won't even begin to go there, but with WHS you wont be using any type of RAID at all. You should probably read up on how WHS works first. All your disks just get plugged into the controller/mobo as standalone disks.
Click to expand...

Sure, as soon as these 13 hour shifts end I might have some time to locate a decen't article to read. But in the meantime if you have any links that you recommend I would be greatful. So WHS does not use any kind of raid-like redundency. From what I read on here I could swear it did, in fact it sounded similar to flex-raid...So i guess I'm better off going with onboard raid-5 so I have some redundency in case a disk craps out so I won't have to reinstall and backup everything?


Who am I kidding? They are not going to end, and I still have to fix my car so spare time isn't going to happen for a long time.

The machine is built, but it's just sitting here with open filer on it and no tiem to figure it out for some time... Windows does not sound as hard, but if there is no redundency then it sounds like garbage.
 
Justintoxicated said:
Sure, as soon as these 13 hour shifts end I might have some time to locate a decen't article to read. But in the meantime if you have any links that you recommend I would be greatful. So WHS does not use any kind of raid-like redundency. From what I read on here I could swear it did, in fact it sounded similar to flex-raid...So i guess I'm better off going with onboard raid-5 so I have some redundency in case a disk craps out so I won't have to reinstall and backup everything?


Who am I kidding? They are not going to end, and I still have to fix my car so spare time isn't going to happen for a long time.

The machine is built, but it's just sitting here with open filer on it and no tiem to figure it out for some time... Windows does not sound as hard, but if there is no redundency then it sounds like garbage.
Click to expand...

Windows Home Server basically employs JBOD. However, you can choose to mirror certain files or folders, which will RAID 1 just those files you chose to give redundancy to. If you want your entire collection to be mirrored, there really isn't a point in going with Windows Home Server. It does have a quick setup time, low learning curve, and is able to scale well with different sized hard drives.

EDIT:
It's also nice for backing up your Windows computers, although if you have any Linux you'll probably just have to use rsync and mount the server as a Samba share.
 
criccio said:
Sorry if you mis-understood. It DOES included redundancy, but it DOESN'T use RAID. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Home_Server
Click to expand...

Sounds similar to flexraid only you probably can't specify the number of redundent drives.

Ockie, would you recommend installing WHS to one of my TB drives, or installing to a seperate IDE drive then using the 6 1TB drives as I single volume? I tried it out in VM ware and it says it will format all of my drives on my system, this sounds like it would be a huge issue if I needed to re-install and it was on the same drive as the volume?

If I go with WHS, should I still go ahead and use the hardware (assisted) raid as well? Or would this be asking for problems?

BTW I decided to try it out and I get the same problems these guys have.
http://social.microsoft.com/forums/.../1195cea4-284b-4244-a2fa-a2a9a8fd990d/#page:1

Basicaly when I install at some point it will tell me setup is already running. It continues to install though, then when it is finished I get an error that "An error Occurred in Windows home Server Setep". And it wants me to reboot. The same exact problem all these guys ran into :( The solutions for them was to try Ubuntu Server ....damn

http://social.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/whssoftware/thread/55967434-822e-4f4b-9dc6-f31fde9612a9/
 
you have to... ok, well, you don't HAVE to, but you should at least use a drive that's bigger than 250gigs...

This is how WHS treats disks (although in the time it takes you to read this post, you could have found a better article that explains drive extender better that I will):

It takes 1 of your HD's and treats it as the OS drive. Regardless of size, it takes 20gigs and partitions it for the OS, whatever is left over becomes the data store.

If all you have is 1 hard drive, that's kinda easy... lets just use 80 gigs for our example.. So, you have 20gigs for OS, and 60gigs for Data. Well, you've now filled up that 60gigs and are looking for more, so you add your 1tb drive in, and WHS adds it to the disk pool which is best explained as mounting a HD as a folder on the data drive.

Now if you can't figure out the problem with using a small HD as your boot/os drive, it will become apparent when you try to copy a large amount of data to your WHS because it only thinks there's 60gigs of drive free MAX at any time. When you copy stuff to your WHS it goes to the Data drive first, and then gets "balanced" to the other drives in the storage pool.

I use a 500gig HD on my WHS as primary, the rest of the data drives are 750/1tb.
 
Ok thanks for that, I finaly got it to install appears their installer is pretty buggy. Anyways, it would sound like my best best then would be to use my onboard raid and turn off redundency in WHS.

Or maybe I would be better of just installing XP, and using flexraid and some 3rd party software.

Why? Because it sounds like if the OS drive dies, then you lose everything stored on that drive, especialy since you can't re-install WHS without wiping everything on that hard drive.... So about 1 TB worth of stuff. The data on the other drives should still exist though..

However, it also sounds like I would lose 1 drive to the OS, and another to Redundency, so I would only be left with a 4TB array instead of 5TB using the onboard raid. or maybe I would have just under 5TB, with the OS drive not having any redundency? In either case it sounds like WHS is not a very good solution at all for redundency of data unless you want to use 2 drives and only get single drive redundency,and not have one drive protected (OS)? not sure why there are so many people loving it if that is indeed the way it works.
 
Justintoxicated said:
especialy since you can't re-install WHS without wiping everything on that hard drive....
Click to expand...

Not true.

However, it also sounds like I would lose 1 drive to the OS, and another to Redundency, so I would only be left with a 4TB array instead of 5TB using the onboard raid. or maybe I would have just under 5TB, with the OS drive not having any redundency? In either case it sounds like WHS is not a very good solution at all for redundent data unless you want to use 2 drives and only get single drive redundency? not sure why there are so many people loving it if that is indeed the way it works.
Click to expand...
You seem really confused, there is many looong threads about WHS here, I suggest you read through them. WHS is a great solution.
 
criccio said:
Not true.

You seem really confused, there is many looong threads about WHS here, I suggest you read through them. WHS is a great solution.
Click to expand...

You think I'm not researching, it took me a day just to trick the installer to work!? WHS insists on completely whiping all drives in the system when you install it. I know I just installed it! Of course you could unplug all the drives except the one you want to put the OS on, but you would still lose everything stored on that drive....

It seems it requires
1) Drive for the OS - which will have no rebuildability / redundency should it get hosed and you would lose all data that was stored on this drive.

1) another Redundent Drive so if any of the storage drives die it can be re-created

Leaving me with only 4 "somewhat safe" drive to put anything on. Lame...
 
It only requires a small 20GB partition on one of the drives, and the OS itself can be reinstalled perfectly fine without touching the data. I have done it myself twice. (my own error...)

You set up "shares" in WHS just like any other server OS, and you can pick specifically what share gets duplicated.

I suggest posting here: http://forum.wegotserved.co.uk/

Its far from "lame"... A vast majority of people here really like it.
 
Justintoxicated said:
You think I'm not researching, it took me a day just to trick the installer to work!? WHS insists on completely whiping all drives in the system when you install it. I know I just installed it! Of course you could unplug all the drives except the one you want to put the OS on, but you would still lose everything stored on that drive....

It seems it requires
1) Drive for the OS - which will have no rebuildability / redundency should it get hosed and you would lose all data that was stored on this drive.

1) another Redundent Drive so if any of the storage drives die it can be re-created

Leaving me with only 4 "somewhat safe" drive to put anything on. Lame...
Click to expand...

If you OS drive dies, you can do an reinstall and not lose your data.
You will lose your Settings and isntalled add-ins

but your backups and data are safe.

Just the other day I pulled out my 750gb drive(OS drive) and stuck in a 1.5tb.
Put the CD in
Did a reinstall on the new drive, and im back up and running with ZERO data Loss.


My suggestion to you would be to ditch the 65gb ide Drive, and do a fresh install on one of the 1tb.
If you already have data on some of them. you will have to add the drives one at a time and copy your data to the storage pool.

I realize that sounds like a PITA, and believe me it is.
But I dont regret my decision.

Also if you decide to ditch WHS after you do that you can just pull a drive or all the drives out for that matter, and they can be read in any windows system without any gimmicks.

As far as redundancy goes:
If you dont want to use the duplication thing, you can use Flexraid on WHS just the same as you would on any other windows OS.
I have been testing it on my WHS box and I quite like it. The only downside I see right now in FlexRaid is that it is not realtime.
But I think after I have convinced my self that it is reliable i will be switching to that and not using the duplication feature except on my very very very important stuff.

There is a few threads on using Flexraid on WHS on the flexraid site. Might be worth your time to check out.

As far as Server 2008 advantages go.
Well you have hyper-v builtin, and you can do things like AD, WDS, exchange.

I guess it all depends on what you really plan on doing with this box.

For me the most important part was the storage.
So i went with WHS, and run vm's on WHS for the other stuff I want to do.
 
like others have said in this thread, and in every thread asking these questions about WHS:

If the OS drive dies, you just reinstall on a new drive and it will re-create the tombstones to all the data drives.

WHS only uses the "data" portion of the OS drive to store tombstones unless you are running at your max capacity. As long as you have replication checked for all your shares, if you loose 1 drive, it will be fine. Hell, I lost two drives and there was minimal actual losses because of the way the replication happened to be working.

At least 1 drive (the one the OS is installed to) will need to be empty, then you can add your other hard drives, move stuff over to the shares manually, and THEN add them to your storage pool and continue. This is a little bit of work, but realistically, it's the easyest "server" to have at home.

If these features plus the others in WHS that you do not seem to care about do not fit your needs, you should look for something else. WHS requires a different method of thought around it, as gone are the days of hardware/software raids, but if you can get past that I'm sure you'll find WHS to be a great timesaver.
 
Someone needs to make a hardcore WHS sticky.
 
Ok, storage is my primary concern so I guess I can give it a whirl.

It sounds like the duplication works similar to Raid 1 (just makes another copy) and halfs your storage space which would not work for me (might as well just Raid-1 my drives).

So it sounds like my best bet is to use my onboard raid 5 for these 6 drives or Trying out Flexraid. Mostly the storage will be archiving backups so I don't think real time is necessary, however setting up the onboard raid is probably easier (but also not expandable).
 
You can't mix drive sizes with Raid 5. Not without losing some space or putting some drives in jbods to equal the size of other drives. It's a pain. RAID 5 can also suffer from bit rot and the write hole bug.

To mix drive sizes you have 3 choices: unraid, WHS and flexraid.

Flexraid is new and I would be nervous trusting it. Unraid is proven, runs from USB and uses parity. I don't know about how to extend it's functionality beyond just storing data.

WHS is built on server 2003. It can do everything windows can so you get all the functionality. And you can use drives of any size. Drives are mirrored as has been pointed out so you need more to protect your data as opposed to a parity system.
RAID is NOT supported on WHS. Many people do it but something could go wonky.

Personally I use WHS. I have 9 hard drives in it now with more than 5tb of total storage and drives of every size.
 
I really dont want to mirror my drives on the backup server, it would make more sense to mirror my drives in my PC's so I did not have to retrieve from backup in the first place if a disk died.

So far, it still sounds like my best bet is to use the onboard Raid (6 identical 1TB drives in Raid5) and run some Regular Windows OS on top of that. Actualy I dont see any advantage over windows XP and 3rd party software like ViseVersa installed on the other PC's to backup to my storage box. This way I get decent redundency without Losing 3TB of disk space as I would with WHS.

It just seems that WHS would be a very poor choice for me, since I want redundency on my backupserver without sacrificing all the disk space. WHS would only make sense if I didn't want any redundency on my backup storage box.

Sound reasonable?
 
Justintoxicated said:
I really dont want to mirror my drives on the backup server, it would make more sense to mirror my drives in my PC's so I did not have to retrieve from backup in the first place if a disk died.

So far, it still sounds like my best bet is to use the onboard Raid (6 identical 1TB drives in Raid5) and run some Regular Windows OS on top of that. Actualy I dont see any advantage over windows XP and 3rd party software like ViseVersa installed on the other PC's to backup to my storage box. This way I get decent redundency without Losing 3TB of disk space as I would with WHS.

It just seems that WHS would be a very poor choice for me, since I want redundency on my backupserver without sacrificing all the disk space. WHS would only make sense if I didn't want any redundency on my backup storage box.

Sound reasonable?
Click to expand...

All depends on where your data is stored and how much space you need. If all your data is stored on your desktop the server can just backup your computer and you can do a bare metal restore in 20 minutes if you need to.

What I do is store all my data on the server. All of my music, photos, videos, etc. exist on the server only and not on my desktop. I just map the network shares to my desktops and they can all access the music and photos and such. I like having all my data in one central location for all my systems to access. And I can connect from any computer in the world and access my data.

WHS also does so much more.

You also mentioned in your first post of wanting to use drives of different sizes. You can't do that with raid 5 without losing space. And RAID has it's own issues.

It all comes down to how you store your data and how much space you really need.
 
You have to take more into account the just the overhead from redundancy.

I know you said you have 6tb of space, but how much actual data do you have?

Also how often are you doing writes to the server? If your like me I do a lot of writes, I'm almost always copying or doing encoding on my server.
Reason you need to look at that is if you do onboard raid 5 it will be painfully slow during large writes.
With my WHS box I can sustain 80MB/s writes over the network. onboard R5 id be lucky to get 10MB/s.

Just for the record you can (not supported, but it works) run Raid underneath WHS.
Reason I bring this up is because WHS offers so much that a XP box simply cannot.

With every setup you give some and you take some.
I just want to make sure that you look at it from all angles.

The guys on this forum with the largest storage systems used to run 2003 with hardware R5/6, and a lot of them have switched to WHS.
I think there is a lot to be said for that.
 
i had a onboard raid 5 about 2 years ago.. really slow...

then i went to WHS and hated the fact that if i wanted my movies backed up i needed 2x the storage, which i could not afford.

I got a Highpoint RocketRaid 2220 running on desktop hardware in a PCI slot for $85 shipped. Then i got 4 750gb drives from that guy who sold like 33 drives in 2 days here on the bst for $60 each.
I get 70+ mb transfer speed on smaller files (1gb and less) and around 45-50mb on 2gb+ files on my PCI Raid 5

I now run Vista ultimate on my "server" and a VM WHS on it.

I like Raid 5 better for my data because of the storage i get back, the HP RR 2220 has online disk expansion which i have used added a new 750gb last week. took 16hrs to complete but it worked....

WHS is great and if the 2tb drives are cheap soon 3 2tb drives in a WHS would be great.... but it didnt fit all my needs


I still use it as a VM for backups of other PCs and remote access, but not for my drive management...


I use Vista also for Media Center on my server to record TV when the HTPC is off.
 
Archer75 said:
All depends on where your data is stored and how much space you need. If all your data is stored on your desktop the server can just backup your computer and you can do a bare metal restore in 20 minutes if you need to.

What I do is store all my data on the server. All of my music, photos, videos, etc. exist on the server only and not on my desktop. I just map the network shares to my desktops and they can all access the music and photos and such. I like having all my data in one central location for all my systems to access. And I can connect from any computer in the world and access my data.

WHS also does so much more.

You also mentioned in your first post of wanting to use drives of different sizes. You can't do that with raid 5 without losing space. And RAID has it's own issues.

It all comes down to how you store your data and how much space you really need.
Click to expand...

I need 5Tb worth of space for my backups. I dont want to have 9 1TB disks (3 in PC, 6 on server) total and up with under 3TB of usable space. Thats just not practicle, my backup server should not need to be in Raid-1 config. That would indeed be what I end up with if I go with WHS and use redundency.

Open filer would make much more sense. Setup a Raid-5 using it's software Raid and backup / write to it from anywhere in the world and still have redundency. My Issue with Open Filer is that I will need to put together another PC for my web project, but that is starting to sound like the best idea. I just didn't want to have 3 PC's on all the time in my bedroom, but it really does sound like my only real solution at this point.

Or just Raid 5 using hardware and toss on Windows XP. I realize I won't be able to expand my array but with WHS I could not expand my raid array either, so no difference there since it does not support it.

Or Windows XP + Flexraid should be able to do the job as well, and allow me to later expand the array, if flexraid really works...
 
Justintoxicated said:
Or just Raid 5 using hardware and toss on Windows XP. I realize I won't be able to expand my array but with WHS I could not expand my raid array either, so no difference there since it does not support it.

Or Windows XP + Flexraid should be able to do the job as well, and allow me to later expand the array, if flexraid really works...
Click to expand...

Yes, you can expand with WHS. You can add drives of any size to the pool at any time.

Also if you are using the server solely to backup the data on your PC's you wouldn't need to use redundency. You have two copies of your data, one on the PC's and one on the server.
 
Justintoxicated said:
I need 5Tb worth of space for my backups. I dont want to have 9 1TB disks (3 in PC, 6 on server) total and up with under 3TB of usable space. Thats just not practicle, my backup server should not need to be in Raid-1 config. That would indeed be what I end up with if I go with WHS and use redundency.
.
Click to expand...

What you are talking about here is storing data on your PC, then backing up to the server and then having redundency on that backup. That's just a waste of space. And you can't put redundency on the backup anyways.
WHS will backup all your PC's for you every day. No need for you to do anything. But those backups aren't stored in shares that can be duplicated. You could of course disable this backup and manually do your own to a share and then duplicate that.

So if what you want is 3tb of data on your PC backed up you just need 3tb in the server. You now have the original data and a backup of it.

Or don't even store the data on your PC. Then you don't need 3tb there you can have it all on the server with duplication on.


Justintoxicated said:
The raid array would still not be expandable...Only the WHS storage space... I don't even see what that is considered a feaure. Any OS can expand storage space when adding a new drive.....
Click to expand...

Because WHS can take any size drive and pool it together in a single storage pool. Makes it alot easier to manage data. Sure you could jbod drives together but then not have any redundency.
WHS makes it easy to add and remove drives as needed. Add redundency or remove it on a share by share basis.

Some people will use WHS for the drive pooling but flexraid for the data protection. But again, flexraid is new and you never know if you could have issues with your data.

It's also a HUGE advantage being able to use drives of different sizes. It would cost me a fortune to use raid 5 as I would have to replace many of my drives with others of the same size.
 
It doesn't pay to make a sticky because the people that should read it won't. It is much easier to just post a question and wait for somebody to respond with the answer.
 
You can turn on duplication for the Backups via a Registry Edit.
 
Archer75 said:
What you are talking about here is storing data on your PC, then backing up to the server and then having redundency on that backup. That's just a waste of space. And you can't put redundency on the backup anyways.
WHS will backup all your PC's for you every day. No need for you to do anything. But those backups aren't stored in shares that can be duplicated. You could of course disable this backup and manually do your own to a share and then duplicate that.

So if what you want is 3tb of data on your PC backed up you just need 3tb in the server. You now have the original data and a backup of it.

Or don't even store the data on your PC. Then you don't need 3tb there you can have it all on the server with duplication on.




Because WHS can take any size drive and pool it together in a single storage pool. Makes it alot easier to manage data. Sure you could jbod drives together but then not have any redundency.
WHS makes it easy to add and remove drives as needed. Add redundency or remove it on a share by share basis.

Some people will use WHS for the drive pooling but flexraid for the data protection. But again, flexraid is new and you never know if you could have issues with your data.

It's also a HUGE advantage being able to use drives of different sizes. It would cost me a fortune to use raid 5 as I would have to replace many of my drives with others of the same size.
Click to expand...

I'd like for my backup to have some redundency like in a Raid-5 setup. It just seems safer and does not cost much storage space. Mirroring however takes up way too much space for a backup. I didn't think it would be so hard to find an OS that does what I need. WHS + Flexraid sounds promising though. I might just give it a shot today since I don't plan to work 13 hours today :p.

I'm curious to see how WHS backs up the commputers. If it puts them into a single file etc like other windows OSs, I find that a waste of time usualy and prefer to see all the files that are backed up such as with ViseVersa.

Open Filer Can simulate a large volume (grow and shrink the volume and allows for different size disks), without need to waste a disk for a data partition. It can do software Raid as well but I have not been able to play with it yet. However it's not good for an apache,php,Tapestry, Marvin, Jboss etc... Its simply made to be used like a NAS device only more powerful than anything off the shelf, but it does sound like it may be my best bet.
 
Justintoxicated said:
I'd like for my backup to have some redundency like in a Raid-5 setup. It just seems safer and does not cost much storage space. Mirroring however takes up way too much space for a backup.
Click to expand...

Why does the backup need redundency? It is a redundency in itself of the desktops data. Should your desktop die, no problem, server has the backup. Should the server die, no problem, desktop has all the data.

And again, raid 5 suffers from the write hole error and bit rot. Mirroring is far better for data protection than parity. At the very least one could look into freenas .7 as it has ZFS and RaidZ. No write hole error.

What about just storing your data on the server and not on the PC's themselves? Just work across the network. Like I said before, it's what I do and it works fine.

Also, WHS uses VSS. So you get previous versions of your files. Goof on a file? No problem, you can get the previous version of it back.

Justintoxicated said:
I'm curious to see how WHS backs up the commputers. If it puts them into a single file etc like other windows OSs, I find that a waste of time usualy and prefer to see all the files that are backed up such as with ViseVersa.
Click to expand...

You can access individual files in the backup.

Also WHS has the option to backup the server itself to externals. So should the server exploded one could have data stored elsewhere. I also backup some of my most important data to an external just in case.

Don't get so hung up on Raid 5. It has it's own issues and limitations. Often times being smarter about working with and managing our data is all we really need.

How would you backup your desktop anyways? And in the event it's drives die how would you restore it?
WHS keeps it backed up for you, automatically. It can also wake it from sleep, back it up, and put it back to sleep.

In the event your desktop drive dies you replacing it and boot from the restore disc, select a backup and it will have your computer back to the exact moment of the last backup. No need to reconfigure anything.
 
I'm mainly concered with backing up my data, not my OS installes. Usualy by the time those get screwed up its time for a cleann install anyways :) But it is a nice feature. I'm not hung up on raid5, but I don't like the fact that WHS wastes the space of an entire disk (well ok not completly wasted but it sorta is)...

Freenas looks easier to setup but openfiler looks better over all
http://www.scribd.com/doc/29643/OpenFiler-vs-FreeNAS

Oh and the reason I don't want to just toss all my data on the WHS server is cause it can only hold 9 drives (10 drives max if I buy a hotswap) (Antec P180 mini). My CM Stacker holds 8 (10 max if I buy hotswaps). I just won't have enough room in my little server case to store everything + have redundency mirror. I like the idea of using the server as a backup repository, vs relying on mirror type strategy (although WHS implementation may be good enough in reality)

Ok...I will give WHS a try when I get home today. :) Can't hurt to try it out.
 
Trepidati0n said:
It doesn't pay to make a sticky because the people that should read it won't. It is much easier to just post a question and wait for somebody to respond with the answer.
Click to expand...

It would be nice for those of us that do answer to either point to the thread, or use it as a resource so we don't have to search so much to find info.
 
Just shooting from the hip here, but how about a full Linux distribution? That way you can get...well, just about all functionality, including what is missing in OpenFiler. My next NAS is going to be running Linux. If you want something you can set up pretty quick and don't mind a tiny bit of overhead choose Ubuntu. If you don't mind hand-editing conf-files and have some linux experience or a lot of time to learn, choose Arch. Arch is like the best parts of Slackware, but with a APT -like package management system for common packages.

I am no where near a Linux guru yet, but I think this could solve your problem.
 
Well for some reason WHS will not install on this PC I get a blue screen when it is supposed to start up. It installs fine in VM ware on my other machine though.

getting the famous 0X0000007B error :(
 
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