Home Server Questions

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ottozylch46

Weaksauce
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Oct 7, 2009
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I would like to put together a home server for my movie collection, and am looking for advice as to the best way to do it for my circumstances. After reading the forums and seeing what and how other people have done their systems, I have some questions.
First, it seems that WHS would be my best option. What I am unsure of is how to configure things. WHS appears to make a "pool" of all the drives and shows it as one "drive", correct?
Is this the same thing as a JBOD?
I am not worried about losing anything since I can simply re-rip all the movies if anything happens so I don't believe I need any sort of RAID.
If I go with the first example (pooling all the drives), what happens when one of the drives goes bad? Would I simply replace it and not lose anything else on the other drives?
How would I figure out what I had lost on the bad drive? Would I have to manually go thru all the files and figure out what movies are missing?

Sorry if this is old hat stuff to you guys...still trying to learn this.
Greatly appreciate your input.
 
If one of the drives in the WHS pool goes bad, you will indeed lose what was on that drive. However, if you choose to turn on WHS Duplication for a certain Share, whatever you store in that Share will be duplicated on two separate physical drives.

Again, that is only if you turn on duplication for that Share. RAID is not needed (and not supported) in a WHS environment because of the duplication feature.

To give you en example, on my WHS machine, my Shares consist of: Video, Music, Documents, Pictures, Software, and Public. I only have duplication turned on for Documents and Pictures because those are the only things I know I cannot replace. I know that if I put anything in the Documents or Pictures share, they will be duplicated on two separate drives.

If I was to duplicate my Videos share (about 1TB of videos so far) I would need at least another free TB to do so, not worth it for me.
 
It is kind of like JBOD, but not quite. Each disk is individual, but appears to the end user as a large volume. However, there is no interdependency between disks. You only lose the data that was on that drive. The files will just no longer be available. As far as I know, files will NEVER span across more than one drive, so you won't be taking parts of files with you when you kill a drive, only complete files.

In your case, since you don't care about data loss, WHS would be perfect.
 
Thanks very much for the quick response. Starting to understand a bit better.

Two more questions:
1) When adding additional drives in the future, is it a simple matter of plugging them in and WHS does everything necessary to add it to the pool?

2) I've heard the term "balancing". Is this a procedure that WHS does once or initially, or is it an on going procedure that is done as more and more files are added?

Thanks again for your expertise.
 
Yeah, my question with this has always been that when I organize my own files, I know what I lost if a HDD were to go down. With WHS if a drive goes down, how do you know what part of the pool was lost? Could you lost part, but not all, of your music/pictures/etc? How would you know what you lost??
 
Thanks to the OP. Helpful thread as its helping me get my server configured as well. I have seen it mentioned that some people place the server in a different room or even in a closet. I'd like to ask how far away can it be from the network switch? OK to run 30 ft or even 50 ft of CAT 5e cabling to place the server in a remote location?
 
Thanks, but I didn't see any mention of how far away I can place the server, i.e. how long of an Ethernet cable I can run. Did I miss something?
 
I wasn't directing that at you. CAT5e can be run up to 100 Meters. Didn't think to Google that? lol
 
I thought you could run cat5e and cat 6 up to 1k feet. DiscreteMeat that distance problem can also be solved by placing a powered switch in between the 2 just fyi.. So you could technically keep going more and more feet by what I understand through my old networking classes I was forced to take during my CS degree..
 
Criccio,
Yes I read thru the sticky and other forum posts also.
Was just trying to clarify things to make sure I understood them.
 
The official standard for CAT5e is 100 Meters for a single run of cable. Widely available via Google.
 
You can easily extend the 100 meters by placing powered switches at 100M intervals. That said, if you are considering runs long enough(500+ meters) it just makes more sense to go fiber.
 
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