IMHO that's pretty fast for a software RAID5 setup!
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New Windows Home Server Vail Preview Build
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IMHO that's pretty fast for a software RAID5 setup!
That's probably a Vista thing, you'd have to try a Win7 or even XP client. At home I have an XP(32) RAID-1 fileserver and Win7 client, both on Gb ethernet. I usually get 80MB/s on big files.
Still I'm amazed at those 50MB/s writes on software RAID-5, reads should be way higher
Trepidati0n
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Why would you think it would be any faster..or are you under some sort of illusion?
Writing to regular SATA drives has NEVER been fast..especially if there is any form overhead where other things are accessing the drive (like prepping for duplicaiton). 20-30 MByte/sec writes is fairly decent for a JBOD system doing full file copy. Reads...I can basically hit the potential of where the data is on the platter. Sorry...but linux boxes running JBOD won't do much better.
You "can" use RAID with WHS, however WHS duplication is generally more flexible and is available on all setups and not just on computers with RAID. There are some who have run WHS with RAID duplication turned off, but it is a untested configuration. Personally I'm happy running WHS with six drives and duplication turned on. The benifit of duplication, which is implemented in software, is that it works across virtually any mix of media you have connected to your system: p-ata, sata, scsi, e-sata, usb, firewire, etc.. One big duplicated partition spanning all devices, and if one fails, replace it with whatever you want and no data loss.
OS type has no bearing on this.
This is quite inaccurate and incorrect information. When you make replies like this it serves only to confuse people who do not already have experience in this area.
22MB/s = 176Mb/s = crap = something is wrong or the hardware used is wrong. Yes I am talking about writes.
The only thing I will agree with is "if there is any form of overhead" - Yes a drive slammed with I/O from other sources will suffer this should be common knowledge.
1) File transfers across the network will depend on both the originating and target drives capabilities as well as frame size and link speed. Because of these "multiple" factors the statement "Writing to regular SATA drives has never been fast" is very flawed.
2) 50MB/s is an "acceptable" transfer rate however it's hardly optimal - this has been the case for several years.
My crap dell work laptop is capable of a 70MB/s transfer to the WHS. It does however fluctuate because its a laptop nic.
WHS is a very solid solution for a media server and if you want to optimize transfer speed you need to take into account the network medium, drives on either end and availability.
Most of the time the problem lies at the NIC and the switch people use. Switching fabric is EXTREMELY important.
You can build a very cost effective WHS box that is capable of Gig saturation simply by going with a decent gig switch, WD caviar blacks and an Intel server nic.
Remember that Veil is based on Windows Server 2008 architecture.
Using a dual port intel nic aggregated via PaGP I am able to fully saturate the bonded interfaces by streaming 1080p movies to multiple tv's whilst uploading newly "acquired" content. The transfer mind you hits 80MB/s while my kids go movie stream happy.
WHS duplication is horrid and I would never consider it as a viable solution. If you want separate storage for important data you can add a drive to the WHS machine that is not part of the general "Storage Pool". Or buy a NAS for 120 bucks.
If you want an extremely fast storage solution with data integrity/parity, go with Openfiler and configure a raid 5/10/6 array which of course you can access via iSCSI.
It is also possible to present raid 0/5 etc volumes to WHS as "drives" for the storage pool with the only caveat being the volume must not exceed 2TB. YOU do not need ESX/ESXi to implement this. You simply need a raid card capable of multiple volumes (i.e pretty much all of them). This is trivial of course but very easy to configure none the less.
When you do the above you take into consideration you are nesting raided volumes on top of WHS's software like solution.
WHS file shares (folder to folder transfers) are very fast for me over Gigabit, but backup/restore is noticeably slower.
Anyway, as far as need goes, it's the non-technical users that get viruses that hose their OS, accidentally delete important files, etc. They really should have quiet, automatic backup... that isn't difficult to setup or use. WHS is great for this. But marketing isn't really there yet... it's tough to make people realize they need backup until after they... need it and don't have it!
Anyway, as far as need goes, it's the non-technical users that get viruses that hose their OS, accidentally delete important files, etc. They really should have quiet, automatic backup... that isn't difficult to setup or use. WHS is great for this. But marketing isn't really there yet... it's tough to make people realize they need backup until after they... need it and don't have it!
The one drawback I can think of. It is slow, I went from a raid 5 server with a dedicated controller 100 mbps over to this whs box at around 20mbps. I really don't move huge files to it, just reads to the network so its not that bad of a con.
sitheris
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I've been running a WHS box (old version) for a little over a year now almost 24/7 - only restarts have been for windows updates. Vail looks nice, however I don't believe I will be upgrading. WHS is a very good simple server OS for people who need it, but I think I will be installing ubuntu on the box soon. WHS is too simple and limited for my needs.
Give an example of what you think you can't accomplish with WHS. Especially Vail, as its server 2008 based. (iSCSI initiator support etc etc).
Or an example of something that is "complicated" that an Ubuntu file server will do that you cannot implement with WHS Vail.
Don't get me wrong Ubuntu 10 server is both reliable and useful, however you will be making alot of configuration tweaks in the form of SMB shares and UpNP if you want lets say an Xbox to walk and talk with it.
I've messed around with the earlier Vail beta, and while I do plan on using it as a part of my home server setup when it's finally released, I feel like the WHS team is really out of touch with reality when it comes to the new Drive Extender. They've effectively reduced data security to that of RAID 0 unless you turn on duplication. When dealing with Blu-Ray, the amount of overhead used by duplication plus checksumming is excessive. I expect a lot of people to be quite unhappy with the choice between 44% storage efficiency and RAID 0 data security. Storage is cheap when I can buy 2tb for $100. Storage is not nearly so cheap when that 2tb drive adds 800gb of usable space to my server. Add to that the new proprietary file system used by DE v2, and you've got a system that quite successfully killed off most of the advantages of the original.
Still, I like the rest of what WHS does, so I'll work around the DE problem. Thanks to the iSCSI initiator support, I can get the best of both worlds by using RAID 6 on an iSCSI target and adding that to the WHS storage pool. I've tested this using Ubuntu Server to do mdadm RAID 6 and exporting the raw raid device over iSCSI, and it works perfectly. That way I can turn off duplication and effectively have RAID 60 data security. Important stuff will still be duplicated, and RAID 61 security with offsite backups should be enough for anyone. So, while WHS is great in a lot of ways, getting any decent storage efficiency and data security out of it at the same time is definitely a complication.
Still, I like the rest of what WHS does, so I'll work around the DE problem. Thanks to the iSCSI initiator support, I can get the best of both worlds by using RAID 6 on an iSCSI target and adding that to the WHS storage pool. I've tested this using Ubuntu Server to do mdadm RAID 6 and exporting the raw raid device over iSCSI, and it works perfectly. That way I can turn off duplication and effectively have RAID 60 data security. Important stuff will still be duplicated, and RAID 61 security with offsite backups should be enough for anyone. So, while WHS is great in a lot of ways, getting any decent storage efficiency and data security out of it at the same time is definitely a complication.