Possible to force WHS NOT to store data on boot/default drive?

[cyberjt]

From what I understand the minumum storage for a new WHS install is somewhere in the region of 75GB or which it carves 20GB for a boot drive and the rest for storage into the 'pool'. Any extra drives added to the storage pool, whilst just being added as JBOD have data added to a standard NTFS such that if those drives are added to a different box they are readable. Now I currently run all my non workstation environments from VMs - with the VM boot disks in RAID 10 on one controller (A) and the data strores on a RAID 1 and RAID 5 arrays on a different controller (B). Hence I want to minimise IO on the VMs controller, A, and hence do not want WHS using the remaining 55GB as storage I want it to use the added VDs from controller B .

Is there any way to remove the 55GB from the storage pool or force it not to use it? (I am not worried about extra storage being used since the the VD for it will be set to autoexpand unlike my other VMs which have allocation at start).

 

[nitrobass24]

ummm technically no, and the minimum install for WHS is 65gb, and makes a sys partition of 20gb

What you could try is puttin a blank/empty file on the D:/fake

just open a console window:
if not exist d:\fake md d:\fake
fsutil file createnew d:\fake\fake%random%.txt 53687091200

This will create a random named file that is 50gb in size.

Now it uses the space but nothing will ever access it, and nothing else can placed there because the system thinks that the space is full.
I dont know how WHS will react to this Post PP2, as i know before if the primary data partition was full it didnt allow large file transfers even if there was free space on the other data drives.

 

[cyberjt]

Thanks for the info, I might try this and see how I get on, I really hope post PP2 it is still not doing this ridiculous save to one location then move it to another idiocy, I really can not understand what MS was thinking about when they came up with that one!

 

[nitrobass24]

Thanks for the info, I might try this and see how I get on, I really hope post PP2 it is still not doing this ridiculous save to one location then move it to another idiocy, I really can not understand what MS was thinking about when they came up with that one!

well Post PP1 it did not do that
i was if you were accessing via Vista, and had no free space on the primary partition, the network share reported the D drive as being full when in fact there was actually space on the secondary drives.
Since PP1 there has not been a "landing drive"

I wrote a pretty good description of it in some thread, and now I think its on the front page of the WHS sticky. I would definately read through that and maybe even the WHS whitepaper.

EDIT: here it is

What is the landing zone or is one still there?
~Technically there is no "Landing Zone" it was supposedly fixed with PP1 and an Update. However recent post and issues do suggest otherwise, particularly when using Vista.

The original definition - This was the size of the free space on the partition of the D:"data" drive on the main OS disk.
That amount of said space was all you could transfer to the box at any given moment.
This was due to the fact, that when you transferred a file or set of files to the WHS it had to first be written to the OS disk "data" partition and then be copied to the other storage disk(s).

Current Definition - Unlike before when data had to be written to the OS disk, it is now written directly to storage disk(s) unless space is unavailable, then and only then is data written directly to the OS disk.
However there still seems to be an issue particularly common when using vista, that although there is plenty of free space on other "Storage Disk(s)" there is not enough free space on the OS disk in relation to the size of file(s) one is transferring.
When the size of the file is very large, lets say 200gb, and there is only 150gb free space on the OS disk data partition, you will receive an error and the transfer will not complete.
This is particularly common with folks that have a small OS disk, and that is why it is still advised that you install the OS on the largest disk that you have.