Server 2012 with Drive Bender as a WHS solution

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blackhawk777

Limp Gawd
Joined
Jun 10, 2010
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I just wanted to throw this out there as an option for people looking to upgrade and replace their Windows Home Server as I just went through that process.

Last week I set up Drive Bender on a Server 2012 virtual machine with 10GB of memory and it works extremely well. Drive Bender provides the capability to pool different drives with redundancy (which WHS V2 lacks), and installing it on Server 2012 allowed me to add more than the 8GB of ram that WHS V2 is limited to.

This post may seem random, but I know there are a number of users out there who appreciate the ease of management of WHS V1 but are looking for something more current. With this solution you can now have a 64bit server with a bunch of ram, pooled storage, redundancy, and the speed of the latest Windows server. Installing subsonic added the ability to stream video and music to pretty much any smartphone, tablet, or PC as well.
 
Nice setup. Was planning to do something similar myself, but with WHS 2011 (cheaper license).
 
Thanks. The thing that really impressed me about Drive Bender is that it is extremely responsive and the transfer speeds are excellent in my environment. I'm seeing consistent transfer speeds to the pool of 80-100 MB/s over my gigabit network. WHS V1 was hit or miss with transfer speeds, and I tried DrivePool on WHS V2 but it seemed less consistent and reliable. Also, once I got past transferring about 8 of 10TB of data I have to the server it started to hang on the transfer for seemingly no reason at all, and the shares would sometimes be inaccessible during transfers. I almost went back to WHS V1 out of frustration but decided to try Drive Bender over Server 2012 and in contrast, Drive Bender hasn't skipped a beat.
 
I was under the impression that WHS2012 had a built in drive "pooler"?

No?
 
Inate8 said:
I was under the impression that WHS2012 had a built in drive "pooler"?

No?
Click to expand...

You get Windows Storage Spaces, which can do drive pooling, but it has its own set of limitations and quirks (everything is striped across all drives, even when mirrored). Drive Bender / DrivePool just gets that simple per-share duplication and drive pooling back.
 
Ahh okay, that's good to know. I'm still finalizing a lot for my new server, something to keep in mind. Thanks!
 
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