storage question

[RKBET]

Hi guys, I fairly new to the forums here as u probably can see. And I have a Question about a Storage/File Server I'm working on. Right now im running a WHS server on a case i use for as a workstation.


Whats the difference in doing storage with raid 5 or 6, or windows home server pool, or manually duplicating over 2 hard drives or more?

 

[Yakyb]

basically

WHS is designed to implement pools which basically group all hard drives to one and offer safety precautions such as duplication

raid is designed for both performance improvements as well as designed to improove uptime of the drives there are many different levels of raid and they are all explained pretty well in the wiki for raid
RAID is not to be confused as a backup method

as for manual duplication this is generally used as a backup procedure and performed on a regular basis (every night /week / month ) and involves a script or manual moving of the data from one hdd to another usually on a seperate box or external drive meaning that if something catastophic happened you would have the data saef elsewhere

 

[DougLite]

Hi guys, I fairly new to the forums here as u probably can see. And I have a Question about a Storage/File Server I'm working on. Right now im running a WHS server on a case i use for as a workstation.


Whats the difference in doing storage with raid 5 or 6, or windows home server pool, or manually duplicating over 2 hard drives or more?

Each of the methods you describe has advantages and disadvantages.

RAID 5/6:
+ Increased linear read/write speed
+ Automated fault tolerance
- Single file system means that if the file system or partition table gets trashed, you lose everything on the array
- A RAID-5 or RAID-6 array is tied to the controller it was made on
- Single instance storage means that if a file gets deleted, corrupted, or modified in an unintended way, it must be recreated or restored from a removable backup

WHS Pool
+ On the fly expandability
+ Largely automated duplication to protect data from single disk failure
- Can't scale read/write speed beyond that of a single drive
- Duplicating a large amount of data (more than one drive's worth) not as space efficient as RAID-5
- Single instance storage means that if a file gets deleted, corrupted, or modified in an unintended way, it must be recreated or restored from a removable backup

Manual duplication
+ You can have multiple snapshots or shadow copies, allowing you to go back in time to a previous version, recover from corruption, or recover accidental deletion/modification
- Much more management intensive and requires more planning than the other largely automated methods.

No single storage system is perfect. A fire, flood, or theft can instantly wipe out a totally fault tolerant / redundant system. Corruption can strike unnoticed until it is too late. Users make mistakes. There are 101 ways to lose data, hard drive failure is merely one of them.