use of laptop hard drives in raid 5 array for WHS system drive. opinions please.

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Limp Gawd
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Mar 13, 2009
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one thing i don't like about WHS is the lack of failure protection for the system drive. if the system drive dies the WHS is toast.

i have an adaptec 3805 hardware raid card ( 8 x internal SAS/SATA ), and am considering putting the OS on a raid 5 array. doesn't need to be be particularly big in capacity, but small in physical volume occupied by the drives and low power consumption.

to this end i am considering a supermicro 8 2.5inch drives into 2 5.25inch bay module, and a set of seagate 7200.3 laptop harddrives, probably 4 500gb in a raid 5. the 7200 drives don't use much more power than the 5400 drives ... i checked the data sheets.

data is currently on 3.5inch seagate drives

how crazy is the idea of using laptop harddrives ( 7200rpm or otherwise ) in a raid array?

the raid array would be transparent to WHS as it would be done in hardware.

cheers all.
 
Well, I've been running my WHS box with two 250 GB (desktop) drives in a RAID1 config and haven't had any problems. Just using the onboard SATA RAID controller.

I don't see any problem using the laptop drives vs standard desktop drives. I know Microsoft doesn't officially support RAID setups, but after having to reinstall from the loss of the system drive I personally wouldn't ever set up a WHS without at least RAID1 again.
 
The key to WHS is a fast "landing" drive. If you are looking at optimizing a WHS, do a hardware raid 10 of the system > the largest storage drive/ one time data push.

akaonly use laptop drives for storage drives :)
 
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Well, the "landing zone" isn't really used anymore since PP1. That is the reason that I went with smaller hard drives in a RAID config. Before PP1 everything was written to the landing zone first, but now it gets written directly to the drive pool... so I still don't see any issues with using laptop drives for the system drive.
 
Just go with two drives in RAID-1. That way you're cool even if something crazy happens to the RAID metadata or your RAID controller.
 
hdd---hdd---\\
......................\\
.......................\\
.........................---array
.......................//
......................//
hdd---hdd---//

am i correct in the presumption that the above represents a raid 10 array?
 
RAID-10 arranges a pair of mirrored drives in a stripe. This gives you the throughput boost of running RAID-0, while at the same time protecting you from physical disk failure as RAID-1 does. Only downside is the pretty high overhead of requiring four drives.
 
I believe you have it correct. One thing to point out, raid 1+0 and raid 0+1 arent the same. If I am not mistaken raid 10 ( 1+0 ) is safer because it does the 1;1 writes, then the stripe writes, whereas a 0+1 will write the stripe first. And you can recover from a partial 1;1 write, but cannot recover from a partial stripe write. Someone please correct me if I have wrong information.
 
Laptop hard drives will lack TLER, so a bad sector could cause a drive to drop out of an array. This is generally true with most desktop hard drives as well.
 
ShockwaveVT said:
Pretty sure WHS supports backing up the system drive to an external drive (viaUSB, etc).
Click to expand...

You can backup the "backup files" and some other information, but as for creating a true backup... nope it isn't supported. If your hard drive crashes you have to do a "reinstall" and I haven't had any luck trying that option the two times I've already rebuilt my WHS box.
 
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