WHS and RAID5

[nitrobass24]

As you all know WHS allows you to add drives at any time and of any size creating a just in time storage pool. This is awesome, but if you want redundancy you must turn on duplication with essentially cuts your available space in half almost like a RAID1 but it only prevents against a single drive failure.

Scenario: 20 1tb drives
Lets say that I create 4 raid5 arrays(The OS would see these arrays as individual drives) Would this work. Any reason I would not want to do this.

 

[Archer75]

As you all know WHS allows you to add drives at any time and of any size creating a just in time storage pool. This is awesome, but if you want redundancy you must turn on duplication with essentially cuts your available space in half almost like a RAID1 but it only prevents against a single drive failure.

Scenario: 20 1tb drives
Lets say that I create 4 raid5 arrays(The OS would see these arrays as individual drives) Would this work. Any reason I would not want to do this.

You do not want to do this with WHS. It moves the data around itself and that would screw with parity. Best just to let WHS do it's thing. Data gets transferred to D: which is sort of a loading zone. From there WHS puts it wherever it feels it needs to go.
Yes, it is essentially mirroring but on a share by share basis instead of drives. So only duplicate what you need to. But it has other features which makes it more valuable, such as the ability to backup all the windows computers on your network and do bare metal restores quickly.

 

[nitrobass24]

Yes, it is essentially mirroring but on a share by share basis instead of drives. So only duplicate what you need to. But it has other features which makes it more valuable, such as the ability to backup all the windows computers on your network and do bare metal restores quickly.

Yea I know WHS is awesome im currently running it...but im quickly running out of room by the day.

 

[Archer75]

Yea I know WHS is awesome im currently running it...but im quickly running out of room by the day.

Also using RAID 5 with WHS would force you to use drives of the same size or lose space.

If you need more space you can look into flexraid which does a raid sort of thing without the drive limitiations. But you have to use a DFS to get the drives to pool together. More configuration here.
And there is also unraid. Not free though.

Your options with WHS are to buy more drives or make some decisions with what you have duplicated and what data you have on there, if you really need it or not.

My server currently has 4tb of storage. I don't duplicate my movies though. Those are easily replaceable. But the rest of my data is duplicated.

 

[nitrobass24]

my movies replaceable ...yes
easily...not so much blurays are huge and take a long time to make iso's