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Windows Home Server VS a RAID 5 setup

T

Time2Kill

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I currently have a 2.5TB Raid 5 setup on a Windows Home Server machine. I'm looking to expand the storage, but I don't want to be tied down to buying more 500GB drives of the same brand etc and I'll be running out of ports on my RAID card. I was thinking about taking advantage of the 'storage pool' that Windows Home Server offers. It sounds much like RAID in the fact that if a drive fails, it will recover itself with no data loss, but it doesn't have the requirements that all the drives be the same etc.

Does anyone know any more on how the WHS storage pool works and if its a good idea? I use my RAID as a media storage across several computers for HTPC setups. Just seems like it would be much easier to manage over a RAID setup.
 
Go check out hte WHS forums and microsoft. --> http://forums.microsoft.com/windowshomeserver/default.aspx?siteid=50

As for your question...WHS is very slick in that regard.

1. When you attach a drive it is not in the pool yet. You have to add it to the pool. A few clicks and you win at this.

2. Mirrored data is mirrored on another drive in an exact copy. It does not span drives. Therefore if a drive dies or the server dies, you can easily find your info. If a RAID card dies, well...that can be easy to hard to repair.

3. If the WHS main drive dies and you had a bunch of pool drives, you are still okay. WHS keeps markers on each drive that detail the files and how WHS was using them. Therefore, reinstall WHS on a new drive and you have your pool back

Compared to a good raid card, I would rather just have WHS mirror my data and buy more drives. The cost is about the same and the stress and recovery methods are better IMO. right now in my setup all data is mirrored and backups are not. Pretty simple...no stress.

with an 8 sata port MB and 500GB drives...you have 2TB of space min, 4TB max...with a probably average of about 3TB (when balanced between backups and data). Not that bad IMO.

Supermicro 8-SATA server chassis with redundant PSU and HDD bays - $600 (can probably do for $200 if you don't need bays/nice case/PSU/etc)
8-SATA port MB - $130
Proc - $100
Mem - $70
Used Vid Card = $20 (FS/FT)
Optical Drive = $20
8-500 GB drives = $900
WHS = $200 (reasonable guess)

total = $2k or $1/GB worst case, $0.66/GB typical, $0.50 best

total (if cheap case/PSU) = $1600 or $0.80/GB worst case, $0.53/GB typical, $0.40 best
 
Windows Home Server uses duplication, not RAID, so it's storage efficiency is very poor compared to a large RAID 5 array. Duplication costs 1/2 the available space for redundancy, compared to RAID 5 using 1 drive out of the entire array for redundancy. So your actual space available will be constrained quite a lot if you use WHS's redundancy.
 
However, the OP is talking about WHS and the effects of RAID5...not just RAID. With WHS you have the choice on what to duplicate...with RAID5 you don't. Also most "cheap" RAID5 systems just don't allow you to add in another drive. This is a big part of why I like WHS and its pool system.

Don't get me wrong..RAID5 isn't bad, I just don't think it is a good match when coupled with WHS.
 
I thought WHS used a parity bit similiar to RAID 5, not just duplication.

I already have the 2.5TB full, so that would mean another 2.5TB of drives before I even gained any more storage over what I have now.
 
Time2Kill said:
I thought WHS used a parity bit similiar to RAID 5, not just duplication.

I already have the 2.5TB full, so that would mean another 2.5TB of drives before I even gained any more storage over what I have now.
Click to expand...

That is correct in your case.
 
Nope, it's just duplication. If you want to find a fancy parity scheme, look into ZFS.
 
ZFS is very nice if you can deal with Solaris or FreeBSD. I don't know that I'd try to learn one of those OSes and ZFS at one time, but if you have some experience with either, it's definitely worth your time to learn ZFS.
 
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