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WHS and Hard Drives issues

잠김 WHS and Hard Drives issues

  • Sonntag, 26. Oktober 2008 10:56
     
     
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    I have been looking around for informaition about WHS and harddrive issues, and found that WHS more or less sucks in functionality.

    I can understand that Microsoft wanted to make an easy home version server, but why making it hard for those who would like to use this server version, as a really good home server.

    Why not having support for RAID drives, every shop is selling RAID controllers, and almost every pc suitable for using as a server for WHS has RAID functionality built in.

    For thos of you who would like know what RAID is you can find some information if you follow this link:
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redundant_array_of_independent_disks

    Everyone who would like to set up a server with their personal photos, videos, music and other stuff, would ofcourse like to make that server as safe as possible, and they would like to have as much storage as possible. Today many people would like to have all their music and video ripped and stored on a server, and easily accessible everywhere through different types of mediacenters.

    My WHS has 6 drives, 2*500 GB for the system, with RAID 1 for mirroring of the system, so that the server can continue to run even if one drive fails. It was really hard to find a way to install the server on a SATA2 RAID controller, since no drivers are available from the Microsoft distribution of WHS. Even if you have drivers on a separate floppy disk, you will end up with problems, since WHS can not copy the drivers to the disk.

    The other 4 drives are used for storage and they are ofcourse 4*1 TB set up on another RAID-controller in a RAID 5, making 3 TB of storage available, and still, one drive in this RAID-set can fail, and I have still all my data available.

    When you have this set up, you also very soon realize that WHS only support drives up to 2 TB in size. This is really really bad, and I hope that Microsoft actually realize that is something you need to work on. If you rip all your CDs and your videos, and also start to record TV-programs, you will need to have a lot of storage available.

    So, since the operating system in itself, that WHS is built on, does support drives bigger than 2 TB, there is a way I used to work around the issues in WHS:

    I partioned the disk into suitable pieces, and mounted the pieces in each share. Not a nice solution, but it works, even though the WHS software do not like it.

    Please Microsoft, make WHS a good solution for the home, without such stupid limitations, otherwise a NAS would be a better solution for most people.

       

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    • Montag, 27. Oktober 2008 14:44
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      Why not RAID? Please read the Why RAID is not a consumer technology post on the Windows Home Server team blog. Charlie says it better than I have, and in fewer words. :)
      I'm not on the WHS team, I just post a lot. :)
         
      • Montag, 27. Oktober 2008 20:37
         
         
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        Just so you know, while WHS only supports up to 2 TB partitions, it doesn't mean that is a limit on WHS's server storage. The total server storage can easily exceed 2 TB.. in fact, mine is 5 TB right now.

        There are no single disk 2 TB drives out yet, but I expect in the future, WHS will certainly support larger drives. Right now, it is a limit of using MBR.

        Quality RAID controllers are expensive. As WHS does not use RAID hardware anyway, it does not gain any such benefit. A quality RAID controller in such a system is not really justified, neither is a crappy software one because WHS itself uses software methods.
           
        • Donnerstag, 27. November 2008 08:25
           
           
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          No perfect world, but RAID still a better solution for availability, but I guess MS not want to let it become a much cheaper version of  Windows Storage Server.
          my mobo is ASUS P5S-M with Intel RAID function, I cannot understand why we still able to make RAID volume and also be able to convert to GTP in disk management of WHS, but from the WHS console  it only shows all separately hard disks.
          However, there are many bugs in the server storage of WHS console,
          For example, while I use a exist disk drive to make a simple volume and convert it to GTP, and console will treat it find a non add-in  disk, so will we can add it in, but disk drive is useless, then I will have total 5 disk drives on server storage, but I only have 4. 
          Then I can even not possible to remove it, always error....
          My now only hope -- Fix bugs please
             
          • Donnerstag, 27. November 2008 14:41
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            Please be aware that anything you do to change your storage configuration in the Disk Management MMC snap-in rather than using the Windows Home Server Console application is unsupported and may cause problems with server storage. That includes building a software RAID array, formatting a disk, switching to GPT/dynamic disks, etc. These are not bugs; you are using unsupported tools in an unsupported fashion, and experiencing undesirable but predictable results.

            The WHS Console is the only supported interface for WHS storage management.
            I'm not on the WHS team, I just post a lot. :)