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    I building up a system to play around with Vail and I see several post where people are talking about moving the storage pool off of the system drive.

    I have an old 320G drive + a new 1.5TB drive I bought to play with Vail + I plan to retask another 1 TB drive once I get the sytem up and running.  (The case I'm using supports 4 Hot swap drives).

    As I see it my choices are : 

      320G with a 60+ G System partition remainder in the storage pool + 1.5 TB Storage drive (expanding with additional 1 TB Storage drive)

    320G and expand System partition to 320 G with no storage pool on the system drive.  Giving me  1.5 TB Storage pool (expanding with additional 1 TB Storage drive).

    So what are the advantages of not having the system drive as part of the storage pool?

    The disadvantages I see is I lose a 200+G of storage, which is probably not that significant right now and in the long term having a seperate system drive limits my storage capacity as I can only support 4 drives in my configuration.  Which makes me think I might be better off using the 1.5TB drive as the system + storage drive and put the 320G into the storage pool where I could always swap it out for a larger drive. 

    Thanks in advance for any comments or advice

    Gary

     

    Saturday, May 1, 2010 3:10 PM

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    The advantage is that if your system drive fails, you can replace it with zero chance of data loss elsewhere.

    I would not personally use the 320 GB drive at all in a production system. It won't gain you enough to make it worth the space it takes up and (as an older drive) failure is statistically likely much sooner than the 1.5 TB drive. But testing a beta is different.

    One thing that you haven't picked up is that, once you've removed the system drive from the storage pool, you should be able to extend the system partition into the unused space, effectively making use of the entire drive.

    I'm not on the WHS team, I just post a lot. :)
    Saturday, May 1, 2010 3:26 PM
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    The advantage is that if your system drive fails, you can replace it with zero chance of data loss elsewhere.

    I would not personally use the 320 GB drive at all in a production system. It won't gain you enough to make it worth the space it takes up and (as an older drive) failure is statistically likely much sooner than the 1.5 TB drive. But testing a beta is different.

    One thing that you haven't picked up is that, once you've removed the system drive from the storage pool, you should be able to extend the system partition into the unused space, effectively making use of the entire drive.

    I'm not on the WHS team, I just post a lot. :)
    Saturday, May 1, 2010 3:26 PM
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    Well right now I'm just going to be playing around so that's why I grabbed the 320G drive off the shelf where it was gathering dust.  Nothing is going to be on the Vail box that I can't afford to loose.  (everything on there will be backed up somewhere else).  The 320G drive was only used for about 6 months before it was replaced by a 1TB drive (but it was pretty heavy 24x7 operation).

    It sounds like there might be a small advantage to keeping the system drive seperate, but it does lose me a drive (I actually could support a 2.5" non swappable drive in the case but the MB I'm using only has 4 SATA ports so I lose a drive anyway.)

    I did pick up on the fact I could expand the system drive but I don't see the advantage of a 320G system drive over a 60G system partition.  I don't expect to have that much stuff in the system area. 

    It sounds to me like the best solution right now is to use the 1.5TB for the main drive.  Throw in the 320G drive into the storage pool (just to have multiple drives) and then when I free up the 1 TB drive put it into the storage pool as well.  Then if/when I move this to production use replace the 320G drive with a larger drive.   

    However where this is a BETA I'm wondering if having a seperate system drive might be an advantage as it will allow system updates without having to trash everything on the other drives.  (Assuming the storage format doesn't change during the BETA)  Then when the Beta is over if I move this to production I could replace the sytem drive with a large (1.5TB or larger) drive to maximize my storage capacity of the system

    Gary

     

    Saturday, May 1, 2010 4:01 PM
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    Given that this is a beta, you do not want the only copy of important, irreplaceable files on your Vail server. Period, end of discussion. you should not rely on the ability to import a non-default storage pool in future versions of Vail; it's likely that Microsoft will intentionally block this ability at some point to eliminate the possibility of legacy bugs being carried forward into RTM.
    I'm not on the WHS team, I just post a lot. :)
    Saturday, May 1, 2010 9:59 PM
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