First, I highly recommend you read the release notes, Getting Started Guide, and stickies at the top of this forum, as some of your questions are answered there. Probably you will find yourself with other questions that will also be
answered in the documentation. Next, I also highly recommend you test the scenarios that are important to you, and submit bug reports where they don't meet your needs. Remember that this is still a beta product; there are bugs known and unknown, and the main
reason for this type of beta test is to stress the product in ways that Microsoft and private beta groups didn't think to, so as to find as many of those bugs as possible. Much like voting, if you don't participate in the process your complaints about the
results will fall on rather deaf ears. :)
Now to your questions:
Disk failures aren't documented, and probably won't be, by Microsoft other than in the most general terms. My experience with simulated disk failure (i.e. pull the cable on a running disk) was that I lost approximately 50% of my files when I disconnected
a single disk from a two disk set with no duplication. (With duplication, I lost nothing.) Another user has conducted a similar test and says he lost everything. I don't have any idea why his results differed from mine, so I think this needs more user testing.
In any case, Microsoft's design really requires the use of duplication for any data protection. Don't turn duplication off unless you don't mind losing
everything in a particular share. This remains unchanged from V1, where Drive Extender tends (through it's storage use algorithm) to cluster files that are in the same location in the folder tree on the same disk(s).
Accessing your storage post-failure is addressed in the documentation. You can connect a server storage drive, or drive set, to another server and it will appear as "non default storage". The "non default storage" will also be mounted to a folder on the
server's system drive. As long as a drive is part of that "non default storage" you won't be able to add it to the default storage pool. Files in "non default storage" appear (I didn't examine every one) to be available and accessible; obviously if one or
more "blocks" of a large file are on another (missing) disk you won't be able to access that file but (if I recall correctly) it won't be visible unless all "blocks" with pieces of the file are present.
I'm not on the WHS team, I just post a lot. :)
