Sign in
Microsoft.com
 
Microsoft
 
 
 

locked
WHS Disk Layout RRS feed

 > 

  • Question

  • Question
    Sign in to vote
    0
    Sign in to vote

    I am preparing to convert my FreeNAS server to WMS. I have 8 disks.

    System: Insignia 2.8Ghz. 750MB RAM.

    1) 73GB IDE FreeNAS System Disk
    2) 250GB IDE SW RAID 1 with disk #3 - Data Disk
    3) 250GB IDE SW RAID 1 with disk #2 - Data Disk
    4) 100GB IDE non-RAID - Data Disk
    5) 1TB SATA [NEW] (connected to PCI SATA Card) - Data Disk
    6) 1TB SATA [NEW] (connected to PCI SATA Card) - Data Disk
    7) 500GB External Backup USB disk
    8) 350GB External Backup USB disk

    My FreeNAS configuration uses disk 4 as a staging area. Nightly batch job copies disk 4 data to disk 2-3 (RAID), and then from disk 2-3 to 7 and 8. Yes, I am paranoid about data lose!

    The documentation that I read stated to use a large disk for the system disk.

    Questions:

    A) Can I use a 250GB system disk or should I use a 1TB disk? If the system only requires 20GB and Tombstones only 4kb, then I do not see an advantage of using one of the 1TB drives. I am also concerned about booting off of the new PCI SATA card/drive.

    B) When I setup WHS, I want to force backups to the external drives. Can this be done? I keep one external drive active at a time, and the other in a fire safe. Or is there a better way to auto backup to an external drive?

    C) If I have to rebuild the WHS system disk due to a SW issue, will I lose the data partition on the same drive? (Software failure/corruption not hardware failure)

    D) is 750MB RAM enough to manage WHS?

    Thanks

    Friday, March 27, 2009 5:06 PM

Answers

  • Question
    Sign in to vote
    0
    Sign in to vote
    A) You can use the 250 GB disk if you like. I would personally recommend buying all new disks, as a disk that's 2-3 years old is statistically more than halfway through it's lifespan.

    B) You have no control over where Windows Home Server puts the data in your shares, or your backup database. All this data will be "in the storage pool". To back up the shares, you can use the server share backup tool (added last year in Power Pack 1) to back them up to an external drive. There is no supported way to back up the backup database, but the Home Computer Backup and Restore technical brief contains steps to do so.

    C) You will normally lose only the system partition. If the disk fails, obviously you also lose the data partition.

    D) Yes. The minimum recommended is 512 MB, which is adequate for a basic Windows Home Server installation. If you install several add-ins or (unsupported) software through Remote Desktop, you will probably want more.

    I'm not on the WHS team, I just post a lot. :)
    Friday, March 27, 2009 8:02 PM
    Moderator