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WHS SYS Drive: 1TB or 500GB? RRS feed

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    I have two 500GB drives on hand, and another 1TB drive on order.

    Should I use the 1TB drive as the main SYSTEM drive? From my research, the SYS drive is used as a landing zone for files and sooner or later files will be moved to other drives. However, I don't foresee I will transfer any files bigger than 50GB to the WHS server, so is there any advantage to using 1TB vs 500GB as the system drive?
    Tuesday, December 2, 2008 5:05 PM

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    Unless you plan to fill your server completely full, there's no advantage to having a 1 TB drive as your system drive. However, I would recommend a single 500 GB (system) drive, and then a pair of 1 TB drives for the storage pool. WHS works best with a reasonably large system drive, plus pairs of drives of (roughly) matched sizes in the storage pool.
    I'm not on the WHS team, I just post a lot. :)
    Tuesday, December 2, 2008 5:43 PM
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    Unless you plan to fill your server completely full, there's no advantage to having a 1 TB drive as your system drive. However, I would recommend a single 500 GB (system) drive, and then a pair of 1 TB drives for the storage pool. WHS works best with a reasonably large system drive, plus pairs of drives of (roughly) matched sizes in the storage pool.
    I'm not on the WHS team, I just post a lot. :)
    Tuesday, December 2, 2008 5:43 PM
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    Ken Warren said:

    Unless you plan to fill your server completely full, there's no advantage to having a 1 TB drive as your system drive. However, I would recommend a single 500 GB (system) drive, and then a pair of 1 TB drives for the storage pool. WHS works best with a reasonably large system drive, plus pairs of drives of (roughly) matched sizes in the storage pool.

    I'm not on the WHS team, I just post a lot. :)


    "(roughly) matched sizes..."  Really?  This is the first time I've seen a reference to WHS preferring drives in the pool to have any commonality.  What is the impact of not having roughly matched drives?  

    For examply, I have seven drives in sizes ranging from 120gig to 1tb.  Six of them are between 500gig & 1tb.  Was it a mistake to through the 120gig drive in there?  


    Thursday, December 4, 2008 4:55 PM
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    Hi,

    Not a mistake, but a 120Gb drive isn't an efficient use of resources nowadays. (Older drives tend to draw more on both startup and while running, than modern drives, size for size.) Also, it's going to get filled relatively quicker - WHS works on the principal of utilising one drive until it's nearly full, before going on to the next one as it tries to keep associated files together, if at all possible.

    The rational behind the two somewhat similar size drives is because the majority of people tend to have Duplication enabled, so it makes it 'easier' for DE etc., if it can duplicate across two drives. If you have various sizes, it just means that, after a while, it's possible that some of your duplicate files could now be spread across multiple drives. This, in itself, isn't a problem, but a lower-powered system is, by definition, going to have more work to do, with the multiple tombstones and indexes which it needs to keep up to date.

    Colin



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    Thursday, December 4, 2008 5:45 PM
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    When I say "roughly matched" I mean that a 500 GB and a 640 GB drive would be fine (or a 750 GB and a 1 TB), but I wouldn't really recommend a 500 and a 1 TB drive together. The price differential between the 500 GB drive and the 1 TB drive is very small.

    WHS tends to use the drives in the storage pool in pairs. If you have two drives of significantly disparate sizes, then WHS will wind up being limited by the smaller of the two. It is possible to have a situation where you have plenty of free space, but are unable to copy more files to your server without a network health warning because there's no room for duplication. All of this is much less important with the most recent update to WHS, as there's no longer a problem when your system drive is close to full. Previous to that update, if you had drives of disparate sizes, you could wind up in a situation where you couldn't copy anything to your server at all, because you had filled the system drive up and your client PCs were refusing to copy more files.

    I doubt you'll experience any significant problems due to your 120 GB drive.
    I'm not on the WHS team, I just post a lot. :)
    Thursday, December 4, 2008 5:49 PM
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    Ken Warren said:

    Unless you plan to fill your server completely full, there's no advantage to having a 1 TB drive as your system drive. However, I would recommend a single 500 GB (system) drive, and then a pair of 1 TB drives for the storage pool. WHS works best with a reasonably large system drive, plus pairs of drives of (roughly) matched sizes in the storage pool.

    I'm not on the WHS team, I just post a lot. :)



    In the post November update world, do we need to adjust our thinking? Much mental energy has been devoted to drive deployment strategies that keep data off the system drive. In the absence of the landing zone (or Vista file transfer) issue, do we really need system drives spinning along with 450GB or more of free space? Would it now make more sense to install our 1TB drives as system drives and pair them up? Is the system drive not now fair game for data?

    I look forward to any comments.
    Saturday, December 6, 2008 5:07 PM
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    GreyWizard said:

    In the post November update world, do we need to adjust our thinking? Much mental energy has been devoted to drive deployment strategies that keep data off the system drive.  In the absence of the landing zone (or Vista file transfer) issue, do we really need system drives spinning along with 450GB or more of free space?

    I don't think so.  To be honest, I never worried about that in the first place. :)

    GreyWizard said:

    Would it now make more sense to install our 1TB drives as system drives and pair them up?
     

    I don't think it really matters any more.  You can pretty much install WHS on any drive (80 GB and up).

    GreyWizard said:

    Is the system drive not now fair game for data?

    It will be used for data only when necessary (that hasn't changed).

    GreyWizard said:

    I look forward to any comments.



    Saturday, December 6, 2008 8:42 PM
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    Even in the post-November QFE world, WHS still tends to use drives in pairs. And because many people want to install software other than WHS add-ins on their servers (unsupported or not), I think it's still useful to try to keep the system drive relatively free of WHS files.
    I'm not on the WHS team, I just post a lot. :)
    Sunday, December 7, 2008 4:04 PM
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