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Rexz posted:I'm currently leaning towards WHS because I can run stuff like uTorrent and iTunes natively. But I don't completely understand how their 'RAID lite' system works. I'm assuming I could only have 1 TB (250+250+500) of duplication (which would be more than enough)? Should I install the OS on my new 1.5 TB drive? What happens if this drive dies - I just recover by booting off a CD? Having just installed WHS for the first time I think I'm mildly qualified to answer this for you. My main reason for using WHS was the stupidly large collection of external hard drives of varying sizes which were getting obscenely hard to manage using XP in a drive-by-drive basis, WHS lets me consolidate them all in to a single pool of storage and makes adding and removing drives from that pool easy as pie. My secondardy requirement (and this will make some readers cringe) was the ability to run the WHS server as a second utility PC, for iTunes, playing video, music, uTorrent MSN Messenger, burning CD/DVD's and other tasks previously taken care of by the same hardware running XP. Yes, I know you're _supposed_ to run WHS headless but i'm currently treating it like I did the XP install, complete with dual monitors and fancy wallpaper, take that! The only real workaround I had to do was download the msi install for Messenger Live (8.5) because it didn't want to install from the .exe. I haven't managed to get the newest verion of Messenger Live running yet but I'm working on it. The bottom line for installing and running apps on the desktop is that anything which will run on Windows Sever 2003 will run on WHS, this also applies to drivers for your hardware. I didn't have a problem getting all the drivers running on a five year old socket 754 motherboard (Asus K8V SE Deluxe). I even managed to get my bluetooth keyboard/mouse and logitech Z-10 speakers and LCD screen to work as they did in XP (using the XP drivers in compatibilty mode). As far as I understand it the Raid-lite system is really just a striped set with the addition of optional mirroring for nominated shares, all handled by the software and configured by the very easy to use console. There's no limit to how much data you can set as redundant other than the amount of disk space you have (i.e. you need the same amount of free space as you are setting to be redundant, obviously). I'm still not 100% sure what happens if a drive in the non-redundant pool dies suddenly but I'm assuming anything which was balance to that drive will be lost forever, but that's really no different to my old system of individual hard drives and there's the advantage that (hopefully) WHS will warn me ahead of time if a drive is going to die so I can remove it from the storage pool. From what I've read the system uses the boot drive as a scratch area while it balances to the bigger your install drive the better, so yes, use your 1.5Tb drive as the primary boot drive (I wish I'd known this BEFORE I installed mine on a 320Gb). I promise, once I get another "utility" PC organised I'll put my WHS server in a closet and stop using my WHS install as a desktop, maybe.
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Jun 15, 2009 01:38
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Farmer Crack-rear end posted:Has anyone heard anything peculiar about the WD 1.5TB drives? I know Newegg reviews are generally terrible, but it seems like the WD 1.5TB drives have a higher ratio of poor reviews than most other hard drives. If you want to see bad reviews, check out the reviews for the Seagate 1.5Tb models...I have four of them, one has already died and been RMA'd and I think I have a second on the way out (it's getting reallocated sectors).
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Jun 17, 2009 01:59
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frogbs posted:Having just read your cautious, but very sane advice, I think i've shied away from building, or even buying an array/NAS, at least for the time being. I computed the cost per Gigabyte, and right now, its still cheaper for us to burn each program/show to DVD and keep it in an archive room. No one has to worry about maintaining the array, and the only way we'd lose all our data is if something totally catastrophic happens. The only downside is that we have to burn each disc, which takes time, and that archiving each dvd on a shelf takes up much more space than a 3u case. If you really want justification to build a NAS, you should be doing both. Use the NAS for on-line accessible storage and then off-site backup to DVD for archival purposes. You really don't want a fire at the TV station burning up all your archived content.
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Jun 17, 2009 07:51
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noss posted:Here's the problem: Kinda the wrong thread for this question but... I assume the world edition is just a kinda-NAS so have you tried browsing for it through network neighborhood? Do you know its IP address and share names? If you're lucky you'll just be able to open Explorer and hit the "Map Network Drive" button and type: \\IPADDRESS\ As you hit the last \ it should populate with the available shares, then pick the one you want, and a drive letter and map it. If you don't know the IP address of your mybook, check the GUI of your router, it may give you a list of connectted devices and their IP's.
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Jun 24, 2009 01:27
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KennyG posted:I just wrote a little PHP app on my webhost (all I could do at work), it can get 100 full simulations of daily failures of the life a raid array: You're figuring out the probability of a failure during a rebuilt resulting in complete loss of the array, right? Can you reconfigure your model to give results for a RAID 5 array consisting of 4 drives and no hot swap? This is actually very interesting to know, thanks for posting it.
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Jul 3, 2009 05:04
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dreamhost!
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frunksock posted:I need recommendations on 5.25" -> 3.5" SATA enclosures. That is - one of those things that takes up 3 5.25" bays and converts them to 4 or 5 3.5" bays, ideally with power and SATA connections (doesn't need to be hot-swap tho). I use this: http://www.pccasegear.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&products_id=5630 (site is in Australia, so don't try and order unless you're are too) and it fits perfectly in my old antec mini tower despite it having those wacky side mounted rails which you usually screw in to the side of the optical drives, I just slid it in and it fit nice and snug...no sata or power connectors but it does have a cooling fan.
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Aug 19, 2009 07:15
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Fitret posted:I need some advice on how to best fix my current storage situation. Right now I've got a WHS, and I absolutely love all of the features, but I no longer trust it. I know back before PP1 they had data corruption issues, so I waited until they did a redesign to adopt and everything has gone swimmingly since then - until last week. Last week, I got a notification that about 15 files had become corrupt. I talked to the WHS guys and it seems that my data is lost. They think it might be due to a hard drive that's about to fail, but I've got redundancy enabled on the folder, and guess what - my files are still gone! I'm not sure what the point of redundancy is if when a single hard drive goes bad, you still lose files. I don't want to derail the NAS thread too much so I'll include my solution to my problem which is almost identical to yours. I had the same problems with corrupted duplicate files and failed backups, I ended up reformatting and starting again (luckily I had additional backups of all my important stuff) but even after the rebuild the issues continued. I narrowed it down to the actual system drive being faulty and the issues with that cascaded to corruption of a lot of files, even the duplicted ones and eventually to the backups failing and the backup service not starting at all. It seems that WHS relies heavily on the system drive and if it fails you're pretty much hosed. They really need to work on that design flaw in future because like you I no longer trust WHS to hold my important data...and to tie this to the NAS thread, I'm using a QNAP TS-409 for all my junk now, it has a few issues mostly related to the lovely seagate drives I put in it but apart from that it never skips a beat (I know, RAID5 is not a backup, I still keep actual backups). The moral of the story is that despite WHS's claims to the contrary, it is not a foolproof backup/data security solution, but then, for the average home user, what is?
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Aug 24, 2009 03:51
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I'm considering moving from WHS to unRAID, feature wise they seem pretty similar but my WHS install has never really worked as intended and has recently become unstable plus it's really overkill for what I need. I thought it worth trying unRAID to see if stability will improve on the same hardware. I'm pretty sure unRAID is my only option given that I have a range of different drive sizes and speeds. I've done the required reading and I'm confident unRAID will work for me but my current WHS config consists of 8 internal HDD's and 4 external USB drives, I can't find any information on whether unRAID supports adding external USB drives to the drive pool. Can anyone comment on if this is possible with unRAID?
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Feb 15, 2011 04:08
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BotchedLobotomy posted:Late reply, but no you cant. You can mount external drives to access but they will not be part of the array/drive pool. Thanks for that, I never could find a definitive answer in the doco. I have since reinstalled WHS on my file server but am still considering unRAID because all I really need is a big file system with shares defined and unRAID does that (as does WHS) but after spending several hours looking for drivers and mucking around getting WHS configured I can see the attraction in using unRAID.
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Feb 22, 2011 05:47
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Viktor posted:Made the switch to unRAID a while ago from WHS, the selling point for me was an easy to implement parity. One warning from my switch, writing to the array is super slow depending on your parity drive(so use a cache disk). Were talking ~20MB/s vs 60MB/s with the same hardware on WHS. 4.7 introduced 4K sector support of the advance format drives. The upcoming 5.05 beta is suppose to assign disks via serial numbers instead of the need to match up your "disks" to slots if you change hardware/controllers. This will eliminate a headache of the system. Thanks for the trip report. I ended up removing 3 drives from my WHS array and boooting to unraid just to see how it went. The poor copy speeds I was getting were just as bad under unraid so I couldn't blame bad drivers under WHS. My first isolation test solved the problem when I moved the NAS I was copying to/from to a different router. I was getting decent transfers under unraid but much faster under WHS, which was puzzling until I read your post above so thanks for sharing your experiences. I think I'll stick with WHS for now now, mainly because it seems to be running fine and the arseload of external USB drives I want to put to good use as part of the drive pool. I may revisit unraid at some stage, when/if it supports adding usb drives to the array, is that ever likely?
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Feb 23, 2011 02:09
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