How about some real RAID support that can be optionally turned on. Its based loosely off server 2003 that supports software RAID1,5 at least AFAIK. I'd love to use this as long as i knew i was using a sensible RAID option, i don't care about the fact that i could put extra disks of any size in later on...
Because it's completely unnecessary. You need RAID for data redundancy or additional speed. Given that this isn't a PC that you're going to be using you don't care about additional speed and data redundancy is already provided. Now stop being an idiot.
One often overlooked benefit of RAID is storage density. The data redundancy provided by WHS makes terrible use of storage space. If you want redundancy on all of your files, you lose 50% of your available disk space. So if you have (8) 500GB drives, you'd have 2TB of available space and 2TB devoted to redundancy.
I would love to see WHS integrate a file system similar to the unRAID system as implemented by Lime Technology. See http://www.lime-technology.com/wordpress/?page_id=47 for details. It offers all of the benefits offered by WHS: multiple sizes of disks can be used, disks use a normal/non-striped file system that can be mounted and read outside the array (if the server fails), easy array expansion, easy replacement of smaller disks with larger disks, etc. But it also offers much more efficient storage density. If you have (8) 500GB drives, you'd have 3.5TB of available storage space with only 500 GB devoted to redundancy.
UnRAID does not offer the write performance of a traditional RAID5 array, but neither does WHS (writes to staging drive then copies to "final" drive. Both are plenty fast for a "limited user number" home environment. And an unRAID configuration can easily serve 5+ movies to different clients at the same time, so read performance would not be a problem.
There is nothing that would prevent Microsoft from implementing this system on Windows Home Server. It's just a Reed-Solomon parity scheme with some disk management automation built-in. If WHS had this type of space-efficient redundancy, I'd purchase it in a second and recommend it to everyone. But as-is, I'd be wasting way too much disk space on redundancy when I could be using it for storage.
The problem with unRAID is that it doesn't provide full-blown redundancy. If you have multiple drives (say 5) and two of them fail you have no way of reconstructing the information stored on them. It's a software-dependent data safety system that attempts to reconstruct the missing data based on the content of the other drives. On the other hand in WHS if you lose 2 of your five drives and they don't contain each other's backups you will lose nothing. What it turns to is a trade-off between money and your data security (as always). Microsoft made the decision to go with data security. The question is: why not provide both?
a) Microsoft just like every other corporation out there is a for-profit company. It will do the least amount of work possible to get the most amount of money. Adding a feature like that is a lot of work and likely patent licensing with arguable return on investment. b) Joe Blow (for whom this software is made by the way) won't understand the difference between unRAID's approach and WHS's current approach. He'll see that both can provide data safety, choose the way that gives him more storage, ignore the red warning that tells him one of his disks is nearly gone (because he can still access his data) and will then get really angry when another disk fails and he can't get at his data anymore. People have an unfortunate habit of messing around with options they don't understand and not doing proper research.
This is just an opinion but: I don't feel that it would be responsible to sell a product mainly intended for data back-up that doesn't offer at least double redundancy of data, especially given that the target audience isn't us, it's Joe Blow, who will buy the server and assume that all of his information is guaranteed to stay locked in that little box for all eternity (acts of god excluded).
Mark: In general, I agree with you, but there are two small flaws in your reasoning. First of all, WHS does not provide double data redundancy; it provides single redundancy. There is the primary copy of the data and the backup copy. unRAID also provides single redundancy: the primary copy of the data and the backup that is stored in parity data. (If 2 of 5 drives fail, you would lose the data on the failed drive, but the data on the other drives would still be readable. WHS would have to have strong and frequent warning messages in the event of a drive failure.)
Something else to consider is that WHS has basically half the storage density of unRAID-type storage, so it would require roughly twice the number of hard drives (for equivalent available space) and would have twice the opportunity for a disk failure.
Also, an unRAID-type configuration does not preclude the ability to mirror important data on more than one disk. That would give true double redundancy: mirrored backup and parity backup.
I think the target audience for WHS isn't ONLY "your average Joe." True, not everyone would be interested in flexible software RAID (similar to unRAID), but some would be. It would be nice if MS addressed the needs of both audiences. If WHS had this type of advanced disk management, I'd purchase it immediately. Otherwise, it's just too expensive to add 2 disks every time you need more storage space and only get the available space of one of those drives.
For anyone interested in having a "flexible, parity-based drive extender" (a.k.a. unRAID) feature added to WHS, please vote for this feature on the official Windows Home Server feedback page:
Now that we've thrown 'em off the trail, use the form below to get in touch with the people at Engadget. Please fill in all of the required fields because they're required.
How about some real RAID support that can be optionally turned on. Its based loosely off server 2003 that supports software RAID1,5 at least AFAIK. I'd love to use this as long as i knew i was using a sensible RAID option, i don't care about the fact that i could put extra disks of any size in later on...
Yes! Give advanced users the ability to use real RAID if they want.
Because it's completely unnecessary. You need RAID for data redundancy or additional speed. Given that this isn't a PC that you're going to be using you don't care about additional speed and data redundancy is already provided. Now stop being an idiot.
One often overlooked benefit of RAID is storage density. The data redundancy provided by WHS makes terrible use of storage space. If you want redundancy on all of your files, you lose 50% of your available disk space. So if you have (8) 500GB drives, you'd have 2TB of available space and 2TB devoted to redundancy.
I would love to see WHS integrate a file system similar to the unRAID system as implemented by Lime Technology. See http://www.lime-technology.com/wordpress/?page_id=47 for details. It offers all of the benefits offered by WHS: multiple sizes of disks can be used, disks use a normal/non-striped file system that can be mounted and read outside the array (if the server fails), easy array expansion, easy replacement of smaller disks with larger disks, etc. But it also offers much more efficient storage density. If you have (8) 500GB drives, you'd have 3.5TB of available storage space with only 500 GB devoted to redundancy.
UnRAID does not offer the write performance of a traditional RAID5 array, but neither does WHS (writes to staging drive then copies to "final" drive. Both are plenty fast for a "limited user number" home environment. And an unRAID configuration can easily serve 5+ movies to different clients at the same time, so read performance would not be a problem.
There is nothing that would prevent Microsoft from implementing this system on Windows Home Server. It's just a Reed-Solomon parity scheme with some disk management automation built-in. If WHS had this type of space-efficient redundancy, I'd purchase it in a second and recommend it to everyone. But as-is, I'd be wasting way too much disk space on redundancy when I could be using it for storage.
The problem with unRAID is that it doesn't provide full-blown redundancy. If you have multiple drives (say 5) and two of them fail you have no way of reconstructing the information stored on them. It's a software-dependent data safety system that attempts to reconstruct the missing data based on the content of the other drives. On the other hand in WHS if you lose 2 of your five drives and they don't contain each other's backups you will lose nothing. What it turns to is a trade-off between money and your data security (as always). Microsoft made the decision to go with data security. The question is: why not provide both?
a) Microsoft just like every other corporation out there is a for-profit company. It will do the least amount of work possible to get the most amount of money. Adding a feature like that is a lot of work and likely patent licensing with arguable return on investment.
b) Joe Blow (for whom this software is made by the way) won't understand the difference between unRAID's approach and WHS's current approach. He'll see that both can provide data safety, choose the way that gives him more storage, ignore the red warning that tells him one of his disks is nearly gone (because he can still access his data) and will then get really angry when another disk fails and he can't get at his data anymore. People have an unfortunate habit of messing around with options they don't understand and not doing proper research.
This is just an opinion but: I don't feel that it would be responsible to sell a product mainly intended for data back-up that doesn't offer at least double redundancy of data, especially given that the target audience isn't us, it's Joe Blow, who will buy the server and assume that all of his information is guaranteed to stay locked in that little box for all eternity (acts of god excluded).
Mark: In general, I agree with you, but there are two small flaws in your reasoning. First of all, WHS does not provide double data redundancy; it provides single redundancy. There is the primary copy of the data and the backup copy. unRAID also provides single redundancy: the primary copy of the data and the backup that is stored in parity data. (If 2 of 5 drives fail, you would lose the data on the failed drive, but the data on the other drives would still be readable. WHS would have to have strong and frequent warning messages in the event of a drive failure.)
Something else to consider is that WHS has basically half the storage density of unRAID-type storage, so it would require roughly twice the number of hard drives (for equivalent available space) and would have twice the opportunity for a disk failure.
Also, an unRAID-type configuration does not preclude the ability to mirror important data on more than one disk. That would give true double redundancy: mirrored backup and parity backup.
I think the target audience for WHS isn't ONLY "your average Joe." True, not everyone would be interested in flexible software RAID (similar to unRAID), but some would be. It would be nice if MS addressed the needs of both audiences. If WHS had this type of advanced disk management, I'd purchase it immediately. Otherwise, it's just too expensive to add 2 disks every time you need more storage space and only get the available space of one of those drives.
For anyone interested in having a "flexible, parity-based drive extender" (a.k.a. unRAID) feature added to WHS, please vote for this feature on the official Windows Home Server feedback page:
https://connect.microsoft.com/WindowsHomeServer/feedback/ViewFeedback.aspx?FeedbackID=306080