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.
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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.