He's right. You don't YEEEAAAAAHHHHHH your own comment. That'd be tacky.

@Ashkental: I don't think that it's a matter of fear. Some people just aren't into RTS's.

La Jolla is also a city in north San Diego county.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Jolla,_San_Diego,_California

Dude...

That's not really true. RAID 5 is n - 1, as one drive is used for parity. With WHS' Drive Extender in a multiple drive configuration, your duplicated shares ensure that a copy of your files are stored on one additional phyiscal drive. It does not duplicate your files to all drives in the storage pool. For instance, I have roughly 3.5 TB of drive space on my WHS machine spread across four drives. My shares account for roughly 500 GB with an additional 500 GB used for duplication for a total of 1 TB of space used. If the files were duplicated on every physical drive, the space reserved for duplication would much larger.

Like RAID 5, the percentage of space lost to tolerate the failure of a single drive goes down as you add more drives to the storage pool. Your space is only halved if you've only got two disks. With three (the minimum required for RAID 5), you're giving up roughly one-third of your space to duplication (minus roughly 20 GB for the OS).

Additionally, like the Drobo, this WHS supports using drives of varying sizes in your storage pool. If you did this in a RAID setup, you would need to have the same partition size across all drives. You won't benefit from mixing and matching as the extra space in the larger drives would go unused. Lastly, you typically cannot dynamically increase the size of your volume as you add more or larger drives to the array as you can with the WHS or Drobo.

Lastly, with WHS you don't have to duplicate. For instance, I store my Recorded TV from my Media Center on my WHS. I don't duplicate that share as it takes up a lot of space and I can live with losing those shows in the event of a drive failure.

There are some performance trade-offs to do this, of course. I don't have any figures, but I can't imagine that a WHS or Drobo could even hold a candle to an iSCSI RAID enclosure with comparably spec'ed drives.

@Vcize

It's the name for WHS' lazy RAID tech. It duplicates files across volumes for redundancy without relying on RAID. See the technical brief here for more than you probably wanted to know:

http://bit.ly/gt2I

'Tis.

Yooooooooow, Kelly Clarkson!

You've got to be kidding me.

@trainwrecka: Stop. Feeding. The. Trolls.