Need suggestion with raid -Windows Software dynamic disk RAID or Windows Home Server 2011

[Jetha-Lal]

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I am using WHS v1 and it has been a long time using the same and by now I have added 9 x 2TB WD Green drives variations EADS and EARS and now I am willing to switch to Windows Home Server 2011 and I have took out all the other had and I am just having one 2TB drive from my v1 system along with a hodge podge of 1TB, 640GB for taking up the slack for getting Windows Home Server 2011 running, I have found that the RAID is the best possible solution as far as data redundancy is concerned if there is no DE in Windows Home Server 2011 but then I personally think that RAID 1 is just a waste of time if I will be using it for regular backup, I am finding RAID 5 to the best solution taking in to account that I am having all WD Green drives, currently I have set up in RAID 5 with six 2TB drives for 10TB storage and that’s the amount of the space that I need, I have tried using onboard RAID controller and the performance seems to be quite good but then I have heard that using Windows Software dynamic disk RAID 5 is the safest as windows is aware of controlling the RAID but then I am not that very sure about the same, I think that I will be getting a better performance with it as I have been using WHS for data, video, music storage and streaming and I just do not need 100MB+ transfers, I was planning to get one more 2TB WD Green drive (EARX) so to make a total of four 2TB drives for backup but then as far as I am aware the consumer level RAID cards gives horrible performance, so here I just wanted to know that setting up an external storage using Windows dynamic disks in a RAID 5 configuration will be a better idea or not, I really want to control the cost till it is possible but then I am preferring to have 10TB storage with 6TB backup, in my case the home server is Core 2 Duo E6850 3GHz, 4GB DDR2 800, Gigabyte G33M along with ICH9R controller, any suggestion regarding the same will be helpful.

[AjunD^Rock]

I will like to inform you that you can't backup more than 2TB, this has been a issue from a long time but then it has not been fixed in Windows Home Server 2011 yet as it is inherited from Windows Server 2008 R2, I don’t think that the Microsoft is investigating about this issue as well but then I have heard of a workaround where one has to configure multiple backup jobs manually using the command line tools as well as the scheduled tasks, to get more information about the same read out wbadmin but then I am not sure if that would be convenient, I also wanted to add that there is no consumer grade backup tool which can handle extremely large volumes of data gracefully, backing up multiple terabytes of data on regular basis is quite tough, I have found that for hardware vs. software RAID and for RAID vs JBOD there has been a lot of tradeoffs, to be very honest you can start with the Wikipedia, If you are having a single large pool of storage along with a backup strategy for handling the same then I think that you should better stay with Windows JBOD , if the backups were working properly and you are quite sure about the same then you can just restore the entire server.

[Jetha-Lal]

Hey thanks for sharing the same but then I just wanted to know what do you think about Windows RAID 5? I think that it will be a better idea to have some kind of redundancy but then will TLER be an irritating issue? Is a Windows dynamic disk RAID the best option for an onboard RAID controller? The backups is appearing to be problematic and I may require individual drives for backup so I was thinking of an enclosure for managing JBOD for backups but then I doubt if it is the most robust solution, I think that large drives will be resulting in a constant "resynching", so is there a good overall solution for this rather than using individual drives for backup, any further help regarding the same will be highly appreciated.

[AjunD^Rock]

I don’t think that you will be able to get enough knowledge in the tradeoffs inherent in different storage technologies, by wandering in to forums, on the other hand I don’t suggest anyone to use RAID because of the issues related to the performance and recovery and I don’t suggest consumer level "hardware" RAID for the same reason as well, as far as for the backups I have already mentioned that it is quite tough to solve it out for the consumers as they want to have a huge amounts of data at their fingertips and the cost for preserving the date here is just enormous, in you your case if you are having data in the tens of terabytes then protecting the same and backing it up as well as restoring the volume of data will be quite expensive and will be quite tough to be managed as well.

[Jetha-Lal]

I am currently having 3TB worth of "DATA" and 1TB of used hard drive space on client PC's for backing up on regular basis and now I am thinking of doing a Windows dynamic disk JBOD along with some external enclosure which will be supporting it own JBOD or some kind of auto backup system that will be spanning span across disks. I am basically having some personal photos/videos in a quadruplet backup which will be around 50GB and they are the most important stuff for me, there are some other stuff as well that I will be backing up and I think that Six 4TB drives will be enough but for now they will be costing me a lot, previously I had bought all the 2TB drives for less than $100, I have checked out the actual RAID cards and they are starting from $45, anyways I just wanted to know if you are aware of the difference between the HighPoint cards with the "SGL" vs. non "SGL" versions, I mean I am not that aware of the difference between them but then I have found that non "SGL" versions are double the price of SGL?? Do you have any idea about the same??

[Sunny.Leoness]

Even I don’t suggest RAID especially RAID 5, I mean that the reason for using RAID in an enterprise context is to get better and high-availability and redundancy and it is just not a data backup solution, I have found that in consumer products raid have just added complexity and additional points of failure as well, I just wanted to share that in most cases the consumers will be able to handle if a drive fails and they will be recovering from a backup as there is no risk of data loss even if your motherboard or RAID controller gets failed, in my case I am having large media collections that have exceed 2TB limits in WHS 2011 and now I am willing to keep critical shared files on a single 2TB server volume which will be participating in scheduled server backup regularly but then I also keep copies of this data on a separate external drive as well, on the other hand I am having other 4Tb spanned volume for handling the client PC backups and other than client PCs themselves there is no redundancy for this data, other data like Blu-Ray and DVD collection and some backups of backup I am having a 6Tb spanned volume and these data gets synced automatically to a separate NAS, I have been making sure to enable shadow copies on the spanned volume as well and I am also using Lights Out on both servers for managing the power usage rather than keeping the machines spinning for 24 hours x 7. I know that use of spanned volumes is a bit risky but then I will like to add that it is quite safer for spreading out onto multiple 2Tb volumes and I am not having any problem in taking that risk as I am having a "live" backup of the data.