WINDOWS HOME SERVER 2011 HARDWARE RAID SOFTWARE
If you are looking to set up Windows software RAID check out our how-to article explaining the process. While this solution may not have the best performance, it doesn’t require any additional software and is supported by Microsoft. Windows built-in software RAID – Windows has come with its own software RAID built into the OS since the Windows 2000 days. Linux has the benefit of being free, has lower hardware requirements, and if you are just looking for shared storage, 100% compatible with samba shares for Windows and OS X. I am not going to shy away from Linux alternatives in this list because in many cases Linux may be easier and better for the solution you are looking for. Now that Microsoft has killed it off, let’s look at some alternatives. Windows Home Server had a few other benefits as a storage solution over a standard Windows installation but for many people, drive extender was the only reason to use the product. However Microsoft ran into other problems with v2 and they did not see it in their best interest to continue maintaining the software. There were some downsides to drive extender as well and version 2 for Windows Home Server “Vail” was supposed to fix most of those problems. If something bad happened, you could just pull out the drive and plug it into another computer to view and recover files. Hard drives used standard NTFS filesystems.Hard drives did not have to match in size or manufacturer so you could literally take any hard drive and use it in your pool.No special RAID controller or hardware was needed.This is similar to a RAID setup but drive extender had a few cards up it’s sleeve that made it invaluable for a NAS appliance. If you do find yourself with a stack of ageing drives going spare then this could be a good way of using them until the day they die.The idea of drive extender for Windows Home Server is you can have as many hard drives as you want and they all group together into the same pool of storage. However if you're using it to locally store data, for file backups or data supplied from the cloud, for example local Steam games, this could be an acceptable risk for cheap and plentiful network storage.
Of course, if the data isn't important then you can enable ZFS striping, this will maximise storage capacity at the cost of data integrity.
This is useful as once a RAID-Z is created additional drives cannot be easily added, but it's easy to add an additional RAID-Z and let FreeNAS work out the complexities of striping across all of these. The process can be applied to RAID-Z arrays in exactly the same way. The way it's implemented is a little inelegant, as it requires creating two volumes with the same name, FreeNAS automatically stripes these together for a single storage pool. The best option is to create a number of RAID 1 mirrors combining drives of identical or very similar size, then allow FreeNAS to stripe all of these together as a RAID 10 for four drives or RAID-Z for more. Despite the advantages of ZFS it's not magic, it still inherits RAID 5's basic flaw of fixing overall drive size to the smallest capacity in the array.
WINDOWS HOME SERVER 2011 HARDWARE RAID HOW TO
The important part of creating your storage pool is working out how to arrange your drives for best effect. We'll mention the feature in the main walkthrough but this is aimed at dedicated performance solutions. That's not to say it's not possible, but you're limited to four devices at best and potentially two on more recent motherboards.Ī more recent issue is with SSD and hybrid configurations - this is somewhat beyond this article - as ZFS enables acceleration of read-access or logging by selecting a single drive for storing this data when creating volumes. The first is PATA drives, but we're assuming these are too old and too slow to be worth considering. There are a couple of specific situations we're not covering here that could crop up. Support for ZFS has been integrated since around 2008 but this was much improved in early 2011. If you're thinking that sounds horribly complicated, fear not, the best implementation for home deployment is FreeNAS from the coincidently named This is a brilliantly light-weight FreeBSD-based operating system designed for network attached storage boxes. ZFS was released by Sun Microsystem in 2005, so is right up to date and combines file system, volume management, data integrity and snapshots alongside RAID-Z functionality. RAID is actually very old and there are now superior solutions.Įnter ZFS (Zettabyte File System) that can store some idiotic amount of data measured at the zettabyte level, that's 2 to the power 70.
Sounds perfect doesn't it, well we can do better.