[hermy65]

I know this topic has come up many times before but rather than adding my questions to someone else's thread i figured i should make my own.

I currently have a HTPC with 3 1TB HD's in it and then another machine that i use as a backup server with another 3 1TB drives in it. I would like to combine all of the HD's into 1 box and make a true backup server. My initial thoughts were to use windows home server because the drives are not identical but im not sure on how to do such a thing. How would I get the data from my HTPC to the WHS without doing some sort of backup through WHS? And what about redundancy? It kind of scares me to have all of my media in one place but not have any sort of redundancy.

If WHS is not the best option for what i want could someone recommend something for me? Also, if i didnt explain this well enough im sorry.

[Kode]

If you want to use WHS bare in mind that you cant add a a drive with data into the pool, so you will need to add a blank disk, move the data from one of your other disks onto the pool, then add that disk, etc, this is the same with most of these solutions though.

WHS allows you to backup selected areas at the expense of twice the space (ie raid1), so if you wanted to backup 2TB of data you will lose 2TB of space.

Another option is Unraid, thats the one i'm going to go with, but at the end of the day its up to you, and depends what you want to get out of it, read up on Unraid, i found it was perfect for my needs.

*edit*
Benefits of Unraid:
* Disks dont have to be identical
* Raid 4 (Like raid5 but parity is on a single disk rather than spread out over the array)
* Lose 1 drive all data can be recovered, Lose 2 disks only data on those disks is lost, not whole array
* Disks can spin down when not in use
* Easy to add new disks to the array and expand the size
* Good community support
* Lot of community plugins to allow thinkgs like PHP, MySQL, Apache, Torrents (With MySQL, could probably use it as a centralise database for XBMC)

[darkscout]

If it's a real 'server' I'd also look at OpenSolaris.

Right now I have OpenSolaris running on my backup server. I have 2 - 1 TB drives mirrored d as boot. 5 - 1.5TB drives as RaidZ 'Tank' (Movies, Music, Etc) and 2 old IDE drives in a Mirror as a filesystem for Xen.

I run 64bit Debian and Windows7 both under Xen.

ZFS doesn't care if the disks are the same size (you will get a warning and be limited by the size of the minimum drive), but it works. Plus you have a 'real' server for other stuff.

Otherwise I'd just go with FreeNAS. unRAID looks nice, but is only free for up to 3 drives.

[Kode]

Unraid is based on Slackware, and there are tutorials on how to install a full slackware unraid setup, but you are right, the cost is a negative, on the other hand you get what you pay for, and i think unraid is worth it, of course id prefer it if it was free, but devs have mouths to feed as well

[hermy65]

Im confused by the raid1 comment, to my knowledge WHS uses something similar to a software raid. Or am i wrong on this

[Ramshackles]

WHS supports software raid 1 afaik, used it for a while, but it will only mirror the data you choose and mirroring media is a waste imo.

I personally use flexraid, on a win7 server. developer is very skilled, helpful and fixes bugs/issues fast.

[Kode]

raid1 refers to the fact it mirrors the data, raid types refer to what they do, not what it takes to do it, that probably doesnt make much sense, but what i am saying is raid1, raid0 raid5 etc can be hardware or software raid, the numbers refer to what they do, raid 0 combines multiple drives into one storage unit, with no protection but faster speeds, raid 1 mirrors data, so a duplicate copy of 1 drive is made on another drive, raid 5 creates 1 logical volume with the total size the same as amount of drives -1, so 5 x 1TB drives becomes 4TB, but it 1 drive fails you should be able to swap the drive and recover the data.

[hermy65]

ok, so in effect if i did not use the duplication feature of WHS i would have something similar to unRaid just in windows rather than linux? Ive never used anything linux related so i assume i should stay away from unRaid?

Ramshackles - what benefits would flexraid offer over whs or unraid? Sorry i dont understand much of the stuff i read on the site so maybe you could explain it in plain english

[Ramshackles]

Well only thing WHS had for me which was nice was the drive pool, raid 1 was never really an option with so many TBs of data.

Flexraid has something called FlexRaid View which can combine selected drives/folders to one virtual disk, similar to WHS drive pool, so that's WHS out the door

Unraid I tried, but never having done linux i was at a disadvantage already, I'm sure it's excellent for linux users though

Flexraid runs on xp, w2k3, vista, w7, w2k8 and linux also afaik.

It has different software raid techs, currently I have 1.5 TB disk reserved for parity (similar to how unraid works) and 5 drives of various size with data on protected by parity.

Flexraid in current form (basic) is a snapshot raid, which suits my purpose just fine, since my media (very large collection of files that doesn't change a lot, movies, music etc).

Snapshot raid meaning you run a proces that creates parity ( can be scheduled ), i found running it every night is just fine for my media collection.

In case of disk malfunction you can recover the data from parity. the forum is quite active and there are people there than can explain much better than me

EDIT: Major selling point for me is it running on Windows 7, so i can use my server for all sort of other stuff aswell, and it's fairly easy to use once you get the hang of it .. he is working on a live version which will write parity in real-time, but i won't be needing that. Updating parity at night is more than enough for me, heck I might miss a movie or two if a drive dies before the update.. and it keeps the storage blistering without the need to updata parity constantly.

[Kode]

well, you dont really need to know any linux to use unraid, it just installs on a usb drive and you use a web interface to administer it, i would imagine its probably about the same level of difficulty to use as WHS. Id suggest checking out the sites and seeing what fits you best http://lime-technology.com/ dont know the url for flexraid

[Ramshackles]

I managed to use UnRaid just fine

Just having all my clients or media serving machines being M$ made it a bit less appealing, also at that time I couldn't easily take out a drive (my server has sata backplanes that are hotpluggable) and plug it into a client and read / write data to it as i can now.

Also, didn't want that powerfull a server being used solely for backup, I know you could use the unraid server for other things, but not knowing anything about linux would just make that a bit harder

flexraid is at http://www.openegg.org/FlexRAID.curi

though forums are probably more updated.

[hermy65]

i found a few threads about using whs and flexraid. this sounds like it might give me the best of both worlds type setup.