Dragging my server up to date!!!!

[Fuganater]

Who cares about noise! It's all about looks. + my new motto is "It's not cooled till it's watercooled!"

[AmEv]

Some kids don't HAVE that kind of money...

[si-skyline]

can i ask what that beige looking device is on top of your case?

P.s dust bunnys are always fun

[Fuganater]

Some kids don't HAVE that kind of money...

You can watercool a system for just over $100. That's really not that much when you add it to you $2000+ computer.

[AmEv]

-_-

[slaveofconvention]

Ok so I have lots of pics of a nice (relatively) smooth WHS 2011 installation but....

After a couple hours or so of moving stuff around and trying to get a sensible balance of free space on each drive and easy access, I came to the conclusion that the lack of DE is actually a deal-breaker for me.

I looked into (and installed) one of the DE replacement add-ins and while it seemed to work it was a time-limited Beta (none of them are "complete" that I know of) and there was no way I was going to have all my data at the whim of someone running a Beta test - I have no idea what would have happened when the beta ended.

As of now I'm in the process of installing WHS v1 all over again - I will post up some pics of the 2011 install process but for now, I want my server up an running again. The 8GB of RAM is now utter overkill as WHS v1 is based on a 32bit O/S so chances are it'll only see about 3.2 GB of it, but it's still a good upgrade - more than double the ram, easily treble the CPU power and faster SATA ports - I may well go back to 2011 if and when there's a decent, finalised DE replacement out.

At the end of the day, everyone has to make their own call about the DE issue - I thought I could deal with it because I used to have an XP based server and deal with it I did but I'm older and lazier now - I don't have a server because it's cool and geeky - I have one because it's useful and I'm lazy. I want to be able to just throw all my stuff in one place, and be able to get it back from that one place - WHS v1 with DE does that for me. To be honest the killer moment for 2011 came when I went to watch a Video on my Xbox (the main use for the server, truth be told) and instead of picking up the shares as I'd created them (Movies A-L, Movies M-Z, TV A-L etc) I got a pile of drive letters - once I opened the drive letter, I then got the Movies A-L etc but that means I have to memorise which drive contains which stuff etc and with the best part of a dozen drives - that's utterly impractical....

Microsoft, I'd like to take this opportunity to publically declare you utterly crap for removing DE from WHS2011 - it may well have made sense to push people towards RAID for business use, but the whole main selling point of WHS was how easy it was for a non-technical person to run it. This is no longer the case, and as a result, I can pretty much guarantee that 2011 will be the last version. The OS is now so devoid of what made it attractive to non-technical home users that it is not going to sell in quantity so it wont be worth supporting.

The annoying thing here is someone at MS will be saying "There's no point pushing this, look at the sales figures" when they really should be asking "Maybe we went too far by removing this long-promised feature at the last minute - gotta wonder if we'd have sold more if we didn't rip it out"

If I wasn't so anti-apple and too lazy to go the linux route......

[Kayin]

Wait, since when was drive extender easier than RAID? (or safer, for that matter...) I wouldn't take such a major leap back OS wise (especially going on a network) for that. I looked it up to make sure I knew what you were talking about. I have to say, most better RAID cards offer that feature too. We just call it JBOD, but that's a pretty wild trick with file journaling. You might be better served with some flavor of Linux if that feature is a deal breaker, but I would rather have the security of the newer kernel and RAID over a feature I'm really not sure I trust. Something like a ZFS system would probably work rather well for you.

[slaveofconvention]

I wouldn't say the drive extender is safer than RAID but I think it's hard to argue against the fact that it's easier.

It's the drive pooling feature which is the "killer feature" for me - I love the fact that when I start to run short of space, I just drop in another drive and the storage drive "grows". File duplication is fully automated insofar as I simply tell the server what folders I want duplicated and it'll automatically make sure there's a copy of those files on more than one drive. It isn't efficient from an overhead point of view but with the relatively cheap cost of storage (well it was cheap last time I bought a couple of drives) I can live with the overhead. It's the ability to combine all different sizes (and interfaces) of drives which makes it so "simple". According to every other device on my network, my server has a 20GB C: Drive for the O/S and a Multi Terabyte D: Drive for storage, made up of 3 2TB drives (less the 20GB C Partition) 1 1TB Drive, 3 750GB drives and a 500GB drive. When I run out of space, I can just drop in another drive and it'll add it to the pool.

In my experience, in order to have a stable reliable RAID solution (probably RAID 5) all of the drives have to be of the same capacity and I don't want to throw out terabytes of hard disks just because they aren't all 2TB drives.

Add to this the automatic single instance storage method of backing up every PC on my network on a daily basis - it means that WHS v1 simply does everything I need in a server at the moment. If there was a working reliable pooling solution available for WHS 2011 I'd switch in a heartbeat.

I will have a look at this ZFS system you mentioned - it's all new to me admittedly.

[Kayin]

Work in servers, you come to distrust the "simple" way of doing things. But I can see how it would be attractive-drive spanning is a lot like a JBOD, which most RAID cards will do. I'll have to look further into this. And I agree on not tossing drives just to get matching ones.

[SXRguyinMA]

download ultimate windows tweaker and it'll get your 32-bit OS to see all 8 GB