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Expert guide to Windows Home Server
"geller wrote: Home Server is cool, but who's going to go to that length for backups? Maybe if you're an SMB or home office, but i can't see many people bothering. What IS cool is MAc time ..."
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Some of the new services added to WHS are unique among its Windows brethren. Drive Extender, for example, enables all the hard disks in the device to be lumped into one storage pool. As such, there are no drive letters visible from the client – just folders. Although that sounds rather like RAID, it isn’t, since the disks remain addressable through Explorer when working on the server locally – you do this at your peril, however.
This system is also dynamic – add a disk and it will be shown in Home Server as a ‘non-storage drive’ until you run a wizard, at which point it’s formatted and added to the pool. Similarly, you can use a remove disk wizard, which will attempt to rearrange the data to make it redundant, at which point you’ll then be able to physically remove or replace it.
You can use this process to add as many internal or external USB/FireWire drives as you like. However, because they’re formatted when they’re added to the storage pool, you’ll need temporary storage even if you’re simply migrating data. Once removed, you can’t simply reattach the drive to the pool without formatting it, either, or read it from a standard Windows environment.
Folder duplication
Although terabyte-capacity hard disks are now available – arguably sufficient for most storage needs – it’s much better to use two or more physical disks in a WHS, thanks to its Folder Duplication feature. This ensures that any given folder is copied to at least two separate spindles, protecting it from the physical failure of either. In an ideal world, each folder would have this enabled, but you can disable it if you have capacity restraints. When out of space to fully duplicate, the health of the folder will be shown as ‘failing’, although this will automatically correct itself if capacity returns.