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A question about Windows Home Server storage space

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Andre asks: 

what is the effective size of the server if i have 4 250GB disk?

 

is it 0.5TB or 1TB?

The short answer is "It depends". Specifically, it makes a difference what folders you enable duplication on. Worst case, your 1 TB of physical disk space will give you 500 GB of "logical storage". Best case: 1 TB.

For each folder (both predefined and user created) you have the option of specifying if the contents of that folder should be duplicated on another drive.

On my home machine, I have ripped music and photos folders set to duplicate. I've chosen not to duplicate my ripped DVD folder,  as DVDs are quite large and I can alway re-rip.

In short, this isn't RAID. WHS has both advantages and disadvantages relative to RAID. One of the nice advantages of WHS is that you can add disks incrementally without requiring all disks to be the same size.

Comments

  • Anonymous
    February 08, 2007
    > Worst case, your 1 TB of physical disk space will give you 500 GB of "logical storage". Best case: 1 TB. I'd call it the other way around ^_^ Though Windows has lost more instances of files than bad blocks have (and cost me far more time in finding and restoring them from other backed up copies), the number of bad blocks has not been zero.  Any file that you want to save, you want multiple copies.  In the best case, you'll have the best chance of being able to restore the file.

  • Anonymous
    February 08, 2007
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    February 09, 2007
    Matt,  I've been considering making an investment in a 'Home NAS' solution for some time now and not yet settled on a solution (well I was close until WHS was announced!).  In terms of storage, am I correct in making the assumption that WHS can take advantage of external storage (as any other server product could) albeit whilst losing the benefits of the clever WHS disk management.  If so, I may still dive into my 'Home NAS' now and then connect it up to WHS when released. Thanks for your time. Regards

  • Anonymous
    February 09, 2007
    RE: External storage. Yup. WHS can use both internal drives and external drives connected via USB or Firewire (1394). This fact is mentioned here: http://www.microsoft.com/Presspass/Features/2007/jan07/01-08HomeServer.mspx among other places.

  • Anonymous
    February 12, 2007
    thanks matt for providing answers! i do have one additional questions...in the case above where i have 4 250GB disk, what happens when one of the disk fails? am i able to just plug in another disk and the system will rebuild itself? what happens if two of the disk (gasp!) go bad at the same time?