Re: Re: WHS Reliable Hardware?

[Phillip Harris <phil@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

I've been having some interesting discussions with Tom at Lime
Technologies over the last couple of days about extending the number of
drives supported by UnRAID so 20 drives might not be the be-all and end all
- his concerns are that he doesn't want to see massive numbers of drives
being "protected" by just a single drive but we've been
discussing having combinations of multiple "pooled" (UnRAIDed)
and non-pooled (simple shared) drives available under UnRAID...

It seems that the 'new' version of WHS splits files larger than 1Gb into
1Gb chunks which *CAN* end up spread across multiple drives. This means
that if you have a folder which is *NOT* duplicated and a drive dies then
it can take out bits of files that are spread across multiple drives
rendering them unusable - at least in the current WHS your file is held in
one piece and you only lose the files on the one drive that has failed!

Also they've added a CRC mechanism to the duplication of folders (to ensure
that if a duplicated file gets out of step with it's duplicate then they
can identify which is correct by its CRC) but that adds a 12% data overhead
to the duplication which means that to duplicate a 14Tb pool of data
requires 32Tb of storage space ... I'm really not impressed by that
decision. :-(

Phil

On 31 Aug 2010, at 22:12, Richard Challis wrote:

> What are they doing with the storage side that you don't like Phil
> please? There is such a lot of info out there I think I might have
> missed a show stopper?
>
> Likewise I'm heading in excess of 20 drives for my storage so UnRAID
> won't cut it. Which is a pity.
>
> Cheers
>
> Rich
>
>
> On 31 August 2010 00:02, Phil Harris <phil@xxxxxxx> wrote:
>> Sorry - it was UnRAID and not FlexRAID that I had considered and
rejected because of the 20 drive limitation and I have 32 bays in my server
... Shame because it seemed to do most of what I wanted. :-(
>>
>> I get hit with the bloody demigrator issue when streaming DVD and
BluRay media so had high hopes for 'Vail' as it cures that but given what I
see them doing with the storage subsystem on there I don't think I can
realistically anticipate moving over to it. :-(
>>
>> Phil
>>
>> Sent from another bloody fruit-based portable device...
>>
>
>
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