WHS and small drives

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DanNeely

Supreme [H]ardness
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Aug 26, 2005
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I know WHS won't install on an HD smaller than 80GB.

Does it actually use/need that much space?

If not how big is the actual image+needed temp space, and could I resize/move the installed image onto a small SSD/CF card?
 
It needs a minimum of 64GB free on the system drive. From there, it makes 2 partitions; a 20GB system partition and whatever is left over becomes the DATA partition and is used in the large pool. How much is uses is irrelevant, because Windows Home Server will not install to anything smaller than 64GB and if you use imaging software to 'force' it onto a smaller partition its only going to break the install.

-Cool-
 
I'm almost afraid to ask why, but is there any logical reason why it needs to have a 44GB data partition on the same drive that it it's installed on vs a different physical drive and why would not having it cause it to go kaboom?
 
It's just they way they made it, 20GB system partition and leftover as the start of your storage pool. Default install takes up maybe 7GB of the 20GB. But that's the way it is.
 
Lol, you'll kill that CF even if you can get it on there because windows writes to the HDD all the time, even the server OSes. an SSD would be ok, but not cost effective.

a WHS does two things: sits idle at least 50% of the time and holds alot of files, and if streaming, transcoding them. You are better off just buying alot of large drives, and a good MB and CPU, and a decent amount of ram.

the current spec of my WHS are:

AMD Athlon X2 6000+ (Downclocked from 3ghz per core to 1.8ghz per core with the voltage reduced a good amount to lower heat)
4GB DDR2 800mhz ram (G.skill)
Gigabyte GA-m57SLI-s4 Motherboard
2x Seagate 1TB HDDS (one 5900 RPM for the OS/Data, one 7200 RPM for data)
3x WD 1tb HDDS Green W10EADS
all the HDDS currently are 32mb buffer
Norco 4020 Case
750W Corsair PSU
Intel dual port gigabit PCI-X NIC

Its overkill really, but I'll be adding 2 controller cards and 16 more HDDS to the norco case its in
 
Google indicates that cheap flash is good for ~1000 writes. With a 3 year target life and 5x write amplification (seen on an Intel slide, and I assume they picked the worst performing competitor they could find) that's still the capacity for an improbable 6GB/day of writes. The hardware seems capable of handling the load if teh OS wasn't retarded.
 
DanNeely said:
I'm almost afraid to ask why, but is there any logical reason why it needs to have a 44GB data partition on the same drive that it it's installed on vs a different physical drive and why would not having it cause it to go kaboom?
Click to expand...
If I remember right, the way WHS works is that the primary hard drive acts as a "landing zone" for new data put on the server and is later shuffled around to other drives as it deems necessary. When you set up WHS they recommend that the largest drive you have be drive 0. In an extreme case if you had a file that was larger then the free space on the primary drive, it wouldn't be able to be put on the server.
 
Cloud 69 said:
If I remember right, the way WHS works is that the primary hard drive acts as a "landing zone" for new data put on the server and is later shuffled around to other drives as it deems necessary. When you set up WHS they recommend that the largest drive you have be drive 0. In an extreme case if you had a file that was larger then the free space on the primary drive, it wouldn't be able to be put on the server.
Click to expand...

That is woefully outdated information and stopped being true a long time ago.
 
rhouck said:
That is woefully outdated information and stopped being true a long time ago.
Click to expand...
With PP1 it seems. Thanks for being so helpful!

Still after reading this thread http://www.hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1376478 having a small primary hard disk could cause weird file transfer issues in some cases.

Though the point of WHS is to hold data and do backups, and a computer can only have so many drives plugged into it. Why would you choose to limit the amount of available storage? It would take more then 40gb to backup most computers, add in a couple more and you run out of space really fast. It's not like the space after the 20gb system partition goes to waste it's the beginning of your storage pool.
 
Cloud 69 said:
With PP1 it seems. Thanks for being so helpful!

Still after reading this thread http://www.hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1376478 having a small primary hard disk could cause weird file transfer issues in some cases.

Though the point of WHS is to hold data and do backups, and a computer can only have so many drives plugged into it. Why would you choose to limit the amount of available storage? It would take more then 40gb to backup most computers, add in a couple more and you run out of space really fast. It's not like the space after the 20gb system partition goes to waste it's the beginning of your storage pool.
Click to expand...

The NAS I ordered from newegg has space for 4 SATA drives and an internal PATA connector that ships with a small flash module for the linux based OS. My thinking was that I could replace the 256MB module with a 32 IDE+CF combo for ~$50 without compromising the HD mounting space while moving the OS off any of my data drives. This would make swapping drives simpler because I wouldn't need to treat one of them as special because it had the OS on it. Since flash doesn't fail randomly without warning like a mechanical drive I'd also have a margin against losing the OS to hardware failure.
 
DanNeely said:
The NAS I ordered from newegg has space for 4 SATA drives and an internal PATA connector that ships with a small flash module for the linux based OS. My thinking was that I could replace the 256MB module with a 32 IDE+CF combo for ~$50 without compromising the HD mounting space while moving the OS off any of my data drives. This would make swapping drives simpler because I wouldn't need to treat one of them as special because it had the OS on it. Since flash doesn't fail randomly without warning like a mechanical drive I'd also have a margin against losing the OS to hardware failure.
Click to expand...

I have seen flash fail randomly with no warning. Nothing is perfect. and a CF card isn't anywhere near as reliable as an SSD, and if you intend to use it like one using windows, you will run into problems and it will die fast. 3 years is a still a high estimate.

CF cards generally lack the wear leveling algorithms that SSDs use to prevent certain sectors or chips to become unwriteable, and IIRC actually have a few chips for backup incase one does.

If you want to run an OS on the IDE port, either mount an IDE hardrive on the inside somewhere (use a notebook drive if you want they are small in size), or use an OS other than windows.
 
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