WHS Concern

[UT-Jackal]

So i see a lot of posts here, but non have i ran across fully address my concern. I'm about to jump into a dedicated media server (already run an old system on XP that has all my drives in it, but not a "true" server) and i'm leaning towards WHS. Aside from some music, and pictures, which i will have backed up manually on another system, this guy will just hold all of my Blurays, and a couple of my DVDs that i have yet to replace with their bluray counterpart. I have ever so briefly messed around with WHS and i know that it pools your hard drives together. I don't intend to use any sort of raid to back up my system (which might be plain stupid) because i feel i could easily get those movies back on the disk. By easily i mean spend a week copying the 25 or so blurays that were on the dead hard drive. But with my limited knowledge I am unsure about one thing, will they run files over onto other disks, like say split my dark knight iso between two hard drives? This would make it much harder on me because then i could have to replace 50 movies instead of 25 due to fragmented files.

Maybe i should just use a raid system, but who knows.

Thanks for your time.

 

[Archer75]

No, it will not split a single file. It just fills up one drive then fills up another and another and so on. As far as pooling drives together with no redundency it's just a glorified jbod.

If you need redundency you just turn duplication on whatever shares you want. It acts like RAID 1. But WHS itself does not use RAID.

 

[UT-Jackal]

Is that the only major downfall of WHS, the lack of things other than RAID 1?

And can i decide which hard drive each file goes? This way when i remove a drive i can know whats on it.

 

[Archer75]

Is that the only major downfall of WHS, the lack of things other than RAID 1?

And can i decide which hard drive each file goes? This way when i remove a drive i can know whats on it.

I wouldn't call that a downfall at all. And WHS brings soooo much more.

No, you can't decide which drive what file goes on. But it's not a problem. If you want to remove a drive you just tell WHS which one and it will move any data that is on it over to another drive.

 

[Ockie]

Is that the only major downfall of WHS, the lack of things other than RAID 1?

And can i decide which hard drive each file goes? This way when i remove a drive i can know whats on it.

I wouldn't call it a downfall. I'd rather have it push data onto a new drive than splitting files up, it helps for recovery and it's great if you decide to pull the drive and access it with another system.