Home Server OS for Backup & Media Streaming?

[bdt]

vinodh: thank you and it's ok, you won't need to go any further, what you posted there tells me everything we need to know: "we ripped DE out" (which is a whole thing that goes back and forth, and is beyond what we're talking about here) "and look, you can use spanned volumes to make a really shitty house-of-cards-on-gusty-day facsimile - yayyy! Oh, and you can't go bigger than 2TB either ..nevermind that 2TB drives are what you're buying now ANYWAY, just don't mmkay?"

Right; so, for me at least, looking at an expandable pool of NON-trivial data, WHS is utterly out of contention and won't be back. Shot for the reply.

 

[vinodh]

Just for a bit of clarity, the 2TB drive limit is for backup of the server itself. You can go beyond that if you are backing up PC's on your network or storing media. Also, Microsoft recommend RAID wrt to drive redundancy etc. I think that defeats the whole point then of calling it a Home Server.

There's a new addon for Home Server 2011 thats mimics drive extender. Its called Drive Bender. Unfortunately,it costs $40.

 

[bdt]

There's a new addon for Home Server 2011 thats mimics drive extender. Its called Drive Bender. Unfortunately,it costs $40.

Ahh yes, Drive Bender, I remember checking out about that last time I looked at anything WHS-related. Given that it's by some small (relative to The Great Satan) developer, it's probably quite good ..and $40 is *hardly* bank-breaking!

 

[bdt]

So, having gritted my teeth against tl;dr, it looks like Drive Bender makes WHS a valid choice again (as an aside, check HP MicroServer WHS love) ..so where's an oke to buy hisself a WHS disc?

As a slight OT update: how's this for a (still only possible/probable) 180-spin on the whole drive-pooling thing?

Microsoft has been conducting their developer conference for Windows 8 this week, they also have been making announcements regarding their next version of Windows Server 8. One item many people have been disappointed in Windows Home Server 2011 was the removal of disk pooling. Well, all is not lost for those who can be patient.

Virtualization Review has reported that Microsoft has announced disk pooling is back and will be incorporated in Windows Server 8, called Storage Spaces.

While the details are sketchy, here is the paragraph below from the article reporting this:

"A new Windows Server 8 capability highlighted on Wednesday is “storage spaces,” which will let users take just-a-bunch-of-disks (JBOD) collections and carve out a space or pool that shows up as drive using the new Server Manager. Users can use this feature to simply attach JBODs to Windows Server 8, explained Brian Surace, a senior program manager on the Windows team. No external storage array was used to create the pool. The improved Server Message Block 2.1 (SMB 2.1) protocol was used to help make this pooled storage available, he said."

Quoted article here

 

[vinodh]

Bastards! They probably had drive extender working perfectly fine in Windows Home Server 2011. They just needed something extra to add onto Server 8 that was new and cut it out of WHS 2011.. Maybe they might include this as an update for WHS 2011 or, typically Microsoft, don't release an update, release a whole new OS and call it Windows Bollocks Server 2012 Horse Manure Edition.