Migrating from WHSv1 to WHS2011, help needed!

Hey guys,

Not sure if anyone has done this yet or has any experience, but im having problems with stutter from my WHSv1 streaming vids, so im planning on heading to WHS2011. I need some advice on how best to retain my redundancy on the new OS without Drive extender. Also bear in mind im running this on 4 mobo ports + 2 SATA add in card.

ATM I have to 2x2TB HDDs duplicating all my data across each of them. Now im sure that im going to upgrade to 6x2TB when I make the move. So how do I go about arranging my drives. As I see it these are the options.

All the drives running in pairs in RAID1. Should give me good and easy redundancy but this does limit my storage to 6TB

OS drive running RAID 1 and then 4 drives running in RAID5, should be 8TB storage, advantage of good data transfer, total 8TB

Finally all 6 drives running in software RAID 5, not sure if this is even possible using 2 controller cards as I am, presumably also good transfer speeds, should be 10TB storage.

Any advice, thoughts and help would be most welcome.

Cheers,

Hawker

Or use an addin like http://www.drivebender.com/

Thanks Snootyjim, im not keen on relying on beta software for my backups and drive extender running in the background is what has caused these slow downs and stuttering in the first place.

Hawker

Not sure I'd recommend RAID5, too likely to get an unrecoverable error during rebuild with those kind of sizes. RAID 6 is the only sensible option really, but you'd need to get a proper controller card to do that.

Hardware RAID should be done (excepting enterprise I'm assuming) with one card and all drives attached to it, or with one mobo and all drives attached to it.

With the tech you've currently got, the only option (as far as I can see) is RAID 1 across each drive. What you might be able to do is to use four drives, create two hardware RAID 1 arrays, then stripe them in Windows to create a RAID 10 array. Same capacity, but gives you one drive rather than two and it should be quicker.

Then install the OS on a remaining 2-disk RAID 1 array.

Only other obvious option is to scrap WHS 2011 and do a linux software RAID.