By Philip Churchill on February 09th, 2011
Adding Low Cost Redundancy to WHS
Microsoft have another video in their Learning Bites series on how to add some very low cost and easy to implement redundancy for your data using software raid which is available from the underlying Windows Server 2008R2 operating system. This allows you to continue using the server until you are able to schedule a maintenance window and replace the affected hard drive and restore your data.
Although this video is designed for Setting up Software RAID in SBS 2011 Essentials the instructions apply equally to Windows Home Server 2011 and shows you how to create a mirror set as well as a RAID5 setup.
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Hmmm, this is very interesting. I may actually download the WHS RC and give it a try.
If drive c is mirrored and it goes down. Will the OS continue to use the mirrored one even after a reboot?
I guess I’m just wondering how functional a dynamic disk is when being used as a boot drive.
Can you install WHS 2011 on a single drive and then convert it to a raid 5 OS and all?
In previous versions of Windows, when you boot the computer you will have the option of booting from either drive. if one has failed, reboot and choose the second drive to boot from. Once the failed drive is replaced, you can convert it to dynamic and issue a rebuild of your mirror from the disk management console.
Perhaps its better in newer versions of windows (I haven’t used it since Server 2003), but one issue we had was with mirrors suddenly ‘breaking’. Nothing wrong with the drives, just that the mirror had failed. You could issue a rebuild and it would continue working fine for another few months. The other problem is that there was ZERO notification when this had happened, or when a drive had failed. You literally had to check Disk Management daily to make sure all was working. Not really convenient.
“The other problem is that there was ZERO notification when this had happened, or when a drive had failed. You literally had to check Disk Management daily to make sure all was working.”
I would suspect that this is still the case, but i’m sure it adds ‘failure’ entries into the event log. There are solutions for auto alerting/monitoring the event log which could be investigated.