On With The Plunge.

There’s not been a whole lot of progress with my Windows Home Server experiments recently. The trial installation would have well and truly expired by now, but it was bought to a crashing halt when I added a third HDD to the machine – suddenly it all stopped booting and this time I couldn’t find a solution.

That wasn’t the main problem though, as a back-up server this would be inconvenient, but not fatal as long as everything else is safely stored elsewhere. What is really still getting me is the 500Gb of data still locked away on the old Ubuntu HDD, and the fact I have decided to run the server with the 1Tb drive currently powering my main desktop PC (in addition to the 500Gb drive and another I already have knocking around.

I decided to go for a couple of Samsung Spinpoint F3 (ordered yesterday to hopefully be delivered tomorrow) drives in the end, putting them in a striped RAID 0 configuration. I was looking at doing a RAID 5 config on 3 drives, but this would use 1Tb for parity data, and I can’t afford a 4 drive RAID 5 array (which interestingly would still only use 1Tb of parity). Besides which, as I’ve probably mentioned before, I don’t even fill 1Tb locally (although I could) so 3Tb would be massive overkill.

I figure RAID 0 with a scheduled backup to WHS should see me OK. If a drive fails it will be a pain, but not the end of the world. Hopefully I’ll get some performance increase in with the newer faster drives and striping as I believe this is what generally holds back my PC, however I'm lead to believe that boot times and application start-up are largely unaffected in RAID 0.

So when these drives arrive, Windows 7 Ultimate will be installed on the new array, I’ll copy off any remaining data from my old drive, then it’s back to getting the WHS box running. I should also have room for a nice collection of VMWare machine images, and I'll have a go attaching some old XP only hardware in XP Mode.

Lets just hope neither of the drives arrive dead, it wouldn’t be the first time.