HP Miicroserver/Win server 2011. Hardware raid, Software raid, or Storage pooling?

[BigBird]

Setting my N54L microserver up for data server/storage. Fitted with 8GB ram and 2 x 3TB WD red drives. Bios modified to unrestrict the speed of the optical bay sata connection, and the supplied 250GB drive fitted into the optical bay.

Initial thoughts was to set up server 2011 on the 250GB drive and use the 2 x 3TB drives in a raid1 configuration, but couldn't decide between hardware or software raid. Have since come across storage pooling but still trying to get my head around the concept.

From what I can gather it will allow me to use the capacity of both 3tb drives for storage thus giving me 6tb of storage, but still offer data protection as good, if not better, than a raid1 setup. Am I right in thinking this works something similar to par files where any par file can be used to rebuild any damaged file. I'm guessing that each disk will contain repair files that can be used to repair/rebulid any other disk in the system?

So am I right in my thinking and is this the best way to achieve a reasonable level of protection. If this is the way to go, I was thinking of using FlexRaid, unless anyone has any recommendations on a cheaper but equally good alternative.


And before anyone says there is no substitute to a proper backup, I will also be using Always sync to backup daily to a remote network drive (WD WorldBook) in the garage just in case. Plus regular DVDRam or DVDRom backup for family photos and other irreplaceable stuff. (">

[yazooo]

Storage pooling is really what the name says, just bringing together your various storage devices to allow them to be used as one. I use FlexRAID with WHS and it has storage pooling + data protection which as you rightly say uses a parity calculation for it's backup method. With this though the parity drive needs to be as big, or bigger than any of the data drives so with what you have at the moment you'll only get 3TB of storage space available. I have 4 disks, 1 of them being a parity and it works ok for me. Hardware RAID I think is a bit of a mismatch with this low end type of server (my opinion). Software RAID, I looked at but the one thing that storage pooling with FlexRAID I liked was that you don't have to wipe the disks before making the pool, and if one of your drives fails you can still read all the other disks normally. There is plenty of other pros and cons though.

[beerman]

Storage pools let you over subscribe the amount of storage and configure the redundancy level. The OS works out what drive to store things on. My media pool is a simple volume as I don't feel films/tv shows are that important, my docs are raid 5 and my VMs are raid 1.

Highly recommend server 2012 which has the feature included. If you are using 2011 then the equivalent is called Drivepool http://stablebit.com/

[BigBird]

Decided to go with Stablebit Drivepool as recommended by beerman. Cheaper than FlexRaid and seems to do what I want. Pools the two 3GB drives to create a 6Gb drive. Have created and set up real time duplication for 'MYWORK' and 'MYIMAGE' folders so that my documents and images are safe if one of the drives fail. The important stuff in these two folders won't take up too much space so not a problem having them duplicated on the second drive. Everything else in the pool will be replaceable and loosing them will be more of an inconvenience than anything else.

This way I have the benefit of raid 1 in the fact that my important files are duplicated, without duplicating the not so important stuff, so leaving much more space available for the not so important stuff.

Important stuff will also be backed up on a remote network drive and possibly online storage...and optical disk for the irreplaceable images. (">

[Mobileman]

ever since i installed mine can no longer run dropbox on my laptop it fails, tried folder change, reg edit but anyone got any ideas ?