Zen wrote:
One thing I'm not happy about is the overhead of the added CRC checksum for the drive extender - 12% of your drive space. So on my 15TB server, I would lose 1.8TB of space for CRC checksums. IMO, that is too high of a price to pay for a feature that I think is only marginally useful. That combined with the existing 100% overhead of folder duplication is likely going to push me towards a different solution for storing the bulk of my data.
CRC checksums are a good thing:
http://storagemojo.com/2008/02/18/laten ... sk-drives/I would look at it this way - can you afford not to have that extra layer of protection? Then again, maybe your files don't mean that much to you and you don't mind if random bits of them get garbled. Once again I am impressed by the WHS team for their foresight and adding really meaningful features - even if they might cause a backlash like yours when they are examined for their superficial impact.
Edit: oh yeah, I forgot about this:
Quote:
Further when we took a look at the feedback, and the bug reports, we discovered that even after the V1 data corruption was fixed, silent hardware errors still caused several data integrity issues. The silent errors are especially common in commodity hard-drives that most of our customer base is using, and it was very important to us to have built in detection and correction of such errors. The only way we saw this possible was by changing to block level.
from this thread:
http://social.microsoft.com/Forums/en-U ... c26ddfdd6fTheres the real-world re-enforcement of my first link.
I like WHS and the duplication feature because it gives me hardware fault tolerance - the CRC Checksumming just provides the next level. And I think it's a far more important protection. Subtle data corruption is far harder to detect - usually when it's way to late. A catastrophic drive failure or file deletion is pretty obvious. But if you get some bits flipped in a file you don't access that long, you might not notice until the last good copy of that file is rotated out of your backup history.
I mean, you do backup and you do keep more than one, right?
I think that's the problem people have with platforms like Drobo - I couldn't care less that Drobo stores information on the hard drives inside it in a proprietary manner because that's not the only copy of my data. WHS duplication, Drobo and RAID only provide protection from hardware failure - for data loss you need a backup and that means a duplicate copy of your data. The more copies, esp. for files that change frequently, the better (only if the information in them is important to you, of course).
Hmm, I wonder if anyone has tried running anything like BackBlaze or Mozy on WHS - I'll have to search the forums...