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Will You Be Upgrading To Vail?
Yes 36%  36%  [ 18 ]
I will test out the beta before deciding 20%  20%  [ 10 ]
Not in its current form, too many features missing 44%  44%  [ 22 ]
Total votes : 50
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PostPosted: Sun May 30, 2010 7:37 am 
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If I can't pull a drive and access the files some other way, then NO.
WHS right now is only one step up from an img/backup anyway. Alot of people that are using MSS wouldn't/couldn't do either.

64bit is good, faster more robust hardware/OS is always good, having multi backups is good, but low-tech options is good to.
With the MSS and HP not suppling hardware replacements we are all one "Snap/Crackle/Pop" away from having to do something else anyway.

I am already at a point where I don't have backups for some on my data that is on the MSS [VHS converted Tapes] why take away an option.

My guess is MS will figure out some way to access, then upgrading will come to pass in time.
I didn't like Win 95 or XP when they first came out, I'm still not using Win 7, although I have an upgrade disk.

Bottom line, to soon to tell. I am glad to see MS thinks going forward with WHS is worthwhile. We only have so many storage spaces to put our data.

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PostPosted: Mon Jun 21, 2010 9:16 am 
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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 ... c26ddfdd6f

Theres 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? :wink: 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...


Last edited by EricE on Mon Jun 21, 2010 9:54 am, edited 1 time in total.

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PostPosted: Mon Jun 21, 2010 9:46 am 
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rrinker wrote:
Can't pull the drive out and read it in another system? Well, since I built my current server in October '08 I haven't had to touch the thing other than apply server updates, and add a couple extra drives when I filled up the initial configuration.


I was a little annoyed at the change as well, until I read what that trade off gains us:

http://social.microsoft.com/Forums/en-U ... c26ddfdd6f

It seems like it was well-thought out decision and made for some very deliberate reasons. I'm far more likely to benefit from the changes they made than the ability to read a disk in NTFS (I really like the immediate duplication of data instead of having to wait for the system to make a secondary copy later).

The struggle between simplicity, complexity and functionality continues 8)

EDIT: iSCSI drives and drives bigger than 2TB can be added to the new storage pools - woot! I could hook up a Drobo Pro if I wanted for the really big video files I'm probably going to start kicking out. Good stuff!


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PostPosted: Wed Aug 11, 2010 6:20 pm 
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I had just built two DIY computers when Vail was announced. I immediately made one a Vail server. Aside from a few minor issues it has worked very well.

I recently rebuilt it into a large case to hold up to 10 drives and I added another 2TB drive to it. The key feature I love, backup time. I have 3 servers segmenting the load of all of my computers. My HPEX470 and HP EX 490 take 1 hour to back up a simple computer used for security while Vail takes 2 minutes and 15 seconds!

Also since it is in a Coolermaster 690 with 5 fans the CPU runs at 33 Degrees C and stays cooler in a warm room.

It is not as fancy as the HP solution but as far as performance it is great.

I do not like not being able to see data on the drives in another computer. That being said I have never had to use that function in 2 years of owning HP servers. For me, when I had a problem, a drive failed and there was no data to look at or recover.


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PostPosted: Sat Jan 15, 2011 12:39 am 
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I'm still sitting on the fence waiting to see what Microsoft is going to do with Vail.

My biggest concern is that I be able to throw in a bunch of drives into a server and have it appear to be one big drive, click a button somewhere to have it prepare one drive for removal, and have it automagically accept a new drive.

My fear is that Vail won't be able to do any of this without a RAID array and I don't want a RAID array. I've done the RAID 5 thing and it was a pain to increase disk space. I've done the XRAID thing with an Infrant NAS and it was somewhat easier but takes about a week of downtime to increase space (replace a disk, wait a day for it to rebuild the array, repeat for each drive, wait a day or two to increase space). I've done the spanned volume thing and it's as bad as RAID 5 when it's time to increase space and worse than the RAID 5 when it's time to replace a drive.

Maybe I'm just being hard-headed but I really want Drive Extender/Grayhole for Windows.


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