WHS Drive Extender Alternatives?

With [url=http://www.missingremote.com/news/2010-11-23/windows-home-server-vail-drops-drive-extender-twitterverse-goes-mad]yesterday’s announcement[/url] that MS is killing off DE in the next version of WHS (Vail), I’m on a quest to find a replacement.  What I’d like to get from everyone is what they would replace DE with.

Obviously, the first option is RAID.  Personally, I’d go with RAID6 for the added safety net.  I have considered this many times in the past and I just can’t bring myself to go back to it, due to the possible migration issues if the RAID card fails.

The second option would be unRAID, but I have two issues with it.  First off, it’s built on Linux and I’m no expert with Linux, so I’d prefer not to have to struggle with a lack of OS understanding when I’m troubleshooting something.  Second, I would need the PRO version (due to my 13 hard drives) which costs $119 and that seems a bit steep to me.

I just stumbled onto [url=http://www.pommepause.com/blog/2009/12/greyhole-easily-expandable-redundant-storage-pool-using-samba/]Greyhole[/url] today, which is billing itself as a free, open source, Linux alternative to DE.  So far, the issues with it are, once again, Linux, and the fact that it’s not in a stable state yet (according to the author).

My last known option is a return to FlexRAID, which I had been considering, anyhow, even before MS made this announcement.  Previously, FlexRAID showed issues under WHS and the system load, which does seem to speak to the issues MS was having with DE.  Currently, this is my first choice, but it will require some investigating on it’s current state.

Any others?

  • I’ve been looking for

    I’ve been looking for alternatives for WHS off and on for a while now. Not just to replace my WHS setup, but to just see what alternatives are out there. A while back I stumbled on Amahi and after yesterdays announcment I just might be looking into it more and more.

    It looks great, almost a WHS clone, it has plugins for some of the main plugins I already use in WHS such as a squeezebox server plugin, SABNZB plugin, a traffic monitoring plugin, various torrent client plugins, DLNA plugins, ect…

    Just thought i’d throw that out there.

    -Josh

    • George L. Schmauch Jr.

      I did some further reading

      I did some further reading and gplasky, over on the SageTV forums, mentioned that Amahi uses Greyhole.  It looks like the same guy might be developing both.  The scary part is this (from the Greyhole site):

      [quote]I’m now looking for adventurous souls who would like to battle-test it.
      I’m sure there are bugs, and probably some of them will delete data it shouldn’t. So I’d like to find those ASAP, before I loose the 5TB of data I myself have stored in my own Greyhole server.

      Big red warning: Do NOT store your only copies of important files on Greyhole! It’s not ready for that. It needs to be tested first.
      [/quote]

      If that warning on the Greyhole site is still accurate, how can we be expected to trust Amahi?  Granted, any important files would be duplicated elsewhere, but still…

  • I was really surprised to see

    I was really surprised to see this, it may hold people back from upgrading too. It is nice being able to toss a new HD in your WHS and easily have it added to the pool with a few clicks.  I’m sure a solution will arise sometime soon.

    • As long as my WHS keeps my

      As long as my WHS keeps my family pictures, family video and music backed up to the backup drives I’ll let my WHS run until it dies. But I do have issues with DE messing with the performance of media playback. I might have to enable homegroup again and go back to putting some big drives into my HTPC.

      • PAPutzback wrote:

        As long as

        [quote=PAPutzback]

        As long as my WHS keeps my family pictures, family video and music backed up to the backup drives I’ll let my WHS run until it dies. But I do have issues with DE messing with the performance of media playback. I might have to enable homegroup again and go back to putting some big drives into my HTPC.

        [/quote]

        Why not use Vail w/ Volume Shadow Copy Service for redudant backups of familypersonal media and share out media playback on Vail using Home Group?

      • George L. Schmauch Jr.

        PAPutzback wrote:

        As long as

        [quote=PAPutzback]

        As long as my WHS keeps my family pictures, family video and music backed up to the backup drives I’ll let my WHS run until it dies. But I do have issues with DE messing with the performance of media playback. I might have to enable homegroup again and go back to putting some big drives into my HTPC.

        [/quote]

        Given the ease of backups and restores with WHS, I may very well stick with it, as well, possibly even upgrading to Vail.  But, I will be removing SageTV from it, as well as every other add-in I currently have.  However, they need to add some sort of feature that I want in Vail, since backing up the server will no longer be important after I remove all the add-ins and other services I have installed.  A plain-old server restore, like MS originally intended, will be just fine.  WHS will become my “backup server” (most likely virtualized) and I’ll run something else for NAS and other server duties.

  • Btw, If I really wanted an

    Btw, If I really wanted an affordable dynamic drive pool solution (I don’t) I would setup FreeBSD + ZFS.

  • The biggest thing for me is I

    The biggest thing for me is I don’t want to deal with drive letters, I don’t want to have a movie1, movie2, movie3, movie4 shceme, and then have to remember where a given movie was stored on. A single folder/share is where its at. I just don’t see why that was taken away, how can Microsoft say things like “removing DE will make things easier” it honestly won’t. If we can’t have a single storage pool that is not tied to drive letters than it doesn’t make it a product I would want.

    -Josh

    • George L. Schmauch Jr.

      I mentioned another piece I

      I mentioned another piece I read about this in the original news post, but, essentially, when MS was trying to improve DE and make it more reliable for business use, they broke it and they aren’t currently talking about trying to fix it.  They basically made it sound like it was a pure design flaw.

    • You might be able to use the

      You might be able to use the software raid (spanning) that is built into Windows to create a volume comprising two (or more?) drives.

      I’ve not used it before, but it is one of the solutions I will evaluate when it comes time to upgrade to Vail.

      Obviously not as convenient as DE was/is, esp. when you expand storage (will have to create totally new volume, then restore it from backup).

  • Don’t shy away from unRAID

    Don’t shy away from unRAID because it is Linux…. I am the Linux village idiot and have been able to get unRAID up and going with little issue.  The biggest problem I have had is with a couple of hard drives that I brought over from my WHS install didn’t pass the pre-clear process and had to add an Intel NIC as my onboard NIC’s didn’t reliably get recognized by unRAID.  I have returned them to Western Digital under warranty, but besides that, I was able to get up and going and have even tested replacing a drive, just to see how “easy” it is.

    I am still working on the folder and share structure I will employ, but so far I have moved about 100 blu-ray ISO’s and 200 DVD VOB’s over and I am able to stream HD content (the ISO’s) to 3 W7MC clients, without issue.  With the same hardware under WHS, I would struggle to get 1 to work without stuttering (Xeon Quad Core, 4 GB RAM, Gigabit network).

    Take the plunge, I am VERY happy with my setup, just have a few quirks to iron out and then I will be a VERY HAPPY camper.

    PS. I am still running WHS in a virtual environment for my secondary backup of photos, music, docs, etc. and to do my offsite uploads to Crashplan.  After my last WHS v1 meltdown, I am insane about backups of backups of backups.

    • George L. Schmauch Jr.

      My issue isn’t when it’s

      My issue isn’t when it’s running great, but when it’s having issues.  Something as simple as a driver issue would take me 10x longer to troubleshoot in Linux because I simply don’t understand how it works.  I’ll be searching forums for hours just to figure out how to determine what might be wrong.

  •  
    I loaded up Amahi on a test

     

    I loaded up Amahi on a test machine and while I liked its interface, it needs a regular Linux admin to be able to really use it, set up Greyhole shares, etc.  While I may be able to do this I could not recommend it to any of my friends (as I would have to support it) and I don’t believe it is anywhere near a WHS replacement in a production environment.

    On to Unraid based on some of the previous comments and I plan to also try FlexRaid, FreeNAS, OpenFiler and any others that people find and recommend.

     

     

  • I don’t really know what DE

    I don’t really know what DE is, since I’ve never used WHS, but I am putting my 2 cents in for unraid.  Just got a server up and running this past month and it’s great.  You are really hidden from the linuxness of it almost completly.  The only exception is pre-clearing a new drive which is a pretty basic command like format d:

    There’s a plugin called unmenu which emails me if there is an issue, will shutdown after and extended power outage.

    I don’t have that many drives, so I’m on the plus version.  If you want to keep your hardware I would check compatability and keep in mind you will have to have a spot to store stuff before you copy it back up to the server.