I have been extremely happy with my WHSv1, started with a prebuit Acer 342 and once i filled the 4 drive slots i assemble my own, the specs are below,
When WHS2011 was released didn't feel the need to move into it, specially because losing the drive pooling, given that there were some options out like Drivebender and Stablebit, most were on beta, and didn't really wanted to gamble, so i stayed with WHSv1 for couple of years more. But the time has come where the 22tb is getting closer and closer to being filled up, WHSv1 has the limitation of 2tb, and 4tb are starting to come down some, not to the price i would like, but i do need to increase my storage short term. So my plan is to remove all the 6x Samsung 1.5tb hdds and replace them with 8x Seagate 4tb and keep the 8x hitachi 2tb for now, until i need more storage. I'll be replacing my 2x Intel SAS8CUI for IBM m1015 flashed to 9211-8i IT firmware to be able to support higher than 2tb on the HBAs. I also have an intel X25 160gb, that i hope will match the 160gb limitation of WHS2011, else going to do the alternatives for lesser than 160gb installation.
But i still need a storage pool that WHS2011 wont give me, so i have two options that im considering and would like your opinions,
Seems to be stable and at $20 seems cheap enough. From what i read it will end up very similar to WHSv1 functionality.
2) FlexRaid
While not the same has some features that on paper seems better for me. I feel the duplication method of WHS to be too expensive, and while i dont consider Flexraid as true backup, i dont have the means to have external backups for more than 20tb, most of what is on my server a Blu Ray Rips from my legally own movie collection, so i can replace them by just re ripping them, but this takes time, so i would prefer to have some sort of redundancy on the server for it to rebuild itself in case of a drive failure. Since this will be software raid it WHS should see it as one drive, similar to how WHSv1 ends up for the network atm. And while i don't understand too much about flexraid, seems it can have different size drives as long as the parity drive(s) are equal to the biggest of all the hdds on use.
I don't see much talk about flexraid here so idk if its good or bad... or its not worth it... so i decided to open this thread to see if you guys can give me your opinion and suggestions into what to do since i do need to move from WHSv1.
Thanks for taking the time on reading, hope you post your opinions and suggestions,