It's a bit of a long post, but you experienced wizards can probably offer some sensible advice...
I've been a very happy WHS v1 user for the last year.
Current system is an HP Microserver with 4x 2TB drives. All the hard drives are running in AHCI mode and I've successfully been able to hot-add and remove the drives without issues. The 5th internal SATA port is not used (so can have a dedicated boot drive there) and the external eSATA is also currently unused, but I don't fancy having persistant storage plugged into it, use it maybe just for a pluggable backup drive.
v1 fulfills all of my needs right now, apart from one: performance. I do a fair amount of post production work in cinematography and DCP file creation, so the single logical drive managed via the drive-pooling is fantastic - I can have a single 6TB+ volume to play with![:D]()
But as performance is a bit of an issue, I did some research and opted for an HP P410 SmartArray with 512MB battery-backed cache. The beauty of this card is it fits inside the case using up the PCIe slot and the multidrop SATA cable plugs straight into the RAID card. So I can continue to use my 4x 2TB drives in a RAID5 configuration, possibly adding another 4 drives in the future to the second SATA port.
With this in mind, I've been looking at getting WHS v2 for a few reasons:
1. WHS v1 doesn't play nice with RAID cards (apparently)
2. Limited to using 2TB size, cannot benefit from 3 or 4TB drives
3. Benefit from the 64bit OS (and the ability to eventually use larger drives, etc)
However, in reading up about the wonders of Veil, not only have I known about the drop of DE (for some time), but also the fact that there's a 2TB "Shared Folder" limit.
So it seems that the combination of those two limiting factors have killed it for me, depending on the answers to the following questions:
Assuming I have a single 7TB logical partition created by the RAID array;
1. Is there a way to bypass 2TB - I have no issues disabling / not using backups as I have the hardware RAID for that (and yes, I'm using the bad excuse that RAID is not a backup!)
2. Can you share a normal directory (using windows explorer, not using the dashboard) as a backdoor method of bypassing the 2TB shared folder limit?
I really want to benefit from faster storage with the dedicated hardware RAID controller, but don't want to be crippled by having multiple 2TB shared folders.
What are your thoughts?
Thanks in advance.
P.S I suppose MS' argument to my particular case is is I'm going beyond what a traditional home user would, but seriously, all these new "hidden" limitations? What are they on?!?
I've been a very happy WHS v1 user for the last year.
Current system is an HP Microserver with 4x 2TB drives. All the hard drives are running in AHCI mode and I've successfully been able to hot-add and remove the drives without issues. The 5th internal SATA port is not used (so can have a dedicated boot drive there) and the external eSATA is also currently unused, but I don't fancy having persistant storage plugged into it, use it maybe just for a pluggable backup drive.
v1 fulfills all of my needs right now, apart from one: performance. I do a fair amount of post production work in cinematography and DCP file creation, so the single logical drive managed via the drive-pooling is fantastic - I can have a single 6TB+ volume to play with
But as performance is a bit of an issue, I did some research and opted for an HP P410 SmartArray with 512MB battery-backed cache. The beauty of this card is it fits inside the case using up the PCIe slot and the multidrop SATA cable plugs straight into the RAID card. So I can continue to use my 4x 2TB drives in a RAID5 configuration, possibly adding another 4 drives in the future to the second SATA port.
With this in mind, I've been looking at getting WHS v2 for a few reasons:
1. WHS v1 doesn't play nice with RAID cards (apparently)
2. Limited to using 2TB size, cannot benefit from 3 or 4TB drives
3. Benefit from the 64bit OS (and the ability to eventually use larger drives, etc)
However, in reading up about the wonders of Veil, not only have I known about the drop of DE (for some time), but also the fact that there's a 2TB "Shared Folder" limit.
So it seems that the combination of those two limiting factors have killed it for me, depending on the answers to the following questions:
Assuming I have a single 7TB logical partition created by the RAID array;
1. Is there a way to bypass 2TB - I have no issues disabling / not using backups as I have the hardware RAID for that (and yes, I'm using the bad excuse that RAID is not a backup!)
2. Can you share a normal directory (using windows explorer, not using the dashboard) as a backdoor method of bypassing the 2TB shared folder limit?
I really want to benefit from faster storage with the dedicated hardware RAID controller, but don't want to be crippled by having multiple 2TB shared folders.
What are your thoughts?
Thanks in advance.
P.S I suppose MS' argument to my particular case is is I'm going beyond what a traditional home user would, but seriously, all these new "hidden" limitations? What are they on?!?