2 replies to this topic

[edamiga1]

I am in the process of building out my 2011 server and was wondering if anyone had used the mirroring feature in windows to provide higher availability. From what I understand you basically choose a partition to mirror and then choose a drive that it should be mirrored on. The OS will take care of the rest. This is basically what DE is doing, but is a little bit more of a manual process. I know that this would slow down writes, but most of my work is reading. It is not as efficient as RAID5, but appears to not create any issues with the vanilla WHS2011.

Looking for pros/cons on this approach. What are the downside to doing this?

[pcdoc]

The only downside if you want to call it that, is a one for one on storage. Meaning 2T + 2T for the mirror is 2T of usuable storage. In a RAID 5 you would only loose 33% worst case and less on a larger array. Nothing wrong with what you are describing and I will be adding one myself soon when I get a hold of another 3T drive. It is a great way to go for low to moderate storage needs but becomes impractical as the storage needs grow.

[edamiga1]

Thanks,

With the Green drives being so cheap, it is almost a non issue. This is the same cost as DE, so not really going backwards in that respect.

It looks like you are using 3TB. How are you doing your backups, or are you partitioning these into 2TB or less chunks?

The other benefit of this is that it is possible to Mirror these onto 3TB drives or larger. One long term thinking is that when 4TB or 6TB comes out and is reasonably priced and I can put one of these is and mirror two 2TB to it. This would at least allow me to lower the number of physical disks...

Are there any performnce issues with using a Green 2TB to backup a Black 2TB? I am using the built in functionality of Windows, so no hardware mirror. I would think this might impact the write performance, but I would hope that it would not impact reads. Will the OS actually optimize the reads across the two drives, so I will actually get better performance?