Best Hard Drives to use for WHS2011

[edamiga1]

I am waiting for the 2011 RTM build of WHS and am trying to finalize my storage decision. I am still not 100% clear on how hard drives greater than 2TB work.

 

Right now the 2TB hard drives are basically the best value and with 2011 we do not have any of the incompatibility issues.

 

What I want to understand are what issues will I run into if I use 2.5 or 3TB hard drives.

 

This is my current understanding:

 

If you use these as part of your main storage the system will break them apart in 2TB partitions or less. This is a W2K8 issue, so will not be fixed until they address it for W2K8, which is currently unknown.

The issue is that I might as well stay with 2TB drives, since this is the max partition I can get.

 

What I am not clear on is if I want to use one of the 3TB drives as a backup drive. Will it let me use the whole 3TB of storage as one drive or will it do the same thing. I currently use 2TB HDs for all of my offsite backup and I would like to move to 3TB drives, so I don't have to keep as many hardrives offsite. Simplier to manage.

 

When would it make sense to move to 2.5 or 3TB hardrives?

Is anyone using 3TB hard drives with WHS 2011?

What are others doing and what recommendations do you have?

[jmwills]

There a lot of embedded questions in there also. The 2TB issues revolves around the limitations on VHD images (how Server 2008 runs backups) being limited to 2TB. You can use 3TB drives for your main storage allocation as single drives but WHS will use them as 2TB & 1TB volumes. You can have a 20TB array on your server if you wanted it but only 2TB at a time could be backed up.

 

You can bypass this restriction by using a third party backup tool. For me, 2TB drives are still be best value and yes I need to keep a few more drives laying around but there is more opportunity for redundancy too.

[edamiga1]

I will stay with 2TB for now. Is there a good post that talks about the backup format. I have not tried this yet. I am happy with the folder approach with V1 and this works perfect for me. How different is 2011 and does it still only backup changes and leave the older backups intact.

[pcdoc]

I am waiting for the 2011 RTM build of WHS and am trying to finalize my storage decision. I am still not 100% clear on how hard drives greater than 2TB work.

 

Right now the 2TB hard drives are basically the best value and with 2011 we do not have any of the incompatibility issues.

 

What I want to understand are what issues will I run into if I use 2.5 or 3TB hard drives.

 

This is my current understanding:

 

If you use these as part of your main storage the system will break them apart in 2TB partitions or less. This is a W2K8 issue, so will not be fixed until they address it for W2K8, which is currently unknown.

The issue is that I might as well stay with 2TB drives, since this is the max partition I can get.

 

What I am not clear on is if I want to use one of the 3TB drives as a backup drive. Will it let me use the whole 3TB of storage as one drive or will it do the same thing. I currently use 2TB HDs for all of my offsite backup and I would like to move to 3TB drives, so I don't have to keep as many hardrives offsite. Simplier to manage.

 

When would it make sense to move to 2.5 or 3TB hardrives?

Is anyone using 3TB hard drives with WHS 2011?

What are others doing and what recommendations do you have?

 

jmwills is correct about the VHD image limitation and it will probably not get fixed soon as that is a major change. I have used 3T drives on WHS-2011 and they work fine for standard storage you just cannot back them up. You can use say 2 X 3T in a Mirror with no issues, you can store non critical data to it. Just remember that you have to partition the drive from the drive management not the console. The console will break up the partition if you set the drive up that way. You cannot use the 3T as a backup unless it is broken up to smaller chunks. In a nutshell, using 3T is unpractical and does not make sense unless it is used in a mirror or a raid.

[jmwills]

And wouldn't you know it..... I saw an external 3TB drive for $119 on NewEgg today. No rebates...looks like we could be breaking that $100 barrier before long.