windows home server redux

Okay, so I know I said a while back that Windows Home Server was going to rock.  In its own way, it does indeed rock, but there's one huge flaw in it for me.  I have a big (2Tb) eight disk RAID 5 array which I built specifically to hold all of my media. This includes a large high-bitrate music collection, a bunch of ripped movies, and some TV that I've downloaded.  Granted the TV is ephemeral, but it'd be a shame to lose it. WHS replicates data on a directory level rather than on a disk level.  So, if I have a directory taking up 500Mb, then on a WHS system it would be duplicated to make 1GB, and split over several drives.  Ordinarily that wouldn't be a serious problem, as WHS handles what goes where and apparently it does a pretty good job of it.

On my RAID array though, I have  about 1.1TB used.  If I had WHS setup as it should be, then that 1.1TB would ideally become 2.2TB - which is more space than I have.  I also think its wasteful, but that's just me.  I understand how and why they did it like this, and it makes sense for their target market that you have high reliability and quick availability. Now, I could disable some of the WHS functionality and have it not replicate the directories.  That doesn't strike me as a very elegant solution though.  So, for the time being, I have the drive formatted as NTFS and another drive running Longhorn Server powering it.  I don't know where it'll end up, but either I'll go back to the kosher copy of Windows Server 2003 Standard I have, or I'll have to upgrade that to Longhorn Server (ouch!).  We'll see as time goes on.

In any case, Longhorn Server build 6001 (Beta 3?) is installed on the server box.  It got a substantial hardware upgrade recently, mostly because a failed power supply killed the old motherboard.  It seems to be VERY stable at this point, though I'm not stressing the OS that much.  Maintenance is certainly easier than 2003, and I think its faster too.  Supposedly Vista to Server 2008 file transfers are faster as they both use IPv6 and some newer transfer technologies.  I haven't benchmarked this, as I've been pretty busy with all the hospital crap going on lately, but it SEEMS a lot faster. Now, some of this is going to be perception, and some of it isn't.  I'd love to see some real world benchmarks of the difference between the two.  I still have 2003 installed on a disk, so I may plug that back in and see if I can test the speeds.

Oh, I AM getting a Suunto X9i for my birthday :-)