Windows Home Server - unveiled at CES last night

[aitf311]

http://on10.net/Blogs/jesse/windows-home-server-will-live-in-your-closet-simplify-your-life/

 

http://www.engadget.com/2007/01/08/windows-home-server-everything-you-need-features-rundown-scre/

[BillK]

I'll believe it when I see it....remember Windows ME?

[PGPfan]

Based on what I've read, it's a 'Windows' only thing, meaning it will only stream to Windows approved devices. That is strike 1. Next is that is only available with new hardware, ie - you have to buy the thing 'precanned'. Strike 2. It does have a nice built-in backup system/method. It'd be nice to see Tom add something comparable to our unRaids.

 

Overall, it really offers very little that we don't already have. At least Microsoft (and the general public as a result) will start to recognize the unique benefits that an unRaid like approach to the 'Raid' concept provides. No need to be one of the drones that waste money at making an 'enterprise lite' hardware Raid 5 system for the home.

 

-PGPfan

[X4n]

1. 'Windows' only thing: the video i've seen talks about streaming to osX, linux, and all others (like samba)

2. precanned: there will be 2 versions, one with HP hardware (preinstalled) and one pure software version.

 

i myself am interrested in how it will provide data protection, they talk about a "sort of Raid, but its different"

from what i can tell it also doesn't strip the data (like unraid), which is nice, but will it be based on parity or just double data?

[isaacg]

From watching channel 9/10 videos, it sounds like the RAID-like functionality is merely always keeping data on two hard drives at all times.  So merely very flexible, pooled, mirroring rather than parity based protection.  Hopefully thats not the case, we'll see.

[lovingHDTV]

From watching channel 9/10 videos, it sounds like the RAID-like functionality is merely always keeping data on two hard drives at all times.  So merely very flexible, pooled, mirroring rather than parity based protection.  Hopefully thats not the case, we'll see.

 

I don't know about mirroring.  I thought it says that you could add additional drives via usb/firewire to the server.  Not sure how that would work if it were mirrored.  Maybe I'm mixing up products.

 

Thanks,

 

[dschur]

The whole thing interests me about as much as a pet rock.

[isaacg]

Yea you can add/replace drives without data loss.  My guess is the mirroring is on a file or even sector/cluster level.  The backup part of it works on the cluster level, one video showed it checking for changed clusters, so they're being very efficient that way.  Anyway, as long as they make sure that every bit is on two drives, if you remove an external drive you wouldn't break anything and it would resync/mirror as needed assuming there's free space, or you'd need to reattach a drive to get back to full data protection again.  If it was at a sector/cluster level the files on the removed drive would be pretty useless.  So it may be per file.  I read somewhere the mirroring is optional also.

[tfieldho]

I was a little skeptical at first but the more I read, the better it sounds.  I doubt it'll replace anything I already have but it would be a great addition to the home environment for automated backups, password sync, etc.

 

There's a bunch more info here: http://www.winsupersite.com/reviews/whs_preview.asp

 

Sounds like its not strictly RAID but will allow for dynamic addition of drives and a single share for each type of media (music, pictures, videos...).  I like this quote:

It's quite different from RAID, Headrick says. "RAID is an insect spray," he cracked. "With RAID, you must understand the technology, add disks in sets, and its hard to remove drives." With WHS, storage is hot-swappable. You can plug in an 80 GB hard drive, for example, and configure it quickly with the WHS Add Drive wizard. When you want to remove it and replace it with a 500 GB drive, there's a simple wizard for that as well.

 

It also supports Windows Media Connect so any UPnP capable device should be able to stream content off it (they mentioned Roku Soundbridge specifically in the interview with the product manager on the Media Center podcast).

 

Of course it's not coming out for a while so I'm sure things will change a lot by the time its released.

[stottle]

I've been a beta tester for WHS, and I think it is perfect for some uses.  I've now got a WHS box with 3 drives (120-200 GB) in my closet next to my unRAID box (with much more storage).  I've my media on the unRAID, but I use the WHS for the backups and the simple to use shared folders.

 

To answer a few questions, the OS runs software to manage "duplication".  You can create as many share folders as you want (defaults to music, movies, etc., plus a folder for every user).  For each share, you can select duplication (or not).  With duplication, each file is stored on more that one drive, as managed by the s/w running on the OS.  For GBs of DVDs, this was just too inefficient for me.

 

But the backups (which by default are configured to run nightly) are so friendly, it is amazing.  I don't know the details, but it seems to keep track so that each file (including the OS files) is stored only once.  So with my four computers, the storage required isn't 4xOS plus the size of user file, it is 1xOS plus the size of each unique file, plus overhead (which doesn't seem too large).  The nightly backups work the same way - that is, if not many files changed, an additional backup will take very little additional storage.  Here's the cool part - as you get rid of older backups (either automatically (3 months old) or manually), the more recent backups are still complete.  The recovery of a complete harddrive worked as well for me as Norton Ghost - but I didn't Ghost (backup) as often as I should so I REALLY like this feature of WHs.

 

Again, I have both unRAID and WHS.  I really lilke each for different reasons.

 

Brett