By Philip Churchill on October 23rd, 2007
The PC Gear Home Server
Technology site Geekzone has a review on The PC Gear Home Server from New Zealand supplier PC Gear. Priced at $1,199.90 incl. GST ($905, £442) it’s not cheap, but it includes the following:
- Intel Pentium Dual Core E2160 CPU
- Gigabyte LGA775 Motherboard with Gigabit LAN
- 1GB DDR2 RAM (dual channel)
- 1 Terabyte of storage (2x 500GB SATAII Drives)
- Thermaltake Matrix ATX Case
- Thermaltake 430W Power Supply
- Microsoft Windows Home Server
Share this WHS Article with Others:
While I think its great to see all these “pre-configured” machines for WHS coming out, the one thing all of them are lacking so far is 3+ hard drives. To get the maximum benefit of WHS your storage should be balanced, which requires 3 or more hard drives. So far HP and others have stuck to the 2 disk setup.
@Robert Why 3? I thought 2 was enough to benefit from the balancing/duplication.
Hi Michiel –
With 2 drives you can have folder duplication, such that if a drive fails your data is still protected. You also get “very basic balancing” because there are only two drives. So say for example you had two 500GB drives, and your first drive is your SYS drive (where WHS software lives). That takes away 20GB from it, leaving you with 480GB.
Since WHS has to duplicate your shares, the maximum amount of space you will get out of your 2nd drive is 480GB — losing 20GB.
When you add another drive, it can now balance across that drive and you get to utilize the maximum amout of storage.
Hi Robert Stinnett,
Thanks for that explanation, it makes sense now why you should use 3 or more hard drives.
Hi Robert,
I think you missed the point because not everything is duplicated. The shared folders are duplicated indeed if you want but the backups are not. So you can use the 20 MB anyway 😉
IMHO you don’t need more than 2 drives by default. 2 Are enough, 1 is almost senseless. More is nice but takes also more energy. (I calculated that my WHS costs me almost 50 eurocent/day for electricity…)
Regards
Michiel
I am not sure if that is true or not Michiel. Microsoft is working on a white paper explaining the Drive Extended technology, but numerous reports on the Microsoft forums have people talking about 20GB of unusable space on their 2nd drive.
I guess we are just going to have to wait and see what the white paper says. Who knows, we could all be wrong 🙂