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Windows Home Server v2, What do you think about it?
I read this article from Anandtech, it seem that what made WHS "interesting" is being replaced by something that's "proper". In Linux world there's LVM, it manages volumes in a pool. Linux has done this since '99. An abstraction layer is created above the block devices so that the kernel can create a file system on top of it. You can have pools that are filled with mixed devices, a physical disk, a RAID array, a SAN datastore, as long it's registered as a block device, you can use it in LVM. Now back to Windows Home Server v2, when I talked to pparks1 few days ago, he said about a feature that made me interested in WHS, it's the "pool" concept, but WHS can "chop" your data, file by file, and put it in different disks. If a disk is failing, you can unplug that disk, and read it on another computer just like a normal disk. In WHS v2, this kind of pooling data is discarded (according to the article at least). It uses (what seem to me) similar abstraction layer used by LVM in Linux. WHS v2 saves data in 1GB chunks, it stands between your HDD and NTFS. If you HDD fails, you can't just simply unplug it and read the data on another computer, it'll show you a lot of gibberish and unusable blocks of data (once again very similar to LVM). Another interesting point, WHS v2 now creates an ECC hash of each 512 byte HDD sector, very similar to ZFS auto healing capability... Does this mean Microsoft finally decided to do things "properly"? What do you think?
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