About a year ago I assembled a WHS (Windows Home Server) from old computer parts I had lying around – finally I could put them to use. I added the following hard drives:

• 200 GB SATA (for the system)
• 200 GB SATA (data)
• 200 GB SATA (data)
• 400 GB SATA (data)
• 320 GB USB (data)

I can’t remember why I decided to use the smallest disk for the system, but it was a mistake. There are some good reasons to choose a larger disk:

• Size of the system disk limits the file size when transferring files to the server. WHS splits the system disk into two partitions: C:\ (20 GB) and D:\ (remainder of the disk is used for data). When you transfers files to a WHS the files will land on the D:\ drive before Drive Extender moves them to secondary disks in the storage pool. So if you have 40GB disk for system, you’ll have 20GB available for data. This limits you to only transfer files less than 20GB, which is small in the year of 2009 when HD videos are common. I discovered this limitation while trying to move a 120 GB virtual hard drive file to the WHS for backup – not fun at all
• When your amount of data grows, you need to swap out the disks in the storage pool. When I have replaced the 200 and 400 GB disks with brand new +1 TB disks, I’m still left with a 200GB system disk when I could had a 1 TB system disk – argh!

So instead of making the same mistake as I did, install the system on a large disk! I can recommend a +1 TB disk.

Using a small disk for the system was a bad design decision by me. This forced me to replace the system disk with a 1 TB disk. I started on this “little” project this weekend, and ended up spending lots of hours on it. As usual, before jumping into conclusions, I did some research, and luckily enough I found a good post on the WHS forums over at Microsoft’s.

The cool thing about WHS is that it’s designed to take care of your data. It’s by design enabled to handle a crash on the system disk. If your system disk crashes, you can just replace the disk with a new one and reinstall the system. During the installation process, it will discover your other disks from the storage pool, and based on them it will be able to recover all your data. You’ll have to use the “Server Reinstallation” option while installing WHS.

The process

• Buy a new disk – I bought a 1 TB disk
• Shutdown the system
• Replace the old drive with the new one
• Boot up the system from the WHS DVD
• Choose the “Server Reinstallation” option
• The Drive Extender rebuilds your data from the storage pool
• Create user accounts, install add ins etc.

Read the forum post in detail, and notice the caveats; when doing this you lose the backup database, installed add ins etc.

While doing research I also checked if people had experience with replacing the system disk using imaging tools like Norton Ghost and Acronis True Image. There seemed to be mixed results out there, and it’s not supported by WHS.

And before you go assembling your own WHS I recommend that you go read the white papers!

Here are some other WHS resources:

• http://www.wegotserved.com/
• http://blogs.technet.com/homeserver/
• Windows Home Server Product website

Happy hacking!