Windows home server 2011 vs Windows 8 when building a home server.

[JaredB]

Hi, I'm planning on building a home server for computer backups and media storage, with the ability to stream the media to my other computers.

My main PC is going to have windows 8, but my second computer will be running Ubuntu, and I don't think WHS 2011 is compatible with Ubuntu or windows 8, but if it is please let me know.

The server in question is going to be a Norco RPC-4224, with a dedicated RAID card with 8 3TB WD Red hard drives configured in RAID 6, but if I need more storage I am going to add more of the same hard drives.

The thing I need help on is if I should install windows 7 on the server and use windows home server 2011, or if I should install windows 8 and use the storage spaces feature. I ask because I don't know if storage spaces will be shareable to all my other computrse, as well I want there to be a way to back up my computers automatically.

I also don't know if storage spaces is compatible with raid 6 or not if I'm using a raid card, as well as if there are complications when adding additional hard drives to a raid 6 array.

Any help on this subject would be greatly appreciated.

EDIT: I just remembered something, are 3tb hdd even compatible with windows 7, becuase I've had that problem in the past, or will the raid card fix that?

[azeotrope]

Storage spaces does not have dual parity, If you want dual parity software raid on windows you'll have to go with flexraid.

What do you mean by compatible? Apparently there are some issues with windows 8 system backups with WHS if using GPT but everything else should be fine. I Don't believe windows 7 or 8 can do remote system backups like WHS. Ubuntu isn't fussy like windows, you can do an online backup by simply doing an archival type copy of the entire root partition. It would be better to schedule this on your Ubuntu PC with cron or the rsync daemon and sync it to a shared space on your server.

There shouldn't be any problem with the 3TB disks on Windows. This limitation is generally on the hardware side, not on the OS.

EDIT: It's not a good idea to grow a dual parity array much further than 8 drives for data security. It would probably be better to create a new array after adding maybe one or two more drives.