What drive for OS on a new WHS install?

[btrcp2000]

Building from the ground up:

Gigabyte ep45 ud3p
q9550
4gb ddr2
WHS
bunch of data drives from current install

What size drive do I need for the WHS OS? Any energy efficient suggestions?

[MitchSchaft]

Atleast 500GB, unless I'm confusing that with the HP WHS boxes.

[gplasky]

Originally Posted by btrcp2000

Building from the ground up:

Gigabyte ep45 ud3p
q9550
4gb ddr2
WHS
bunch of data drives from current install

What size drive do I need for the WHS OS? Any energy efficient suggestions?

WHS by default will create a 20GB partition for the OS and the balance of your drive will be the D: drive, DATA partition. I believe the recommended minimum drive to use is 80 GB. For your mb you could use an existing IDE drive you have (your board supports 2 x IDE drives and one would probably be your DVD drive) or any SATA or SATA2 drive you may have lying around. Or any new, green drive would do also. The DATA will most be used to hold the backup database so it doesn't have to be crazy huge. And this is all based on NOT doing data replication.

Your system drive doesn't have to be your largest disk, but it does have to be "large enough". It's no longer used as the "landing zone" for files. But a full server will store the backup db on the system drive (even use it for primary file storage if needed), reducing the space available. I think a 300-400 GB system drive is large enough for most people.

Gerry

[btrcp2000]

Only data duplication would be music and pictures, maybe 15gb total. Plus the OS drive itself, but I understand that is a different process from just backing up data files, and I'll tackle that later. Thanks!

[briands]

I have a similar dilemma - I can either use a 300GB, 500GB or even one of my new 1.5TB drives... One advantage to the 300 is that I have several and could mirror it to further improve potential up time. The 500 would give a little more room to grow for the OS, but I don't really see that happening. My current XP install is on a 30GB partition.

Where can I find explanation of drive use with WHS?
What does go onto the D drive? Any advantage/disadvanatage if files do go there?
Where are the backups from clients stored?
How does the pool work?
Does it provide some level of redundancy? What level of control can you establish for this? for example, i would like my photo and music directory backed up as well as some movie files, but likely not any of the Sage recording files....
How does it determine which drive in the pool to write to?
What if there are multiple simultaneous writes (recording multiple shows). I could in theory have 6 HD files recording at the same time.

Since I did not want to build an entire new server, I need to do this install overnight (or multiple nights) - or send the family off for a couple days.
My plan is to move my all of the files off of one of my existing drives onto one of the new 1.5 drives to free it up for the WHS OS drive. Then I can pull my all of my current drives (and easily revert back). This will leave me with the newly duplicated drive for the OS and a 1.5 TB new drive (not in pool) to set up WHS initially.
Install WHS - duplicate D to 1.5 - format D into 64k blocks - copy back
Move 1.5TB into pool - format to 64k blocks
Install drivers for all tuners (HDPVR, R5000, HD Homerun and DualTV)
Create folder structure on pool for music, photos, movies, TV
set up SAGE installation on WHS
Add all existing data disks outside of pool
copy Wiz.bin to WHS installation
I think up to this point I can revert by simply unplugging my WHS drive and pool drive and booting to my current OS drive.
Assuming I am happy with the WHS installation, I can migrate files from the data disks outside the pool to the pool one disk at a time (can still get back to current config - though new recordings will be missing)
From this point forward, I will loose my chance to go back, but I'll not do this until I am content with the WHS install.
One at a time, add the data disk to the pool and format them to 64kblocks until they are all in.

So.... please point out any problems with this plan. Don't forget, I'd still like to read up on how the pool works... WHS is not very well documented... I guess it is an OEM OS after all.