I've been tempted by WHS for a while now. I have a few questions for you, since you seem pretty experienced with it. How does the file system deal with failure? What if one of my drives fails? Can I set it up to be as redundant as RAID 5 (i.e. I can lose any one drive and it's okay)? What if my motherboard or OS installation fails? Can I reinstall the operation system and have it recognize my file system (assuming I still have all the drives from it)?
if OS installation fails, you can do a server reinstall and it will preserve your data. Alternatively, you can take out the disk and plug it into another PC and there will be a hidden folder to access the files called \Data.
in terms of drive failure, in my experience it's less about the drive and more about the data you have. so, for instance, if you value your Photos directory like I do, you can select that to be duplicated across multiple drives. This will make sure there are multiple copies of that folder in case of any single drive failure.
I've also got an external RAID that I've connected to my WHS. WHS sees this as one drive, while in reality it's two drives in RAID config.
I've trusted my WHS build with 10TB of very valuable data. So far so good.
