What will happen if I set up Windows Home Server with all of my existing external drives?

December 7, 2007 12:51 PM

What will happen if I set up Windows Home Server with all of my existing external drives?

I currently have several external USB drives. Over the past couple of years, I've been using two of them as the primary drives, holding different kinds of data. Then I have another 2 that serve as backups of the primaries that I would manually populate on a regular basis using robocopy.

If I were to install Windows Home Server and plug all of these drives in, what would happen? Would it create the big "storage cloud" I've been hearing about automatically, essentially creating one huge file share with software RAID? Or would the drives have to be reformatted in the process?

What would be the best way to go about setting this up? I want to use WHS to create my home network storage/backup solution but I don't want to lose any of the data that's already on my existing drives.

Thanks!

posted by jbiz to Computers & Internet (4 answers total)

Best answer: I just setup something like this. Of course, in my case, they were internal drives, but still. Basically, yes, it could not use them until it basically "nuked them" and turned them into part of its storage cloud.

So, I had to do some juggling. I ended up installing the disks on a 2nd machine and copying the data over the network onto existing disks already part of the WHS setup. Then, after the data was copied over, I hooked up the disks to the WHS machine and "initialized them"...

Hope that helps!

My e-mail is in my profile if you have specific questions about the process.
posted by kbanas at 1:14 PM on December 7, 2007 [1 favorite]

Best answer: it formats them. You'll need some temporary storage to offload. I had the same problem but I had enough free space across my drives that I was able to empty one, then add it to my WHS storage pool.
posted by mphuie at 1:15 PM on December 7, 2007

Best answer: The drives need to be wiped for them to be part of the cloud. Otherwise, they just show up as standard drives, and you can map them as network drives like a normal windows setup.

To migrate mine, I did the same as mphuie . Had to clear up one drive completely, by copying the contents to the other drives, then added that drive to the pool, then copied the contents back.
posted by smackfu at 1:28 PM on December 7, 2007

Just to clarify also, it doesnt automatically create a software RAID. By default, folder duplication is off, and you will need to enable it (on a per share basis), and WHS takes care of the rest. IIRC, WHS comes default with 6 shares.
posted by mphuie at 3:10 PM on December 7, 2007