I am running Server 2008 R2 and as most have several HDD's installed of various sizes. I had previously toyed with WHS and the one thing I liked about it was the ability to just add HDD's to the Storage Pool. Is there a way to do this in 2008 without using the Extend Partition option in Disk Management. From what I have read, it seems that this option may be riskier than keeping all my data on one drive. Basically I am under the impression that if one drive fails then they all fail. Could I set up an extended partition with a mirror as well? Would all the drives need to be identical (at some point they will be) for that scenario? WHS's storage pool idea had the advantage of adding any sized, branded HDD to the pool and allowing other drives to be used to backup that information. Also, one final note, most of the drives are SATA but a couple are IDE currently and are connected through different controller cards so a hardware RAID is probably not an option.Neogenesis3000

Hi, It seems that you have some disks with various size(such as 80GB, 100GB…), and you want to know whether you can configure software RAID with those hard disks with Windows Server 2008 R2. If I misunderstand your concern, please feel free to let me know. If so, the answer is yes. I am not familiar with Windows Home Sever, however, you can configure software RAID with various size of hard disks. But please note that disk size of the RAID will base on the minimum size of the disk. For example, you use two disks(one is 80GB, another is 100GB) to configure a RAID 0, the disk size of the RAID 0 will be 80 + 80, not 80 + 100, you will waste 20GB’s disk space. Best Regards, Vincent Hu

That is kind of what I am asking but not quite. I don't know how much you have played with Windows Home Server but it uses a storage pool which you can add and subtract drives at will of any size and any interface (USB, IDE, SATA) assuming you have enough space to move the files off the drive you are moving. What is nice about this option aside from easy adding and removal of storage is the fact that the data is spread over the entire set of discs. Not striped mind you so not quite as nice as RAID but still if one drive fails then you won't loose all your information. Technically all but one can fail and you theoretically won't loose everything. You will still loose some data that is on the drive that fails but hopefully you backed up. Speaking of backing up, the other option you have in WHS is to use some of the drives as backup. As far as I can remember, it didn't matter what size drive you set as backup as long as it had enough space to copy the files. You could then set this to backup every so often. Now, Windows Server 2k8 has the ability to extend a volume from one drive to the next, sounds similar to WHS and maybe it is but the way I understand it is if one of the drives in an extended volume fails the entire volume is kaput and you loose everything. So WHS method, loose some, WS2k8 method, loose everything. I like the WHS method. The other part is the resizing and adding or removal of storage. Once the volume is created you have to destroy it in order to add more storage (I think, might need to check that) or remove a drive. So I guess my requirements are this: 1. Add and remove storage at will. 2. Backup capability. 3. Storage is a pool of all drives added. 4. Redundancy or at least semi-redundant.Neogenesis3000