Server Storage on a Multi-Drive System

Windows Home Server lets you add as many drives as you can either fit inside the case or plug into to your system’s USB 2.0, FireWire, and eSATA ports. After you install a third drive and add it to the storage pool, Windows Home Server sets up the drive as another secondary partition, which is mounted to a subfolder of C:\fs (such as C:\fs\J). If you have folder duplication activated for at least one folder, DE Migrator moves all the duplicates onto the secondary partitions—leaving behind only tombstone pointers on the primary partition—and ensures that the original files and the duplicates are stored on different partitions.

With three or more drives in the storage pool, Windows Home Server can also start load balancing, which means optimizing how data is stored and retrieved by writing or reading data using a hard drive that’s not currently busy. This is possible because every data file exists on two (and only two) hard drives. For example, suppose Windows Home Server needs to read a file that has copies stored on drive 1 and drive 2. If drive 1 is busy, say, writing data, Windows Home Server can always read the file from drive 2. Load balancing can greatly improve performance because Windows Home Server should spend far less time waiting for a hard drive to become available.