Disk extender to the rescue!

Well.

I have been through the drive to get my WHS server up on Raid 5 and had been beaten by server 2003.

Just as well that I did.

We got back from a weekend away a last month, to be greeted by an alarm squealing from the drive cage and a red light showing on the 4th drive. Now if this was Raid 5, I would have swapped the dead drive with a new identical spare, restarted the server and the array would have rebuild with no loss of data.

But as I was running Disk Extender, I went onto the console and removed the dead drive from the server storage pool. all my data was in replicated folders anyway so I new I had not lost anything. once the drive was out, I removed it and sent it back to the Amazon vendor for a warranty swapout. With one drive less, the files just re-duplicated across the remaining 4 and restored my data protection.

But they didn't have any more of the same drives and offered me a choice of a Hitachi or WD drive. I went with the WD drive and it arrived the next day.

Now with raid, you really need identical disks, so I would have had a system that would have worked by possibly not as well as it should have.

With Disk Extender, I just put the new drive in, rebooted and then added the new drive to the storage pool. over the next day, my files where re-duplicated back across the five drives.

Happy days!