Amahi Forums

Hi guys,

I currently use Amahi and am generally happy with it. The main reason I chose Amahi was because of Greyhole - it gives me the ability to pool my storage and also provides the redundancy of RAID 5 without the HDD size restrictions and issues of being tied to specific controller hardware. However, a lot of space is wasted because of the simple "duplication" method it employs, rather than using a parity system. Currently I'm using 9.27 of 9.48 TiB in my system (97.8%) and almost everything I have is set to have one duplicate copy, so I have ~4.7 TiB of data. This is spread across 6 HDDs so if I were to use a single parity system, I'd effectively have 7.9 TiB of space with no duplication (so using 59% of the space) but the same redundancy....as I understand it!

Windows Server 8 has storage pooling that can be set to use parity but Greyhole doesn't have this option (yet). Therefore, I am seriously thinking about migrating to Windows Server 8. What I want to know is if there's anything I'd lose by doing this. Currently I run the following software on my server:

TeamViewer
Firefox
Transmission
JDownloader

That's pretty much it (it's a file/download server only). All of this software runs on Windows, except Transmission which can be replaced with uTorrent. There's also a few things that frustrate me with Amahi that I know can be done easily in Windows (e.g. email alerts and automatic sleep at certain times of day). Another potential advantage looking into the future is the possibility of running a MediaPortal server (it's HTPC software that only runs on Windows). Currently I have a MediaPortal workstation (server + client combined) but in the future I might want more HTPCs in my house and using a separate server would be better for power-saving purposes (not having to leave the workstation on all the time for the other clients to work).

There are other issues of course - cost is one but I get free Windows licences as a student so this doesn't apply to me. Performance is another and I'd have to test if Windows Server 8 will run well on an AMD E-350. Basically I'm looking for advice and personal experience - is there anything that should persuade me either way to stick with Amahi or move to Windows Server 8 in my circumstances?

I'm on a serious kick with this suggestion, but why not install a Virtualization Host OS such as Proxmox, ESXi5 free, or XenServer and have both servers at once?!

As for comparison..

You must understand that as it points out in Greyhole FAQ/Docs, greyhole is NOT meant to be RAID protection/duplication.. it uses a duplication scheme that makes sense for some but not all needs/cases... so it's for you to decide.

Perhaps just having a great RAID card with Amahi, you could get what you want without relying on Greyhole duplication, but keep the pooling?
The benefit of Greyhole that I see is that you can use any size drives, with folder-selective duplication. What I don't like is that I don't have complete control over when files are deleted/ignored due to the intense use of symlinks.

Everything else you would miss out on is anything Linux provides of course, which I see largely as all the free open-source software that more often needs to be paid for in Windows.