主题：【原创】聊聊微软的 Windows Home Server -- Highway

当你只有一个硬盘的时候，使用Duplicate Folder能避免硬盘某个部分损坏造成的文件损失的问题。如果整个硬盘坏了，那就没辙了。

如果你只有一个硬盘，并已经使用了Duplicate Folder。如果这时候加上一块新的硬盘，我认为WHS会自动将文件转移的（是马上就大挪移呢还是在后台慢慢倒腾就不清楚了）。不过即使文件到了新的硬盘上，如果你把新硬盘取下来插到别的计算机上，文件是不可见的。有些恐惧是不是？

WHS控制面板上有专门Add/Remove Storage的Button.会有一个Wizard指导你完成的。完成之后，我想文件分配会自动进行调整的。不过这个我没有亲手试验过。我想等确认微软会发行零售版本以后再捣鼓。如果那样的话就在感恩节大甩卖的时候再顺一块不花钱的硬盘。

这里是微软“半官方”的一个解释，你可以看一下。

Expandable storage

On the server-side, WHS finally does away with drive letters. "No-one gets drive letters in Windows Home Server," Headrick said. "They'd just forget where they put stuff." Instead, WHS aggregates all of the storage attached to the server into a single store pool, regardless of whether that storage is internal, external, or a combination. As you add drives to the server, the available storage pool simply increases.

I asked whether this technology was based on DFS (Distributed File System), but Headrick told me that this was, in fact, developed by the Microsoft Advanced Technology Lab (ATL), which is part of the Core OS Division. Data is mirrored at the shared folder level, so that two copies of a folder are always stored on two different physical hard drives. It's quite different from RAID, Headrick says. "RAID is an insect spray," he cracked. "With RAID, you must understand the technology, add disks in sets, and its hard to remove drives." With WHS, storage is hot-swappable. You can plug in an 80 GB hard drive, for example, and configure it quickly with the WHS Add Drive wizard. When you want to remove it and replace it with a 500 GB drive, there's a simple wizard for that as well.

Headrick compares WHS storage to toast in a toaster: It's user-serviceable and there are no screws. I think it's one of the most innovative features in the server, and it could very well help revolutionize how people interact with backups, since it will be so easy to add storage and ensure that you're always retaining a wide range of backups.

One final point about WHS storage. Were you to pull a drive out of WHS and try to access the disk from another Windows-based PC, that system would see the disk as standard NTFS. So it will work anywhere, though of course the backups are written in a proprietary data format.