Mac equivalent to Windows Home Server?

Is there any kind of Mac equivalent to Windows Home Server? I'm specifically looking for the ability to simply add new hard drives to the "pool" of storage.

Currently my WHS box acts as storage for all my media and a web server. If there isn't an equivalent, can someone suggest how this could be done with a Mac?

Am I SOL in trying to find a Mac equivalent for this?

Khris said:

Am I SOL in trying to find a Mac equivalent for this?

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If you have an existing Windows Home Server box, there's no reason you can't use it with your Macs. Apple doesn't actually have a release of OS X that is intended for ordinary consumers as a server product (although there is the enterprise-class version called "OS X Server").

Depending on your needs, OS X will do just fine for you. OS X comes with the capability to act as a server if need be. In a pinch, when my web server went down I actually ran one of my websites from a G4 iBook for 3 weeks until I moved my hosting offsite. It wasn't the fastest granted, but it wasn't the slowest either. I know that is not what you want to use it for, but what are you trying to do with it?

Ultimately trying to ditch another of my Windows machines and replace it with a Mac. I do like the functionality of my WHS box however (and I'm aware it does work fine with Macs) however I was hoping that there would be some sort of Mac hardware/software that could come close to replacing it.

Cool, I am always up for ditching M$. I am sure there is software for what you want to do. VLC for streaming audio/video (I think), Mac OS X for file serving, print server, ftp/web server, remote access, blah blah blah.....not sure what specific tasks that you can do on a WHS so it's hard to point you in the right direction for apps

Cheers

My main feature is "Drive Pooling". Simply being able to add another drive to the mix and pool it into the available storage. If I can't do this with Mac OS then there's no point in me getting rid of my WHS box.

Khris said:

My main feature is "Drive Pooling". Simply being able to add another drive to the mix and pool it into the available storage. If I can't do this with Mac OS then there's no point in me getting rid of my WHS box.

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Doesn't OS X support software RAID configurations?

cwa107 said:

Doesn't OS X support software RAID configurations?

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It does. Raid 0, 1 and 1+0

GroovyLinuxGuy said:

It does. Raid 0, 1 and 1+0

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thats as much software support as I can think of.

edit: I'd go with 1+0, more overhead.. but at least it's fault tolerant.

Thanks for the input.

WHS doesn't operate in a RAID fashion per say, but it does give you the option to duplicate folders on multiple hard drives to provide fault tolerance.

Unless I want to spend another couple hundred buying a few more drives, I'm probably best to just keep my WHS box around. Hopefully MS comes out with an update for it soon to address the data corruption issue.

Khris said:

I'm specifically looking for the ability to simply add new hard drives to the "pool" of storage.

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You want Drobo!

Have you considered using an appliance-based solution? If all you are doing is file storage and maybe sharing a printer, check these out: http://www.tigerdirect.com/applicat...words=terastation&searchbtn.x=0&searchbtn.y=0

I've got a 2 TB model, set to raid 5, so it's 1.5 TB of usable space. With it, I have the assurance of knowing that if a drive fails, I only need to swap it out with one of the same size or larger, and the box will auto-recover the data to the new drive. You power it down, unlock it, pull the tray with the failed drive out, swap the drive, slide it back in, power it up, and walk away for an hour or so. Then you're back in business.

Or, try this: http://www.freenas.org/ or this: http://www.ezbluesoftware.com/products.php

good luck
P

Khris said:

Hopefully MS comes out with an update for it soon to address the data corruption issue.

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You're kidding me. MS has an uncorrected data integrity known problem? Ok, they obviously don't care about home users

Thanks for the suggestions everyone.

Dysfunction: I'm absolutely serious. Do a search for "WHS corruption issues" and you'll end up with PAGES of info on the topic.

What's even more pathetic is that this problem was reported LAST YEAR and they still don't have an official fix yet.

Khris said:

Thanks for the suggestions everyone.

Dysfunction: I'm absolutely serious. Do a search for "WHS corruption issues" and you'll end up with PAGES of info on the topic.

What's even more pathetic is that this problem was reported LAST YEAR and they still don't have an official fix yet.

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Not to get too far OT, but are we talking filesystem corruption or individual files becoming corrupt?

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/946676/en-us?spid=12624

When certain programs are used to edit or transfer files that are stored on a Windows Home Server-based computer that has more than one hard drive, the files may become corrupted.

....so individual file corruption.

You can get an Airport Extreme and plug a whole bunch of external drives as you want into it. Short of running an actual OS-X server w/ RAID drives, I think that's about as close to WHS as you can get.

cwa107 said:

Not to get too far OT, but are we talking filesystem corruption or individual files becoming corrupt?

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Does it matter? It's still a DI issue. Course, I store 1's and 0's ;D

If you just want storage, get a Linux distro on your 'network' box and set up some samba shares. Have your Mac connect to those shares. Bam! Network storage!