Does Windows Home Server stripe RAID natively?

No, I believe you will need a RAID controller. Mine is built into the MB, but there are plenty of inexpensive ones available as add-on cards.

Hmmm. This is an Acer dedicated server, headless, with WHS pre-installed, but I don’t know what else might be on the firmware, nor do I know if there are any open slots. I’m guessing it uses a doc, but I haven’t opened it up because it hasn’t arrived from Newegg yet.

@dpworkin Pop the hood open when you get your hands on it. If you are lucky, you’ll have RAID built in and just have to find room for 2 drives.

The cool thing is that it comes with a 1.5Tb installed, and hot-swap cage bays for four more, plus four USB ports. And I just happen to have four unused 1Tb drives lying around.

Wow! You can do mirroring and striping and have 100% back-up plus ultra-fast disk access.

So one would hope. I can make it redundant without RAID because I have the room, but I’d rather it just happen.

It turns out that it balances the storage across all drives by making copies of each file, so that if one drive crashes it will be rebuilt. Not exactly RAID, but it’s functional. It also designates ancillary drives for backup, on which it backs up the server files every day.

@dpworkin Sounds sweet.

Cheap, and better than nothing.