WHS is great stuff, and it's backup has indeed saved my ass, but I still have a few peeves with it.
The disk balancing makes it simple to use, but it doesnt perform nearly as well as it should, since everything going to the other disks has to bounce off of the main disk first - which is part of the reason why you need 70gb free space.
And it insists on running chkdsk every 6 hours to make sure discs arent failing (console says its balancing during this time). Thats incredibly excessive, and since WHS doesnt have I/O prioritization, definitely slows you down. It takes quite a while to chkdsk 500gb of data. If anything, that kind of excessive disk thrashing is going to be the factor that will lead the drives to fail in the first place...
Downloading torrents directly to the shared folders often leaves them corrupted. Its probably just a bug, but torrents read and write all over a file, and since the server balances as files are being written, it gets all confused. I ended up tossing another spare drive in there to use as temporary storage that exists outside of the main storage cluster. If you had an option to use more than 20gb for the OS partition, you could always put it there instead of another drive.
As much as you'd like to believe those folder shares are transparent to the OS, theyre not. WMP11 would refuse to see files stored on it, it wanted to use the "media sharing" garbage. I gave itunes a try, but that wouldnt work until I mapped the share to a network drive. And while it worked, it was agonizingly slow - no matter how fast the HDs are, its bottlenecked by the ethernet connection - it took about 8 hours to add 50gb of music to the library, and general navigation was just horrendously slow...itunes would even temporarily freeze when it finished downloading a podcast.
Restoring from a backup takes FOREVER...but it works.
Facebook
Twitter