Windows Home Server

Hi Easy,

My point was that the WHS 2011 console allows the movement of shares and mapping what goes on which drive so it takes the pain out of things a bit.

My storage is as follows

1x 2TB Drive - OS and default shares and client PC backups
4x 500GB drives in windows Raid 5 - Videos Share is here
1x 2TB Drive - for server back up (backs up the other 2TB drive)
1x 1TB Drive - Recorded TV is here.

Now although DE is gone as you can see the only thing here without redundancy is Rec TV now this is no big deal as most of it gets watched or is crap, also not anything that can't be replaced.

My plan is eventually to add another 2TB drive and also to migrate the raid 5 to be 4 2 TB drives in the future and then i will make the decision to either raid 5 these or use drive bender. But hey by that time maybe some rollup power packs might be relaesed for the OS that allow larger data stores than 2TB?

I also love the remote access now, this actually works well a secure RDP session using proper protocols, and don't forget the streaming and transcoding built in quite powerful.

I agree that WHS 2011 looks a bit light in features when you first install it, but v1 was exactly the same (add in wise too) and at £40 ish quid its a steal (because of the 2008 r2 kernal).

I do agree with statements I have read all over the web though this is now an enthusiast product the simplicity has somewhat gone from v1 Days.
 
platypus said:
The more I look at things, the more tempted I am to jump to unRaid.
Click to expand...

I am almost inclined to agree with you, after some initial uphoria this thing really is a bitch to work with.

you can't change the nic I wanted to add my own and disable the onboard, it broke all the clients launch pads, the dns service stopped and remote access broke this also breaks the ability to install add-ins god knows why!!

And don't get me started on the shares, I unwittingly enabled home groups my what fun that was, shares on my clients telling me I didn't have access permissions i double checked and tripple checked I had full rights. Found out home groups kills the shared access for WHS users, (so why is it in the OS??) then when I had figured that out I still had some shares down but this is because the permissions were changes after disabling home groups.

But now it's all working I'll stand by it, remote access is like I said streets ahead of v1. I will be monitoring things as my confidance is not as it was with v1 yet but things can definately get better.

I can see why other options look enticing though;)
 
cavemanoc said:
That's really odd - I've got a couple of drives on an internal Sata 3 (Asus U3S6 USB3.0 & SATA 6Gbps PCI-Express Controller Card) and so far haven't had any problems? I don't suppose your pci bus could be saturated by something else could it? Have you tried using HDTach or similar on the drive prior to adding it to DE to see whether the problem lies with the controler?
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Running hdtach on all my drives gives poor speed results on my system disk, but ok on the sata drives. The drive connected to my sata expansion controller card is...awful: 89MB/s. The controller card is PCIE, faulty card perhaps?

150 minutes to copy an 8GB file...hmm.

Ah, I've seen this before. Sometimes I'll be copying/moving files around, it takes aaaages, and then I get a "path not found" error message. Might have to investigate a new sata expension controller.
 
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Can someone clarify please?

Can I clone the system drive and replace it with a new drive using that image without having to rebuild the Storage pool?

Or do I have to copy the data from the storage pool elsewhere then do new installation on the new drive and copy the data back?

Or can I just put a new sys drive in and perform server re-installation keeping the data pool?

There is a tenner bet riding on this
 
One question for WHS v1 users - is it worth / safe defragging, and if so what do you use. There seems to be some conflicting info out there - the MS advice is not to ues the built-in defrag, yet there are the proprietary diskeeper and perfectdisk which have WHSv1 versions yet use the same windows API calls as the standard defrag.
 
Tomsk said:
This.

Make sure you install onto the system drive and not onto one of the data drives.
Click to expand...

This is something I haven't really got my head around TBH - I'll try to explain what I mean:

In a 1 disk system, the files have to be on the system disk (in the D: partition), so you obviously can't swap the disk without restoring from a backup.

In a 2 or more disk system, I understand that WHS tries to only put tombstones on the system disk, with data files themselves on other disks. If the other disks get full though then surely some data files end up on the system disk. Unless these were only duplicated copies I don't see how you can swap the system disk without losing some data.

Have I misunderstood what WHS is doing? :confused:
 
I would guess at there being data on the system disk - would be hugely inefficient to save the whole drive for the system, bearing in mine people are using 2-3 TB drives in some cases - I would have thought there would be a warning if the whole drive was effectively 'wasted'
 
I'm happy to post you a DVD if you can prove you have a legit key. Actually aren't you just up the road from me in Swavesey? I can drop one off (I presume a WHS dvd can be upgraded to PP3 via the Windows Updates)?
 
It lives, WHS v1 PP3 all setup:-

decwhs.jpg


Didn't expect my 3TB drive to be recognised so happy about that!

Running under AHCI mode now :)
 
Ok every boot up without fail I get an error message from the service control manager saying that a service failed to start, and its quite annoying because it takes focus on the screen, and so XBMC loads but isn't maximised. Given that I'm trying to run it as a headless xbmc box here it's not helping that I have to rdp in after every reboot (updates) to sort maximise xbmc!

The only problem I see in eventvwr is something with the CqvSvc service which, by searching, is to do with the WHS connector service. But I cannot find any way to a) sort this problem or b) suppress the error message.

Any ideas?
 
Have been running WHS v1 for a while now without issue.

09/01/12 backup was fine, completed in 3hours 35mins.
Backups after then all fail. Seem to have narrowed it down to my 'c' drive.
Just did a backup with the remaining 4 drives and it went ok.
Just trying the 'c' drive and it takes all day to get to 9%

Other half's machine backs up without issue also.


Any ideas on what could cause this?
Have run chkdsk on the 'c' drive, not sure what else to look at.


Thanks :)
 
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