Advice?

[jadawgis732]

I currently have an optiplex gx520 running WHS 2003 with on an 80GB OS drive and a 1TB storage drive. I am interested in expanding this and have been reading intently on it. I am looking to go up to about 1.8-2TB storage which will all be mirrored via folder duplication. Problem is the box only has 2 SATA ports and 1 IDE port. I am willing to get whatever drives will be necessary to make this work. (Currently I think the 1.5TB have the best $/GB ratio). I realize that the space I want will not be doable with this current setup. So, should I buy a new MB or can I just add in a PCI card to add some SATA ports. I do have a 160GB IDE drive laying around but I read that you want to install the OS on the largest drive. Also with pooling the data goes to the OS drive first, so I'd rather that not be an old 160gb drive.

 

[bkch0]

Yes, you can add a pci sata card and it is pretty cheap.
If your primary goal is to add storage, why not think about a NAS unit?

 

[pug71]

When I started running out of space I added 1-2 pci sata cards for cheap.. Has worked out fine. You could go that route or get you a motherboard with more sata port on it. My mainboard running WHS had only 4 total sata ports.

I have never heard of what you speak of BKch. Why would one add a NAS unit too WHS ? i'd just add drives as needed and turn on dup for the folders I wanted dupped..

 

[terayon1515]

With WHS Power Pack 1, the 'landing-zone' or OS drive no longer stores incoming data, the data is written directly to the next available drive as determined by WHS using its DE platform.

If you have an available PCI slot you can pick up a Supermicro AOC-SAT2-MV8 8-port SATA card for $100
They are PCI-X but fit just fine into a standard PCI slot running on lower bandwidth, which will not affect WHS's maximum throughput over (proper) Gigabit networking.

Using your biggest drive for the WHS system install is strongly recommended by everyone.

bkch0 makes a good point about a NAS or DAS unit, plugging an external RAID solution via eSATA could work well under WHS. Anything more and I must recommend the Norco RPC-4020