Annoyed with WHS, new fileserver time

quakefiend420

Limp Gawd
Joined
Sep 22, 2004
Messages
224
I currently have a WHS box with the following drives:

1 400GB
1 500GB (OS)
10 1TB

8 are running on the motherboards SATA ports, and 4 are running on a RocketRaid 2310 PCI Express controller card.

I am backing up my PC backups to my domain controller(separate machine), and the rest of the files are backed up to 3 1.5TB drives in external USB enclosures. I've just had another failure with WHS, this time a drive died and the console refused to allow me to remove it to begin the duplication process of what was on that disk, when I finally managed to get it to remove it refuses to duplicate and I'm left manually restoring from backups.

I'm fed up with WHS and would like to migrate my data to a more stable solution, I've investigated ZFS, but it seems a bit more complicated than I'd like to deal with, plus I don't know that I want to trust my data to a rather obscure operating system that I have absolutely no familiarity with. FreeNAS seems easy to use, but isn't as robust as some other solutions.

What seems like the best route for me to go? I can store my data on the 3 1.5TB drives and use the rest of the hardware to create a new server/array.
 
I'm thinking that once I get the new solution up and running that I'll build a backup server with the 3 1.5TBs, then perform the first backup over the local network and move it to my GF's place...I can establish a VPN tunnel between the two in order to back up incremental changes.
 
Well unless you're willing to learn with more advance setups (i.e FreeBSD or FreeNAS with ZFS or Linux MDADM RAID), you're pretty much stuck with WHS for the time being as WHS is pretty much the most dead-simple file serving setup out there.

Though an option you should check out when it's released later this year is FlexRAID Live.
 
I've just had another failure with WHS, this time a drive died and the console refused to allow me to remove it to begin the duplication process of what was on that disk, when I finally managed to get it to remove it refuses to duplicate and I'm left manually restoring from backups.
I'm just curious...if WHS had let you remove the dead drive the first time you tried, do you feel your data would still be there for you to copy?

Did you have those files duplicated?

What could WHS have done to prevent this drive failure or data loss?

Don't get me wrong, my WHS has been a PITA sometimes but I'm curious why you feel this situation is the fault of WHS?
 
I've just had another failure with WHS, this time a drive died ....


NO, you had a hardware failure, not a WHS failure. Unfortunately, no software really prevents HD's from dying so I dont know what to tell you.

Others are correct, unless you already understand other OS'es and/or are willing to learn ( I wasnt about to trust a new OS and a new Admin with no clue to my 6Tb ) theres not much else out there. I played with Ubuntu as a server, worked OK, but I felt much much more comfortable with Windows.

I have a freenas setup. Its on ancient hardware, running software raid ( obvious to the people familiar to the OS) and it runs pretty good. I would wholeheartedly recommend Freenas.
 
I'm just curious...if WHS had let you remove the dead drive the first time you tried, do you feel your data would still be there for you to copy?

Did you have those files duplicated?

What could WHS have done to prevent this drive failure or data loss?

Don't get me wrong, my WHS has been a PITA sometimes but I'm curious why you feel this situation is the fault of WHS?

yes, everything was duplicated

all the files i'm manually restoring are visible on other drives, but WHS refuses to re-duplicate the files even though they're there

basically the only function that i would want it to perform (keep my data accessible to me in the event of a drive failure) failed miserably

right now i'm going through the file conflicts manually,deleting the ones from the server that now have "failed duplication" then re-copying them to the server from the backups

once i'm done and i'm sure I didn't lose anything i'll be building the new solution

open solaris is looking better and better to me
 
Question

How did you get the failed drive out of the pool since the console remove would not work?

Depending on how you did that, you could definitely have some issues.
 
Question

How did you get the failed drive out of the pool since the console remove would not work?

Depending on how you did that, you could definitely have some issues.

After trying to remove it with the drive unplugged, plugged in, hot plugged it a few times, and about 100 reboots, I performed a registry edit to remove it. I then re-added the registry keys to make it re-appear in the console and was finally able to remove it. I know what I did wasn't the normal procedure, but the normal procedure didn't work. Based on all my research my other option was to perform a complete reinstallation and restore from backups.
 
I'm thinking that once I get the new solution up and running that I'll build a backup server with the 3 1.5TBs, then perform the first backup over the local network and move it to my GF's place...I can establish a VPN tunnel between the two in order to back up incremental changes.

Let me give you this thought... I would not consider a GF's place to be a safe place for a backup. Think neutral site.
 
Let me give you this thought... I would not consider a GF's place to be a safe place for a backup. Think neutral site.

good point...i'll give that some consideration, but i don't think she'd stoop so low as to destroy my data

one can hope, anyway
Posted via [H] Mobile Device
 
I moved to unraid about a month ago. I know there isn't much love for unraid around here, but so far I'm really impressed with it.

Mines mostly for media so I've got it running sickbeard and SABnzbd as well. Unraid has a great forum for user customizations, which made setting them up easy (I'm not really a 'nix guy).
 
One thing I didn't see was after the drive died and you tried to remove the drive to rebuild duplication - was there any space left in the pool? Or was there not enough space to duplicate?
 
I moved from WHS to Server 2008R2 & Flex-Raid View for it's pooling feature, everything worked out well, I have access to each drive separately and then the Pool for aggregation.
 
Since DE got cancelled in V2 of WHS, I decided that continuing down the WHS route was a dying path.. I was duplicating everything anyways in WHS so I may as well be RAID mirroring. Built a new 6 core (1055t) server on server 2008 R2 platform, used a perc 5i RAID card with two 4x2TB RAID 10 volumes (a total of 16TB advertised, 8TB effective). (I don't trust RAID 5). The build is secure, fast and no nonsense. I keep dvd/bluray isos on one 4TB volume, and videos, tv, family photos, home videos, etc on the other 4TB volume, using an external 500GB for backups of my highly sensitive data (a third level of protection).

The rest of the time, it doubles as a remote desktop access point / minecraft server / video encoding workhorse.
 
Last edited:
[LYL]Homer;1036536790 said:
One thing I didn't see was after the drive died and you tried to remove the drive to rebuild duplication - was there any space left in the pool? Or was there not enough space to duplicate?

there was plenty of room, this is why i'm annoyed...
 
Let me give you this thought... I would not consider a GF's place to be a safe place for a backup. Think neutral site.

+1 for neutral (parents maybe?)

open solaris is looking better and better to me

If you contemplating OpenSolaris, Solaris Express etc, load it up in VMware Player and mess around with different configurations to become comfortable with the software. It's really quite powerful and probably the most robust solution of all in terms of data redundancy/resiliency. I'm in the process of building my own (moving away from OpenFiler finally). There are A LOT of great tutorials online for Solaris+ZFS online. My favourite is here:

A Home Fileserver using ZFS

This site goes through the whole process, from selecting software, to hardware, to disk configurations, to more advanced topics (snapshotting etc).
 
Since DE got cancelled in V2 of WHS, I decided that continuing down the WHS route was a dying path.. I was duplicating everything anyways in WHS so I may as well be RAID mirroring. Built a new 6 core (1055t) server on server 2008 R2 platform, used a perc 5i RAID card with two 4x2TB RAID 10 volumes (a total of 16TB advertised, 8TB effective). (I don't trust RAID 5). The build is secure, fast and no nonsense. I keep dvd/bluray isos on one 4TB volume, and videos, tv, family photos, home videos, etc on the other 4TB volume, using an external 500GB for backups of my highly sensitive data (a third level of protection).

The rest of the time, it doubles as a remote desktop access point / minecraft server / video encoding workhorse.

so you're using raid instead? what about backups?
 
I moved to unraid about a month ago. I know there isn't much love for unraid around here, but so far I'm really impressed with it.

Mines mostly for media so I've got it running sickbeard and SABnzbd as well. Unraid has a great forum for user customizations, which made setting them up easy (I'm not really a 'nix guy).


I'm planning on doing that soon with my WHS box. but moving my 18TB of data around is gonna take forever.
 
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