Expandable WHS setup

[alan.p]

Finally built (the start of) the fileserver I've wanted for oh so long. I haven't posted it in the sticky gallery because it doesn't (yet) meet the requirements -- only 2 drives. When it does, I will.

AMD Athlon64 LE-1600 for a processor -- the energy efficient model. Gigabyte GA-MA78G-DS3H for a motherboard -- two PCIe-16 slots for future HDD cards, onboard video to save slots and power usage, and six SATA ports. 560W Silverstone PSU, should prove enough for the time being. Plus the beating heart -- a Supermicro drive cage, which was a special order part. All five drives in it are connected directly to the motherboard, and my goal now is to get enough drives to need a second one and eventually need to pull the DVD drive and the power button (Ockie, I wanted a fileserver long before I heard of you, but you gave me a lot of direction. Credit where it is due!)

Got two Samsung 1TB Spinpoint F1 drives in it now, going to add more as I get the funds. (The DVD drive is hooked up now.)

Pleased as anything with it, WHS makes things quite simple. Now in the process of copying all my old files off CDRs and DVD+-R's!

I haven't quite figured out a decentish way of connecting the shares up on my MythTV media PC -- at the moment I'm just mounting the shares using Samba and mount -t smbfs.

 

[Adidas4275]

you could just use xp or vista and then use mediaportal or vmc or sagetv or beyondtv.... all have ways to share media

 

[Imprez04]

for connecting to yer media center, the best way would be to use mediaportal or XBMC. MythTV in ubuntu has only given me problems

second, clean up those wires Oo

 

[alan.p]

Bit of an update.

WHS does not take kindly to being only turned on when you want to use it. Well, manually turned on, anyway. And when it errors, the dialog boxes come up on the machine itself, and you have to hookup a monitor to get the damn things to go away.

The backup system has gone tits up, all the damn backup DB files seem to have io errors, and all kinds of mean nasty stuff. The second hard drive seems to randomly get 'missed' by Windows, for some reason known only to God and Microsoft, which gives WHS fits.

Going to have to reinstall it, I think, and possibly look into a server copy of Ubuntu or something. And wait for PP2 or 4 of WHS.

 

[valve1138]

Bit of an update.

WHS does not take kindly to being only turned on when you want to use it. Well, manually turned on, anyway. And when it errors, the dialog boxes come up on the machine itself, and you have to hookup a monitor to get the damn things to go away.

The backup system has gone tits up, all the damn backup DB files seem to have io errors, and all kinds of mean nasty stuff. The second hard drive seems to randomly get 'missed' by Windows, for some reason known only to God and Microsoft, which gives WHS fits.

Going to have to reinstall it, I think, and possibly look into a server copy of Ubuntu or something. And wait for PP2 or 4 of WHS.

WHS really does work just fine.

I'd try reinstalling it. Also, it could be some bad hardware or maybe a bad hard drive or SATA cable.

 

[epimetheus]

I'm sure you'll find plenty of people in here that don't have any problems with WHS, and I'm one of them. However, WHS is intended to be an always on system. I've had mine running for months now and am up to 7TB of storage without any issues.

BTW, PCI or PCI-X slots and Supermicro SAT2-MV8 cards are probably the least expensive way to expand WHS storage. Anything that runs in a PCIe slot is either going to be RAID (overkill for WHS) or really crappy to begin with, i.e. 4 ports or less.

 

[Old Hippie]

WHS does not take kindly to being only turned on when you want to use it. Well, manually turned on, anyway.

I've been using WHS for @ 8 weeks and have had my share of trials and tribulations with it but starting and stopping at will never resulted in file errors.

I turn mine on and off all the time with no adverse effects.

I'm going to suggest you reinstall the OS and look elseware for the error problem.

 

[Trepidati0n]

I've been using WHS for @ 8 weeks and have had my share of trials and tribulations with it but starting and stopping at will never resulted in file errors.

I turn mine on and off all the time with no adverse effects.

I'm going to suggest you reinstall the OS and look elseware for the error problem.

+1. I've done my fair share of hard power downs on the server and had no data issues.

 

[nitrobass24]

Yea if you are having IO errors then its going to probably be a hard drive dying or a bad SATA cable.
My system never shutsdown...but thats cause im doing rendering on it almost 24/7. Also powering down any system regardless of whether it was designed to be an always on solution or not, should not cause data integrity issues.

So check your hardware and I would try a reinstallation as well make sure you dont have any addin NICs connected when you do the installation...that caused problems for me.

 

[alan.p]

I tried disabling delayed writes to see if that'd do anything (I know, WHS says not to fiddle with it...) all that did was slow the drives down so much, I'd've sworn the damn thing was in PIO mode. Delayed writes it is.

Keeping an eye on it, it seems to prefer accessing the system drive for copies etc (post PP1), and CPU usage skyrockets when network copies occur. I suspect that the NIC (onboard Gigabyte one) is making this happen, so a hardware NIC is definitely on the cards.

Also going to get a third drive, install whs onto that, and see if anything funky happens with a fresh install on a new drive. I don't think it's the sata cables, but I'll order a new set of 5 to replace the ones in there just in case it is. All the data from the Disk Management addin says that both drives are perfectly healthy, and running at about 26 degrees.