Making the leap of faith to WHS

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Phimp

Gawd
Joined
Dec 9, 2006
Messages
596
I've wanted to move over to WHS for a while now.
I've been using Openfiler (linux w/ a pretty web interface) and Raid-5 w/ three 750GB drives.
Only reason I haven't jumped over yet after finding out about WHS, is that I need somewhere to dump all of my data ~1.3 TB while I reformat the drives currenly in the raid5 array and install WHS.
My buddy wanted more storage for his new PC i built him. His 750 gig drive arrived just now so I'm gonna "borrow" it and use a frew random drives in my main computer (250gb mostly) to stash the 1.3TB for a couple hours while I set things up. lol
kinda ghetto having to copy 1.3TB to a friend's new hard drive and a bunch of half-filled 250gb drives to get it done, but meh! as long as it gets the job done! haha

I'm sure I'll have some random questions on WHS soon :p
I'll post the fruits of my labor when I'm done.

Afterthought: I might need to delete the ~300GB of Acronis backups since I may not have enough freespace to spare to stash the 1.3TB, which will work out since I can just run Acronis on all the PC's tonight again.
 
Got it all installed and am currently transferring all my data over to the WHS box.


click for full-sized

Transfer speeds seem to be alright.
I'm just hoping that it will eventually at least somewhat evenly spread the data across the drives so that it isn't all sitting on one/two drives.

Questions:
I'm gonna install peerguardian/uTorrent as services & use uT's webUI or the WHS Add-In... Where should I set uTorrent to download to? I've read that using a share can cause issues & I don't have a separate drive to use Out of the storage pool for uTorrent. Can I just download to C:\Downoads\ or D:\Downloads\ ? (Of course then have completed downloads automatically be moved to a \\server\share\

thanks guys.
 
I have utorrent downloading to a shared folder D:\shares\downloads, then moving completed downloads to a "file dump" where I organize / rename them later.

How do you get the cool looking disk management. mine just has a pie graph of usage.
 
Is there a minimum size for the WHS installation hard drive? I read that WHS no longer uses the "landing zone," so if I ever get the money to build a WHS box, I could use an old 120GB hard drive for WHS and pop in five storage drives. Or does it matter?
 
Don't bother with the uTorrent WHS Add-In, the offical WebUI is much more useful and you don't have to wait for the connector to open to use it.
 
Thanks for that plugin site. I will have to play with some of them when I get home.
 
GJSNeptune said:
Is there a minimum size for the WHS installation hard drive? I read that WHS no longer uses the "landing zone," so if I ever get the money to build a WHS box, I could use an old 120GB hard drive for WHS and pop in five storage drives. Or does it matter?
Click to expand...
Yeah, your 120GB drive will work just fine.

I believe the system drive must be at least 70GB in order for setup to allow you to install WHS. Although, I suppose you could also install to a drive >=70GB & then image that drive to a smaller drive, thus bypassing the HDD size requirement.

criccio said:
Don't bother with the uTorrent WHS Add-In, the offical WebUI is much more useful and you don't have to wait for the connector to open to use it.
Click to expand...
Aight, cool. Thanks for the tip, saves me from fiddling with an Add-In for a half hour only to end up uninstalling it :p

compslckr said:
Thanks for that plugin site. I will have to play with some of them when I get home.
Click to expand...
Yeah, for me, the Disk Management Add-In was the only one I saw that I needed to have. There are some useful ones in there though, like an added tab to manage the IIS FTP server. I may end up using that if I don't install FileZilla.
 
I just found a post that shares my fears w/ uTorrent downloading directly to a share...
but again, I'm not sure if this is a real issue or just paranoia.

From Microsoft's WHS Forums

I believe the data corruption occurs when trying to write to a shared folder on WHS. My guess is that Drive Migrator starts trying to move the file onto another drive while uTorrent is in the middle of writing to it, or just before uTorrent tries to open the file to write to it again. Probably the same reason why .PST files get corrupted when you open them from WHS as well.

My way around it, is to write to the D: directly. I set uTorrent up as a service, have it automatically load torrents from \\servername\Torrents, download to D:\Incomplete, and move completed downloads to \\servername\Downloads. This works pretty well, because uTorrent can write to its hearts' content without worrying about Drive Migrator screwing things up, and Drive Migrator does its' best to keep D: clean anyways, creating free space for uTorrent to use. At least, that's how I understand it.
Click to expand...
 
Phimp said:
I just found a post that shares my fears w/ uTorrent downloading directly to a share...
but again, I'm not sure if this is a real issue or just paranoia.

From Microsoft's WHS Forums
Click to expand...

I don't use torrents, but I do use newsgroups (basically the same thing :p) and I've always had alt.binz set to download the files directly to D:\Shares\torrents\name of file\ and I've never had a file corruption issue. It's quite possible I'm doing it wrong, but I've never had a problem in over a year, and adding another hd doesn't cause any issues either.

Edit: To clarify, once I finish downloading and extracting the file I then copy it to whatever share I want it to reside in (ie D:\Shares\Videos). I never use the \\server path, always D:\
 
[LYL]Homer;1033838026 said:
The posts there are from 2007, so this is the pre-PP1 corruption issue. Not an issue anymore.
Click to expand...
Ahh, that would make sense. Didn't think of that.
Thanks for pointing that out :)
Well, I'm off to go attempt to install PG2 & uT as services.

side question:
pre-WHS I was using openfiler installed to a 2GB CF card & using a CF>IDE adapter I no longer have a use for this and have plenty of 4GB CF cards for my Canon40D, so I 'm trying to put this thing to use somehow...
When using the IDE adapter it has a read/write of ~40MB/s & a random access time of 0.4ms

Any ideas as to what I can repurpose this for? Any program that could benefit from a quick access-time but doesn't need a crazy amount of throughput & less than 2 or 4 GB?
 
I would recommend setting up uTorrent to download to d:\Downloads (since its not a share), and telling it to move all completed downloads to a share like \\server\Downloads.

There is a nice guide here - http://wiki.wegotserved.com/index.php?title=Install_uTorrent_on_Windows_Home_Server

Edit: To clarify, once I finish downloading and extracting the file I then copy it to whatever share I want it to reside in (ie D:\Shares\Videos). I never use the \\server path, always D:\
Click to expand...

I believe this is bad practice. You shouldn't refer to data inside a share using local paths.
 
I download to public\torrents then move them to public\downloads when done. Then i move them. I just installed utorrent not the addin and i was too lazy to setup the web for it. Havent had a problem yet.
 
MrCrispy said:
I believe this is bad practice. You shouldn't refer to data inside a share using local paths.
Click to expand...

I never said I was doing it the right way, just that I hadn't managed to break anything yet. :D

Edit #2: I should also mention that I do all this locally, I use rdc to connect to the server and manage everything that way. Again, quite possibly a bad idea, but its the way I do it.
 
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