Upgrade my WHS / What happens if it dies?

J

Justintoxicated

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So I have an older C2D WHS server currently with 9 drives.

My Case was full at 8 drives so one sits at the bottom of the case.

I'm running out of space (10TB) total. Although most everything is redundant and I have several PCs backed up as well.

Couple things I have been thinking about...

What happens when the OS drive fails? There's a good chance I will lose whatever data is on there right? I mean I read its possible to re-install and migrate the storage pool back over, and i have also heard that the drives should be readable from a non WHS PCs. As far as re-installing WHS on a new drive to recover the storage pool is this an easy process? I also have to wonder about the second part though, about the storage pool drives being readable from another system. Often large video files seem to be spanned across more than one drive, cause video will often pause while another drive spins up to continue streaming...So if the OS drive were to fail how would I recover files on another system that span more than one disk?

Also what is my best upgrade path? replace current 1TB Larger drives? Larger case and continue to add drives? I'm on a tight budget but I want to start thinking about this before I'm completely out of space.
 
did anyone even bother with version 2?
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Some did and some didn't. I didn't.

What happens when the OS drive fails? There's a good chance I will lose whatever data is on there right? I mean I read its possible to re-install and migrate the storage pool back over,
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There's always been a way to recover an OS drive and it's covered at WeGotServed.

The disks can be read individually by a Windows NTFS OS.

If you have redundancy there's probably a copy of the large file on a single drive.

Just replace your drives one at a time with larger drives.
 
Old Hippie said:
Some did and some didn't. I didn't.


There's always been a way to recover an OS drive and it's covered at WeGotServed.

The disks can be read individually by a Windows NTFS OS.

If you have redundancy there's probably a copy of the large file on a single drive.

Just replace your drives one at a time with larger drives.
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So sticking with the same hardware and replacing the drives with larger ones is my best bet? I can't remember whether or not 3TB drives are compatable with WHS v1?
 
So sticking with the same hardware and replacing the drives with larger ones is my best bet?
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That's what I do.

I think the capacity of V1 goes to 30 or 60TB.....somewhere around there.

And when you fill all the MBs ports just add some cheapo PCI(e) SATA expansion card(s) and you'll have more room.
 
Old Hippie said:
That's what I do.

I think the capacity of V1 goes to 30 or 60TB.....somewhere around there.

And when you fill all the MBs ports just add some cheapo PCI(e) SATA expansion card(s) and you'll have more room.
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Yea a I have a couple cards already, but no more room in the case to put drives. I suppose I could start adding external drives... Just not sure if WHS V1 can support 3TB drives, I know I have one 2TB drive in there and it is fine after formatting it on a windows 7 system.
 
when i upgraded my whs v1 server last year i didnt have a huge amount of files, so i backed it all up to a 2tb drive just in case. that being said, i put the new system together with the existing 4 drives. i reinstalled the os on a different hard drive as i had a better one laying around. install went fine and incorporated all the data on the other drives without a hitch. ive since swapped the data drives to new 2tb ones and its running smooth. with the cost of hard drives as low as they are, upgrading to 2 tb drives is probably our best bet.
 
but no more room in the case to put drives. I suppose I could start adding external drives
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I'd be buying a bigger case rather than external drives.
 
Old Hippie said:
I'd be buying a bigger case rather than external drives.
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Yea but then what case will be as good of quality and as quiet as my P180 mini?

Whats the hot 2TB drives these days. I was using Samsung drives but it was a bit of a hassle to have to flash the firmware on my 2TB samsung. Especially when the resulting firmware does not change the version number, so its hard to tell if it was done correctly... Although I think I still have that thumb drive around here somewhere.

so 3Tb drives wont work, even if I format them on a 64 bit OS then stick them in the WHS box like I have to do for the 2TB drives.
 
Yea but then what case will be as good of quality and as quiet as my P180 mini?
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I dunno cause I've never investigated it.


so 3Tb drives wont work, even if I format them on a 64 bit OS then stick them in the WHS box like I have to do for the 2TB drives.
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Try it and we'll both know.

I vote it won't work. :)
 
WHS V1 formats drives when adding to the storage pool in MBR which has the 2TB limit, you can how after adding a drive to pool(best if done before putting data on it as you need to copy everything off) convert it to GPT then edit drive/volume names/sizes in the registry for the convert drive. I used to do this when I was running WHS V1 so I could run large RAID arrays in the storage pool instead of using DE.
 
lovemyram4x4 said:
WHS V1 formats drives when adding to the storage pool in MBR which has the 2TB limit, you can how after adding a drive to pool(best if done before putting data on it as you need to copy everything off) convert it to GPT then edit drive/volume names/sizes in the registry for the convert drive. I used to do this when I was running WHS V1 so I could run large RAID arrays in the storage pool instead of using DE.
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Convert it to a GPT? Your saying there is a work around for the 3TB drives? Will this reduce reliability if I want to use DE? For instance would it fool DE into thinking it has copied a file as redundant, where its really just on 2 partitions?
 
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