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WHS 2011: adding drives with data

Azhar

Fixing stupid since 1972
Joined
Jan 9, 2001
Messages
18,877
I stumbled over a comment on wegotserved.com where a drive cannot be added to Windows Home Server 2011 without being formatted - the third comment at the very bottom of the web site.

This worries me because I have a BlackArmor NAS that's about to give out (the IO board keeps shutting down) and it's got 4TB of data on it.

Does anyone have any experience with WHS 2011 and the StableBit Drive Pool addon? Would I need to install an empty 4TB drive first, copy the contents of the NAS over to the newly formatted drives, then move the drives from the failing NAS unit over and let WHS format that?

If I do it this way, would adding the Stablebit Drive Pool plugin cause all of the drives to be wiped as it pools together into a single pool?
 
Adding drives to WHS 2011 is the same as adding drives to any recent version of Windows. Plug it in, and as long as it's formatted using NTFS the volume becomes available for usage. For volumes over 2TB you have to use GPT, but other than that there's no difference. I'm not familiar with Seagates Black Armour line. Is that data stripped across two volumes for 4TB or two separate 2TB disks? If the latter is true you shouldn't encounter any issues.If it's stripped using some on board controller you'll have to move the data before you can add the disks. Both will have to be formatted.
 
Yeah I will need to format the BlackArmor drives after I pull them out. It's hardware RAID anyways, so everything's going to be gone when I break the JBOD. I'm not worried about that. My concern was putting another NTFS drive that is completely full. But you've answered my question. Good to know it's like any other Windows OS! The guy who commented in the WHS site got me all worried.

And yes, all of my drives are 2TB. I have two BlackArmor NAS 220 with 2x2TB drives in each, configured to JBOD, and two brand new Samsung 2TB drives for moving things around so I can pull the BlackArmor drives out without losing data. A bit of a data juggling act!
 
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