WHS drive upgrade

[Justintoxicated]

I'm considering upgrading some of the 1TB drives in my storage pool to 2 TB drives.
What would be the best way to go about swapping out the drives?

 

[Asposium]

Question: do you have spare ports (SATA) to add any new drives?

•if so,

add as many 2TB as possible​

then remove 1TB drives one at a time​

•if not

do you have more "available space" on the server than the smallest drive you wish to remove?​

••if so​

remove 1TB hard drive​

replace with 2TB hard drive​

••if not​

move/delete data from the WHS until available space >= hard drive to remove​

remove 1TB hard drive​

replace with 2TB hard drive​

(a USB drive could be added as a non-pool drive for temp space)​

 

[Gunr]

Also, just to clarify if you did not know, don't just remove the drive. Go to the Server Storage tab in the home server and use that to properly remove a drive from the pool.

 

[Justintoxicated]

All SATA ports will be full once I add 2 more 1 TB drives. I wanted to be sure that there was a way to easily remove drives and replace them with 2TB drives later. I did not realize it would migrate the data for me if manually removing it from the pool, so thanks for the detailed explanation. I should probably just buy some 2 TB drives but I figure why not use what I have until I actually need something larger, that is so long as I can remove drives easily later. And it sounds like I can do this easy enough.

 

[Cool1Net6]

Question: do you have spare ports (SATA) to add any new drives?

•if so,

add as many 2TB as possible​

then remove 1TB drives one at a time​

•if not

do you have more "available space" on the server than the smallest drive you wish to remove?​

••if so​

remove 1TB hard drive​

replace with 2TB hard drive​

••if not​

move/delete data from the WHS until available space >= hard drive to remove​

remove 1TB hard drive​

replace with 2TB hard drive​

(a USB drive could be added as a non-pool drive for temp space)​

This is an awesome-sauce programming outline of how to add a drive to a WHS machine.

-Cool-

 

[Asposium]

I did not realize it would migrate the data for me if manually removing it from the pool, so thanks for the detailed explanation.

Consider that WHS will only "let" a drive be removed if the following is true (well i think this logic is correct)

available space on server before drive removal minus Size of drive to remove minus used capacity of drive to remove must be greater than zero

for example,

say you have
2TB of free space on the server
wish to remove a 1TB hard drive
that 1TB has 0.6TB used

2.0 - 1.0 - 0.6 = 0.4 (*)
result positive, so good to go
(*) yes, i appreciated drives aren't 1.0, 2.0TB etc formatted, but the example is still valid.

^^^Please correct me if I'm wrong, I won't be upset

I should probably just buy some 2 TB drives but I figure why not use what I have until I actually need something larger, that is so long as I can remove drives easily later. And it sounds like I can do this easy enough.

using 2TB drives to start with (compared with the 1TB drives) has the following advantages:
•uses less ports, for a given server capacity
•less noise, for a given server capacity
•less heat, for a given server capacity
•less power draw, for a given server capacity
•no need to worry about having to upgrade later (well, not in the short-term )

dis-advantages
•you already own the 1TB drives!
•risk of greater data loss due to drive failure. (if a 2TB drive fails you loose more data than if a 1TB drive fails). Though important folders should have duplication enabled.