WHS Failed to report failing drive

TechLarry

TechLarry

RIP [H] Brother - June 1, 2022
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Last week one of the six 300GB Baracuda's in my Windows Home Server started spewing SMART errors.

I unmounted the drive in WHS, pulled it, put in a spare, and mounted the spare.

Now, this whole thing has brought out a weakness in WHS IMHO.

I had the email-notification option of my 3Ware 9500S-8 controller enabled. I started receiving emails from the card indicating the smart failures on the drive.

I checked the logs in WHS, and the smart errors were recorded there as well.

However, WHS did nothing at all to notify me of the errors, and in fact the drive showed as healthy in the WHS storage pane. Not good!

If I had not had the email feature of my card enabled, I would have never known until it was too late.
 
Not good at all. I am in the process of putting a WHS together. My first attempt failed as the motherboard I tried was junk ( Foxconn 6150BK8MC-KRSHN2). I ditched that abomination and am looking for a replacement. I have an old X2 4600 sitting around, but the choice of 939 boards is getting thin. Might have to move on to a newer board and chip. Besides the lack of drive failure reporting, how has the OS been for you?
 
What does that same 3Ware 9500S-8 controller do differently in Server 2003?
 
Is WHS supposed to send you messages when there are event log errors, or just when one drive fails ?

Id guess it sends a message when the drive fails, then when you replace it, it would rebuild it from the other drives....
 
I used an old ABIT IT7-Max 2 with a P4 2.53. It has been my Win2K3 Enterprise file server for many years.

WHS worked great on it. Green-board in the device manager except for the 3Ware card, in which case clicking on "find driver on internet" actually worked for once :)

WHS is VERY cool. The backup system is smart as hell, and the remote service stuff is great.

I do have a few nits to pick with it, but overall great stuff.



Lepke said:
Not good at all. I am in the process of putting a WHS together. My first attempt failed as the motherboard I tried was junk ( Foxconn 6150BK8MC-KRSHN2). I ditched that abomination and am looking for a replacement. I have an old X2 4600 sitting around, but the choice of 939 boards is getting thin. Might have to move on to a newer board and chip. Besides the lack of drive failure reporting, how has the OS been for you?
Click to expand...
 
That's the thing. If it is, it didn't. If it isn't, it should!

One thing you need to understand about WHS is how it sets up drives. It gobbles up ALL drive space and sets up a single JBOD configuration. It is not raid. There is no redundancy, unless you select a specific share for duplication. If you do that, it will maintain a mirror copy of that share and ensure the mirror ends up on a different drive in the JBOD.

dbwillis said:
Is WHS supposed to send you messages when there are event log errors, or just when one drive fails ?

Id guess it sends a message when the drive fails, then when you replace it, it would rebuild it from the other drives....
Click to expand...
 
Interesting, I thought there was full redundancy on WHS drives for some reason.
 
Can it have redundancy if you configure a RAID5 array in the controller's BIOS before installed?
 
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