WHS questions

[Old Hippie]

No need to get defensive, was just curious (as I explained). I've been using WHS for over 2 years myself and have not had the same experience at any point in that time, hence the question.

I was just as curious but I'm defensive?

Very seldom do I look at who wrote the post.

I just answer the post.

 

[dscline]

I never said anything about signifigant traffic.

It's being accessed constantly...I wouldn't have mentioned a quick blip.

Ok, so I guess it's constant, insignificant traffic?

There have been 1 or 2 of us that have had this symptom in WHS. You can search for the thread if you want.

I'm still not sure exactly what I should be searching for. But I think it's moot at this point. Whatever you're experiencing, it certainly doesn't sound like anything that is typical, so the OP shouldn't have to worry about WHS "defaulting" to the slowest drive in the system. Not that it really matters anyway, it's intended to be a networked server with a limited number of clients. Drive performance shouldn't be an issue. The vast majority of mine are "green" drives, and I have no problems with concurrent blu-ray rips and reads.

 

[cre3d]

I was just as curious but I'm defensive?

Very seldom do I look at who wrote the post.

I just answer the post.

I haven't claimed any conclusions in this thread, so your question comes off as nothing more than a snide remark in my direction. Regardless, dscline has the right idea, the argument is rather moot at this point.

 

[Old Hippie]

I haven't claimed any conclusions in this thread, so your question comes off as nothing more than a snide remark in my direction. Regardless, dscline has the right idea, the argument is rather moot at this point.

AFAIK there was no argument.

You questioned my observations/conclusions and I explained why.

If you've never run drives other than Green drives you'll never notice the results I had.

I'm still not sure exactly what I should be searching for. But I think it's moot at this point.

Sorry, I moved the folder to "D" as can be seen in this thread.

 

[dscline]

Sorry, I moved the folder to "D" as can be seen in this thread.

Ah, ok, yes, I've heard of people moving the MS search index to the D partition to save space on the C partition. But that's just a search index. It's not a temp folder that pool data passes through. The search index is a completely separate process from writing/reading data to the pool.

 

[Stanza33]

Sorry to the original poster... but then again maybe not.. as he might find all this info facinating and make a more informed choice from it all.

Anyways
I think another reason Old Hippie you could be thinking that adding a slower drive brings the whole system down slower could be as follows.

You 1st drive the 74gig Raptor would have been the FASTEST of your drives yes?

Then you added as you say 3 x WD Blacks... which I would think would be a little slower than the 74gig drive...

Then I am guessing as space started to run out, you then added the WD Blue drive... which again is a little slower than the WD Blacks.

So in effect you went
Very FAST
Sorta FAST
Average
in drive speeds.

Now if you have a looksee at say the Addin Drive Manager... you can see what goes on.
That is, WHS like to fill the drives starting at the End/Last.

ie you will see drives filling up from the bottom drives, the up to the top drives (in the Drive manager layout)...

ie in this example the drives 4 & 5 are nearly full, the drives 2 & 3 are approx 80% full... but the drive 0 is nearly empty

http://www.tentaclesoftware.com/Site/Images/DiskManagementProductImage.png

So that would give you the FEELING of the whole shebang getting slower as you add slower drives....

Because data that was once on say either your VERY FAST 74gig and or the FAST WD Blacks... is palmed off onto the Average Speed WD Blue drives

Hence the feeling of things slowing down...

I suppose the opposite could also happen, that is say you start with average type drive (slow green drive) as your 1st drive... later on you come into cashola and decide to add more space... but fork out the extra $ for some larger faster drives...

The WHOLE system would feel like it just got faster.... and could possibly lead you to believe that adding FASTER drives to run along side slower drives makes the slower drives run faster... which it actually doesn't.... but sure would feel like it did

.

 

[Fading Phoenix]

Sorry to the original poster... but then again maybe not.. as he might find all this info facinating and make a more informed choice from it all.

.

Well, time will tell if it helps me make an informed choice or not I guess; but I did enjoy reading through. I hadn't expected to check this thread today and find an entire discussion had taken place.

I picked up the case I linked earlier and two more 2tb drives. Now all I need is cpu/mb and the OS. So I'll be doing quite a bit more reading and waiting before I actually decide.

I may make an account on the wegotserved for future questions, I hadn't known of that site prior.

Thanks to everyone for the help and answers-and for the conversation.

 

[Fading Phoenix]

Actually, I have one more question I just remembered.

I had been thinking it seems like such a waste of space to run raid 1 for my hdd's used for blu-ray storage, eventually this could eat up a lot of space fast.

I was thinking if I could back up just the folders and metadata on the drives to an external backup while excluding the actual movie files themselves it would effectively double the storage space I thought I would have available at first.

This would dramatically increase the downtime if one of my hdd's for blu-ray's happened to crash, but I could live with ripping the discs again. What I'd be more annoyed about if I had to do it again is finding all the metadata and jpegs (backdrops and coverart) for the movies. I used media center master to initially create all of it, but all of my blu-rays are in folder format and I've had to custom edit the metadata to include the media information (aspect ratio/codec/audio channels).

Rather than just selecting entire folders with all of it's contents, is it possible with WHS v1 to tell it to clone/backup all contents of a drive that are strictly a specific filetype? Is it possible with WHS 2011 with it's server backup? Would I need or be able to do this with third party software?

If I could accomplish that than I think I would skip raiding my hdd's for blu-ray storage and live with the downtime of having to rip my blu-ray's all over again if one of those discs failed. At least I wouldn't have to do all the other work.

Personally, for my use, I've found WHS v1 + FlexRAID to be the ideal solution. Drive Extender makes it very easy to manage your space, and FlexRAID provides as much redundancy as you want, very economically. You an pick and choose which shares get protected by WHS's drive mirroring, and what get protected by FlexRAID.

I was going to quote this originally to ask what the benefit of using FlexRAID is if WHS has selective data redudancy built into it, but since I posed my question above, would FlexRAID allow me to do something like what I'm asking above?



Apologies if any of this post was worded poorly, otherwise long-winded, or just poorly thought out. Really tired.

 

[dscline]

I had been thinking it seems like such a waste of space to run raid 1 for my hdd's used for blu-ray storage, eventually this could eat up a lot of space fast.

That's where FlexRAID comes in. And you don't even have to exclude the movies.

would FlexRAID allow me to do something like what I'm asking above?

You can't be as selective with WHS's duplication: you turn it on or off at the share level (e.g. duplicate the "documents" share, don't duplicate the "movies" share, etc.). You can't pick and choose based on file type. FlexRAID in Snapshot mode is perfect for relatively static data that you don't edit/delete often (like movie rips), so I use WHS mirroring just for the few things that do change a log (like my recorded TV folder), and FlexRAId for everything else (which, BTW, you can set up complex filters to exclude specific things). FlexRAID allows you to choose how much parity you want to use, so you can use as little as one extra drive for single parity (you can survive up to one hard drive failure and recover) to as many disks as you want to increase redundancy. And since it's based on parity, your redundancy space doesn't have to grow as your storage space grows. You can protect as much data as you want with just one extra disk. Once you get a TON of disks in there, you end up wanting to increase redundancy because your chances of having multiple drives fail at once increases, but you don't have to.

 

[Fading Phoenix]

Sounds possibly too good.

I'm looking at this page for the current versions.
http://wiki.flexraid.com/2011/04/05/flexraid-lastest-download-links/

Unless I'm mistaken, it's free? I wasn't expecting that.
It says their betas expire after 6months and their release candidates after 1 year. How long will their 2.0 preview download last if I used that? And if it expired what would happen with my data?



This is off track, but I'm pretty stoked right now. I thought it had been said that Bulldozer would not be compatible with AM3 socket motherboards, but I found out apparently some boards are being updated to be compatible.

My gigabyte GA-890GPA-UD3H rev. 2.1 should be comatible with a bios update (in beta right now). So now I"m just buying a used micro ATX board from another forum member and then all I'll need is the processor. Saves me some of the money that would have otherwise been spent on a $100+ motherboard.

 

[Fading Phoenix]

I also ordered one of these.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816103105

I'm not very interested in any raid functions of the card, as likely I'll just use the os or other solution instead. The motherboard I'll be using only has 6 sata ports, I already have more drives than that going into the server so I'm just using it for the four extra connections.

Will this work alright?

 

[dscline]

Unless I'm mistaken, it's free? I wasn't expecting that.
It says their betas expire after 6months and their release candidates after 1 year. How long will their 2.0 preview download last if I used that? And if it expired what would happen with my data?

Yes, it's free. I don't know if it will always be free, he could decide to start charging for it at some point. But regardless of what happens with it, nothing will happen to your data. FlexRAID does not change your data when it's installed, and is not involved in your normal read/write operations (assuming we're just talking about FlexRAID Basic redundancy, which is all you need if you're using it with WHS v1, since v1 has drive pooling built in). All FlexRAID does is read your data, and create parity data based on your data. If FlexRAID were to stop working, for any reason, you would lose the ability to use it to restore lost data, but nothing happens to your "good" data. Think of it like back-up software. You could uninstall the back-up software, or lose your back-up media, but that doesn't affect your data. It only affects your ability to use your back-up to restore data. You data doesn't depend on FlexRAID at all. That's one of the beauties of it.

As far as the card, I have no experience with that one. But it should be fine. You don't need RAID capabilities with FlexRAID but most RAID cards have the ability to just act as a dumb HBA.

 

[Fading Phoenix]

Alright, sorry I never thanked you for the extra guidance dscline.

Much to the possible dismay of many, I bought WHS 2011 from Newegg's sale for $50. I couldn't resist.

I'm not concerned at all about Drive Extender, or drive pooling really. FlexRAID interests me though so I'm going to try that out.

And using the Adaptec card as an HBA (had to look that up ) is what I had in mind. I've been a little confused using it though, the bios reads drives connected to it as RAID devices in the boot order menu, but I can't find anything in the adapters interface to change it. Do I just plug the drives in and go?

 

[Old Hippie]

Sorry to the original poster... but then again maybe not.. as he might find all this info facinating and make a more informed choice from it all.

Anyways
I think another reason Old Hippie you could be thinking that adding a slower drive brings the whole system down slower could be as follows.

You 1st drive the 74gig Raptor would have been the FASTEST of your drives yes?

Then you added as you say 3 x WD Blacks... which I would think would be a little slower than the 74gig drive...

Then I am guessing as space started to run out, you then added the WD Blue drive... which again is a little slower than the WD Blacks.

So in effect you went
Very FAST
Sorta FAST
Average
in drive speeds.

Now if you have a looksee at say the Addin Drive Manager... you can see what goes on.
That is, WHS like to fill the drives starting at the End/Last.

ie you will see drives filling up from the bottom drives, the up to the top drives (in the Drive manager layout)...

ie in this example the drives 4 & 5 are nearly full, the drives 2 & 3 are approx 80% full... but the drive 0 is nearly empty

http://www.tentaclesoftware.com/Site/Images/DiskManagementProductImage.png

So that would give you the FEELING of the whole shebang getting slower as you add slower drives....

Because data that was once on say either your VERY FAST 74gig and or the FAST WD Blacks... is palmed off onto the Average Speed WD Blue drives

Hence the feeling of things slowing down...
.

Stanza33, you hit the nail on the head and your explanation is exactly what happened.

The fly in the ointment is that the max transfer speed from my WHS to my desktop also slowed in the same pattern as the drives were added.

My only conclusion is that the feeling of going slower was confirmed by the slower transfer speeds.

I'm all ears if you have an alternate theory.

 

[Fading Phoenix]

Well I have the server installed. Had some trouble with the configuration process, but all is up and running now. It doesn't seem to be seeing the hdd's on my adaptec controller though, need to figure that out.


Edit- worked out issues with my Adaptec controller. Starting to migrate files

 

[Stanza33]

Stanza33, you hit the nail on the head and your explanation is exactly what happened.

The fly in the ointment is that the max transfer speed from my WHS to my desktop also slowed in the same pattern as the drives were added.

My only conclusion is that the feeling of going slower was confirmed by the slower transfer speeds.

I'm all ears if you have an alternate theory.

Only guessing here,

But in the time taken to initially have WHS up and going, until the last drive was added. (no idea but I am guessing a few months yes?)

What are you using to copy to from WHS ? Windows 7 or XP ?

Also what are you running on the above OS's ie Antivirus wise etc. also systems are they low end netbook type processors?

And in the time from 1st drive until last did you add say Microsoft Security Essentials or similar, which is well know to slow down network transfers considerably. etc some report slow transfers of say 20-30m/s ... but when they try Disabling "Enable Network Inspection System"

So many variables. But like I said WHS v1 and the drives you added should not be slow to and from it. so there is definatley something else going on to cause you network slowdown, Not I believe your drives or WHS v1 itself.

.