Windows Home Server FAQ

moose517 said:
hmmm interesting, i've also been having crazy slow downs on my WHS lately as well, and have tentacle software, removed it, lets see if it gets better.
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My WHS has been slowing down too! But that is because for some odd reason the nic is switching between 100mbps and 10mbps. I have done everything software wise to figure it out so I guess the hardware is doing its death knell. Where are you Sandy Bridge motherboards!?!?
 
I've just rebuilt my 20tb WHS setup. It started acting a bit flaky in January - it's in a Norco 4020 and I'd show zero drive activity after it would drop of my network. I'd have to reboot it a couple of times a week to solve this. I turned it off while on vacation for a week at the beginning of Feb. and on return it would hang on boot after the WHS screen with progress bar. I tried doing a reinstall and while it would accept my AOC-SATA2-MV8 controller drivers initially they seemed to fail part way through.

So I've just done a clean install, did all updates, installed the latest Disk Management add-in, transferred over the data (took a week), then last night added Avast a/v back in (did the 'minimal' install this time).

This morning the server was unresponsive (idling with no disk activity). A reboot seems to have solved the issue. Could this be an Avast issue?
 
So since the WD-EARS are no good for this, can someone rec me a good 2tb drive for my WHS. So many options out there. My setup is for a HP x310.
 
davef139 said:
So since the WD-EARS are no good for this, can someone rec me a good 2tb drive for my WHS. So many options out there. My setup is for a HP x310.
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I am going with 3xSamsung 2tb F4's which I will be updating the firmware immediately before installing. I have no idea if they are updated to the new firmware already but I am not taking any chances. As an aside, I installed an EARS drive in another person's server with the jumper method with zero issues.
 
EnderW said:
I thought the F4 was advanced format
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They are advanced format with 512 emulation so sticking them right in the box will work. The problem comes to people who want to run them with the true 4k sectors and need to jumper them. How they jumper them, I am at a loss but I know I won't have to worry about that until V2 comes out if I even need to at all.
 
Kenworth said:
They are advanced format with 512 emulation so sticking them right in the box will work. The problem comes to people who want to run them with the true 4k sectors and need to jumper them. How they jumper them, I am at a loss but I know I won't have to worry about that until V2 comes out if I even need to at all.
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Put jumper on pins on the back of the drive.

Edit - Nevermind, thought you meant how to jumper in general. You meant specific to that drive. My bad.
 
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The OS drive I had finally crapped out (150gb Raptor) and I only had the SSD as a spare on hand so I decided to give it a try before deciding if I'd order something. The OS drive is now an 80gb X25-M g2 SSD. It is a bit snappier all around, and especially opening the WHS console. Reboots are not blazing, about 1.5 minutes instead of 3 minutes.
 
dokument said:
Hey Windows Home Server 2011 was just officially released.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-10805_3-20049231-75.html

http://windowsteamblog.com/windows/...ws-home-server-2011-is-ready-for-release.aspx
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Trying to figure out if I even care. Without any DE technology there seems no reason to even look at it.

Sort of thinking it is about as useful as this for hauling capacity:
johnsontruck.jpg
 
[LYL]Homer;1037054556 said:
Trying to figure out if I even care. Without any DE technology there seems no reason to even look at it.
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There are several 3rd party replacements for DE in the works. And I dare say they work better than the DE that was in vail.

Drivebender
Stablebit Drivepool
Flexraid Live - will use parity instead of duplication
There are a couple more who's names escape me
 
Yeah, I'm open to using one of these. But I won't be an early adopter! I'll let things settle a bit first.
 
Yeah, im not sure its any better than SBS server tho...which has more features.
 
nitrobass24 said:
Yeah, im not sure its any better than SBS server tho...which has more features.
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That and SBS is going to cost a lot more and probably won't be available on as inexpensive a set of hardware as WHS might. Granted, having an MSDN subscription makes it a lot less expensive to 'test'.
 
I am installing WHS 2011 right now and I will see what it is all about. I unplugged my v1 box and set it off to the side just in case I need to plug in and have a system where I know what is what.

I wish I knew enough about SBS to load it with confidence or else I would have downloaded and installed that.

Follow up edit: WTF... So I only get like 30MB/s from my Asus H67 board running a Samsung F4 2tb (more on standby to be added). On top of that, I can't access it remotely. I can't tell if it is my router, a D-Link DIR-825, which isn't playing well because I can't even access it through https either. Of course I have like 3 devices which don't have drivers for them on the board but the sata drivers seem to be good. I am betting my slow writes and reads are due to incomplete drivers for the chipset as well. 30MB/s does what I need it to but on a full gigabit network, I shouldn't be settling. I think I went about this WHS 2011 build all wrong. Maybe even a new router is in order...
 
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Alright. So I was able to correct the transfer rate issue. Now I am getting around 100MB/s on a 4gb test file. Picture folders and such are slower but still very fast. I added the other 2 F4's and they are added to the server now as well.

But now I am getting a some pretty horrible connection speeds to the server using remote. I had to get a little creative in the router to even see it remotely so that might have something to do with it. Anybody else running WHS 2011 with horrible remote speeds?
 
I'll be installing it on Monday. I have all my data backed up on other computers in the house so i'm ready to go.

Just trying to decide on a DE replacement to use. Though it seems they are all still in beta so I may not use the server much at first until that's in place. I need pooling and redundancy.
 
So I have it installed and can say the performance is much better. Working directly on it the entire system is more reponsive. Accessing the shares over the network is also more responsive and overall sustained file transfer speed is higher. I'm getting 75-85MB/s.

But until I get a DE replacement I can't use the system too much.
 
Archer75 said:
So I have it installed and can say the performance is much better. Working directly on it the entire system is more reponsive. Accessing the shares over the network is also more responsive and overall sustained file transfer speed is higher. I'm getting 75-85MB/s.

But until I get a DE replacement I can't use the system too much.
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Eh, DE is a lot less of an issue now that 2tb drives are so cheap. Just use a hardware RAID solution and some planning on capacity. If/when needs change then deal with expansion. Meanwhile why deprive yourself of something that's proven to be a better performer?
 
Thinking more about the lack of DE and that 2tb drives are so cheap, no DE isn't such a big deal to me.

I'll have time next week to try out WHS '11.
 
valve1138 said:
Thinking more about the lack of DE and that 2tb drives are so cheap, no DE isn't such a big deal to me.

I'll have time next week to try out WHS '11.
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I think my big objection to DE leaving is duplication. I back up my vitals to an external on a daily basis so it isn't much about that but it was just nice to have I guess. Didn't have to monkey with raid drivers or controller cards or worrying about consumer grade drives dropping off the raid, etc... I just wish it was still there. So far, WHS 2011 is working brilliantly. I upgraded my box as well so it is more of a difference from v1.
 
I think I'd just skip any sort of RAID and make sure everything is getting backed up to another device, like my old WHS v1 box.
 
wkearney99 said:
Eh, DE is a lot less of an issue now that 2tb drives are so cheap. Just use a hardware RAID solution and some planning on capacity. If/when needs change then deal with expansion. Meanwhile why deprive yourself of something that's proven to be a better performer?
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I have 16 hard drives of various sizes. Using raid means I have to throw drives away and buy more of the same size in addition to a hardware raid card. That is not an option. The entire reason for me to originally use WHS was the ability to use different size drives and easily add and pull them from the pool.

My case holds 22 drives so I still have 6 empty slots. No point in throwing drives in the garbage.

There are at least 4 potential DE replacements in the works, probably more, so I can simply wait.
 
Archer75 said:
I have 16 hard drives of various sizes. Using raid means I have to throw drives away and buy more of the same size in addition to a hardware raid card. That is not an option. The entire reason for me to originally use WHS was the ability to use different size drives and easily add and pull them from the pool.

My case holds 22 drives so I still have 6 empty slots. No point in throwing drives in the garbage.

There are at least 4 potential DE replacements in the works, probably more, so I can simply wait.
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And when drives were expensive that might have made sense. Now they're a lot cheaper, consume less power and operate faster. It's probable you'd have a server that consumed less power, ran cooler and loaded files faster just by getting rid of a hodge-podge of mismatched drives. The power savings alone might make it worthwhile.

And then there's the hassle of trying to untangle the mess that happens when the mismatched drives die. BTDT, not again.

I'm all for making use of existing gear, but at some point it becomes a fool's errand.
 
New drives dropping off is a hassle with or without RAID.

There's not really any 'monkeying' necessary for RAID setups. Win7 includes quite a lot of drivers, saving from the F6 install issues (not that they're all that big a deal anyway). That and many hardware RAID solutions are transparent to the OS.

Daily backups are, of course, important. They certainly make it easier to recover from failures. A RAID just makes it simpler to deal with a drive failure. Just replace the drive and rebuild, sometimes it's even possible without rebooting. Versus stopping in your tracks for a whole day to do a total restore from backups. RAID vs backups is not really and either/or situation. They compliment each other.

Now that online backup solutions and greater bandwidth exist it's a lot less trouble for people to get backups done. I'm still a fan of independent, off site backups, but the online tools are getting better and better.
 
wkearney99 said:
And when drives were expensive that might have made sense. Now they're a lot cheaper, consume less power and operate faster. It's probable you'd have a server that consumed less power, ran cooler and loaded files faster just by getting rid of a hodge-podge of mismatched drives. The power savings alone might make it worthwhile.

And then there's the hassle of trying to untangle the mess that happens when the mismatched drives die. BTDT, not again.

I'm all for making use of existing gear, but at some point it becomes a fool's errand.
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Again, I can just wait. No point in spending money when I don't have to. I have many WD green drives in the server now. To replace the drives I need to, even cheap drives, would still cost me hundreds of dollars. Simply no point in doing that. Software is coming, some of it free, even one solution that will provide parity as opposed to duplication.

It would be stupid to drop $300 on drives now, plus whatever a hardware raid card costs, instead of just waiting a few weeks and not spending any money.

And there's no issue when a drive dies, take it out, put another one in and it restores. Simple. Data is already on another drive and available.

Electricity is cheap here. Leaving the server on 24/7 doesn't even make a dent in my bill. Doesn't concern me.
 
I'm with Archer75. I have 14 drives totaling about 18tb (all data duplicated), where the main storage array is 6 different types of disk:

WHSdrives.png


Further, I have AOC-SAT2-MV8 controllers so software RAID is the best those could do. And they are green drives.
 
Hardware RAID is not a good solution for WHS 2011.

The whole point of WHS was to not have to use hardware RAID.
 
nitrobass24 said:
Hardware RAID is not a good solution for WHS 2011.

The whole point of WHS was to not have to use hardware RAID.
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I dunno, Microsoft seemed to forget what the point of WHS was late last year - at least V1. 2011 seems to be a whole new ball game in regards to storage.
 
[LYL]Homer;1037107005 said:
I dunno, Microsoft seemed to forget what the point of WHS was late last year - at least V1. 2011 seems to be a whole new ball game in regards to storage.
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I agree, doesnt mean we have to follow MS poor decisions.
 
My WHS setup (some 8x 2TB) has run reliably for about 18 months now, maybe longer, but recently one of the drives has developed some bad sectors. I noticed it yesterday evening when copying video captures to it (routine thing) suddenly became excruciatingly slow. According to the Event log, the drive has been failing for several months; I just didn't notice it until now.

I don't install the WHS add-on for my PCs... admittedly, I never have. If I did, would I notice the failure from a client? Since I generally don't remote into that server I just didn't know.

Alternatively, is there a way to get email alerts about failures within WHS?
 
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