Re: WHS Reliable Hardware?

[Phil Harris <phil@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Mark,

I have the same mobo as you and the nForce controllers on there are very
badly supported under MS server OSs of any flavour. I currently use Silicon
Image controllers for all my drives (both internal and external) and have
had minimal problems with drives 'failing' since then - in fact I did have
one drive which persistently failed but eventually turned out to be a dodgy
SATA cable. Since replacing that I've had no troubles at all.

Currently looking at 'Vail' (the new version of WHS due out Q1 2011) and
that has some 'interesting' functionality including that they are trying to
encourage you to duplicate everything (so effectively you need twice the
storage capacity) but on top of that you also have a roughly 12% CRC
overhead as well!!!! So basically for 14Tb of usable space you need 32Tb of
disc space.

If you don't duplicate shares ... Well it seems that Vail splits large
files into 1Gb chunks and stripes them across multiple drives so if you
don't have shares duplicated then it looks like it exposes your data to
being even more vulnerable as a 5Gb DVD ISO could be split across up to 5
drives any of which could fail!

Have to say I'm in a bit of a quandary what to use next ... Need something
that supports pooling of drives and on the fly expansion of storage it has
to support 30 or so drives (so that's FlexRAID out of the running).

:-(

Phi

Sent from another bloody fruit-based portable device...

On 30 Aug 2010, at 08:12, "mwgardner2000" <groups@xxxxxxx>
wrote:

> Hello,
>
> I have a home built Windows Home Server V1 box. I'm very happy with
the functionality of WHS (the PC backup feature has saved the day on more
than one occasion!), but I'm getting increasingly frustrated with the
reliability of the system and the hardware in particular. WHS often reports
disk failures, but when I go in and have a look, everything seems fine. By
often, I mean several times a day.....
>
> The box has an 8.2TB storage pool and comprises:
> - Asus M2N32 WS Professional mobo
> - 2.40 gigahertz AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core
> - 4 GB RAM,
> - Highpoint 1820 PCI disk controller
> - Highpoint 2320 PCI disk controller
> - WD 500 GB disks (4 WD5000YS)
> - WD 1TB disks (3 x WD10EACS)
> - WD 2TB disks (2 x WD20EADS)
>
> The reliability problem has been over an extended period (including
when the box was previously running Windows 2003 SBS), and over time
changes have been made to improve things. I have had at least 3 disks
exchanged by WD (can't fault their service on that) but my suspicions as to
the root cause of the problems have for a long time centred on the
controllers. The controllers on the mobo in particular seem to be flakey
(NVIDIA nForce 590/570/550 Serial ATA Controller and Marvell 614x SATA2
Controller) and installing the Highpoint controllers seems to have helped.
>
> However, the latest problems being reported by the system relate to
the 1TB drives which are all on the Highpoint 1820 controller. WHS reports
a disk failure; the console show the disks as missing, but without
intervention the console updates and everything looks normal again.
>
> There have been some postings on here about enormous WHS servers
(Phil!) and I'm wondering if anyone else sees reliability issues? What
hardware do others use in their WHS home built boxes?
>
> Whilst I like the functionality, I'm reluctant to invest in new PC
hardware and am thinking of going for a large NAS instead. I will keep a
WHS in some form for the PC backup functionality if nothing else.
>
> Any ideas / comments / suggestions welcome!
>
> Cheers
> Mark
>
>
>
>
> ------------------------------------
>
>
> Yahoo! Groups Links
>
>
>


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