Windows Home Server FAQ

My upgrade path was a breeze, actually.

However, as I pointed out already in the past, I was moving from a 945G-based motherboard to a G31-based motherboard, from the very same manufacturer. So pretty much the same drivers, except possibly some of the main chipset ones (and IGP, but those are a non-issue). But all the drivers needed were already present in the system, so that might have had something to do with it, Windows only generally complains if there are core system drivers missing... Re-activation was necessary, though, since motherboard, CPU and IGP changed in the process.

From the WHS install routine, it seems it's at least semi-image-based, which could mean some basic drivers already are available to Windows, but I can't confirm that.

All in all, I think if you're "moving sideways" (meaning, same core drivers, like CPU, storage controller, etc.), you should be OK. So switching from Intel to Intel (like same socket, but probably a wider variance might be possible, since Intel packs drivers for all chipsets on the same setup utility, and they all get copied to the system when installed) within the same chipset family (NVIDIA to NVIDIA, Intel to Intel) is probably feasible without too many scares. AMD to AMD is probably the same thing (IF AMD builds driver setup utilities like Intel, that is).

"Vertical" moves (meaning, different CPU manufacturers, unless we're talking Socket 7 or Socket 370, but that is generally too ancient to be dealing with different CPU manufacturers at this place in time, right?) are probably a shot in the dark. It might work, it might not.

Cheers.

Miguel
 
deanx0r said:
Hey guys,

How easy is it to migrate WHS to new hardware in case of a hardware failure (motherboard)? Can you just pop in new motherboard/cpu and hope that WHS will find its way there?
Click to expand...

I did a migration from an Intel G31 based board to an AMD 740G based board with no problems other than having to install new video drivers and reactivate WHS. I was VERY surprised because I was almost 100% expecting that I would have to do a reinstall.
 
dydx said:
I did a migration from an Intel G31 based board to an AMD 740G based board with no problems other than having to install new video drivers and reactivate WHS.
Click to expand...
That is a very good surprise! Vertical migrations without hiccups? Man, WHS is VERY hardware-friendly when it comes to changes...

Miguel
 
Yikes... my AMD board bit the dust over the weekend, and I have now replaced it with an Intel system for piece of mind. But it's nice to know it's a hassle free operation when I have to migrate.

Is migrating the OS to a new hard drive as easy? I've noticed there were no 'backup' for the WHS drive. Can you just mirror the system drive to a bigger disk and slap in back in your server without WHS getting upset?
 
deanx0r said:
Is migrating the OS to a new hard drive as easy? I've noticed there were no 'backup' for the WHS drive. Can you just mirror the system drive to a bigger disk and slap in back in your server without WHS getting upset?
Click to expand...
NO, you cannot simply mirror the system drive.

I've been there, and although WHS will start from that drive, and run fine with it, there will be a constant "Drive Missing" warning on Drive Manager. WHS will map every pool-joined HDD in the system by its serial number (or unique identifier, I haven't really understood that one yet), and it will constantly check if it's available. If not, an error message will crop up.

Now, while I didn't try to remove the missing system drive, I also don't think it's a very good idea per se. Who knows what kind of things might go south just by mirroring an HDD? DE is finicky as it is...

The best way to replace a missing system drive is to run the Server Restore Wizard (instead of "New Installation") . I haven't done that yet, so I'm not the best person to talk you through it. But I'm sure someone else is bound to jump on this one.

Cheers.

Miguel
 
Seems painful, specially when I planned to do weekly backups of the system drive. Given the nature of this problem, I would assume mirroring the OS drive in RAID 1 wouldn't work either, right? I am not sure if it would be better to load the system drive on a SSD just to prevent any kind of mechanical failure from the system drive.

Thanks for the updates!
 
Could still do weekly backups, just when you have to restore you need to follow the rest of that process.

Also RAID1 does work
 
nitrobass24 said:
Also RAID1 does work
Click to expand...
Yes, RAID1, albeit not being officially supported by WHS, is rather transparent to the OS: the two drives form a single volume, and it's the volume information that gets reported to WHS. As long as the volume information stays static, WHS shouldn't complain.

However, RAID1 is NOT a backup solution, and I don't think running an OS on a permanently-degraded RAID1 array is a very good idea. Maybe a 3-drive solution, with RAID1+OS Image, re-imaged weekly, or RAID1+spare?

Cheers.

Miguel
 
very nice find nitrobass, wish i had this a few weeks ago when power outage destroyed my raid array :(
 
I was filling up the server with (unduplicated) data this morning and noticed it some heavy hard drive activity on it. Logging through remote desktop took 10-15 minutes, the system was unresponsive. I eventually managed to restart it, and the hard drives were all under heavy loads making the system unusable.

A quick look into the console was showing me that my system was 90% full and was moving data left and right. I had to delete about ~500% of data I moved to make the system responsive again. My system is a E6600 w/ 2GB and 5TB spanned over 4 hard drive. I don't get it would need to move or balance the data as none of it was duplicated. The system was also sitting on a 98% full hard drive for a few days while the other 3 remaining hard drives were empty (no data moved or balanced).

Is this something typical from WHS? is there a threshold of data you shouldn't fill your server over? I am just trying to figure what went wrong to avoid future downtime.
 
Do you have the latest Power Pack installed? There's no reason it should behave that way.
 
Drive Balancer has its quirks...

I remember when I upgraded my storage after replacing one drive and adding another: it was a bloody mess for quite some time. It took me like four runs (and about 10 hours) with the Driver Balancer Utility to get the system balanced again.

I'd advise you to 1) upgrade to PP3, if you haven't already and 2) run the Drive Balancer Utility add-on (not quite an add-on, you need to RDP to the box and run it from a command prompt) to even out the box.

Just keep in mind sometimes even this utility doesn't behave properly, and there are leftover files you might need to manually delete (fake files full of zeroes to force DB to push data to other drives). The help file on the package is very useful, you probably won't have any problems with it.

Hope this helps.

Miguel
 
quick question:

My old mobo (which has 5 PCI and 1AGP) on my WHS only has 2 sata ports. Can anybody recommend any PCI to SATA card? I don't need raid or anything. Also, would I be able to use these ports on a card in addition to the ones on the motherboard?
 
Kulith said:
quick question:

My old mobo (which has 5 PCI and 1AGP) on my WHS only has 2 sata ports. Can anybody recommend any PCI to SATA card? I don't need raid or anything. Also, would I be able to use these ports on a card in addition to the ones on the motherboard?
Click to expand...

I have this one and have had no issues. It'll run in either a PCI or PCI-X slot, but obviously you'll take a bandwidth hit running it on PCI.

http://www.buy.com/prod/supermicro-8-port-serial-ata-card-8-x-7-pin-sata-serial-ata-300-serial/q/loc/101/201962138.html

Best bang for the buck I could find when I built my system last year.
 
Kulith said:
quick question:

My old mobo (which has 5 PCI and 1AGP) on my WHS only has 2 sata ports. Can anybody recommend any PCI to SATA card? I don't need raid or anything. Also, would I be able to use these ports on a card in addition to the ones on the motherboard?
Click to expand...
If you want something a little cheaper than the SAT2-MV8 (though with half the ports), then you might try anything based on the SiI3114 chipset (like this, or any of its clones), which would actually allow you to connect 20 drives to the controller (through four 5-port PM adapters).

Bandwidth might be an issue with 20 drives hanging off a 133MBps link, however. Though WHS is pretty much a single-drive-in-use machine unless you start adding up concurrent users.

Cheers.

Miguel
 
__Miguel_ said:
If you want something a little cheaper than the SAT2-MV8 (though with half the ports), then you might try anything based on the SiI3114 chipset (like this, or any of its clones), which would actually allow you to connect 20 drives to the controller (through four 5-port PM adapters).

Bandwidth might be an issue with 20 drives hanging off a 133MBps link, however. Though WHS is pretty much a single-drive-in-use machine unless you start adding up concurrent users.

Cheers.

Miguel
Click to expand...

interesting, could I just buy a 5 port multiplier and hook it up to the motherboards sata port?

edit: nvm too expensive. I'll just go with that one and add a PM if I need one later.
 
Oh, cr*p. Sorry about that, I messed up a little there.

I meant 3124, not 3114. The 3114 is a 4-port SATA I controller without PM support. I always get those two mixed up. Though it still is a low-budget option, of course (just remember some HDDs might need jumpers to work on 1st-gen SATA links).

Kulith said:
interesting, could I just buy a 5 port multiplier and hook it up to the motherboards sata port?

edit: nvm too expensive. I'll just go with that one and add a PM if I need one later.
Click to expand...
Port Multipliers need explicit controller support.

Right now, there are only a few PM-compatible storage controllers I know of: 3124 and 3132 from SiI (4-port PCI and 2-port PCIe, respectively, both SATA II). I believe the PromiseTX4 also supports FIS-based PMs.

Thing is, there might be quirks on interoperability between different controller/PM manufacturers, like between the Addonics 5-port PM and a Promise card (here)..

Also, there are other solutions, like controller-less PMs, but those can only usually be used either as software RAID solutions or as USB controllers, since individual drive access is only available through USB or when connected to PM-aware controllers.

So, to answer your question, it depends on the controller you'll be using the PM. AFAIK (and I've been through Intel's southbridge manuals like a hawk), no Intel southbridge up to ICH10R supports FIS-based PMs (these allow all drives to be accessed at the same time, and thus can be faster; command-based switching, available for instance on the JMB383 controller, only allows one disk to be accessed at a time), and I have no info whatsoever on that for AMD southbridges.

Cheers, and sorry for the mix-up.

Miguel
 
Kulith said:
What about something like this : http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...5280003&cm_re=sata_pci-_-15-280-003-_-Product
Click to expand...
That's one of the several SiI3114-based controllers available. It should work just about the same as anything else on that ballpark.

Kulith said:
Will it matter that it's only sata I?
Click to expand...
There are probably a couple of scenarios when you'd prefer a SATA II link, but I guess that, for a low-cost, low-load WHS it will be fine. Do keep in mind that even some 5400rpm HDDs have sequential transfer rates of more than 100MBps, and generally speaking newer SATA links can handle bandwidth more efficiently, so you *might* be slightly limited. Though considering PCI is a shared bus, you'll probably have a hard time handling both that kind of data flow and a Gigabit link at the same time to begin with, so you should be relatively OK. PCIe was a boon in that regard, no more shared bandwidth between a gazillion components...

Kulith said:
I can still use onboard sata ports with it?
Click to expand...
Unless there is a weird incompatibility between the SiI3114 controller and the motherboard's chipset, you should be just fine.

You might need to disable IRQ 19 handling on the BIOS, though, if your computer only wishes to boot from the controller card and you can't get it to force the primary boot drive as a drive plugged to the motherboard's controller.

@nitro: why do you reckon PMs suck? Just for the bandwidth sharing? Or is there something else? While I do understand the limitations of a "funnel" configuration PMs tend to create, it seems to me a low-usage NAS (probably up to five simultaneous connections) shouldn't experience much of a speed hit unless everyone tries to access high-bitrate files on the same PM-aware controller port, right?

Cheers.

Miguel
 
NP, Kulith. Glad to be of assistance. And again, sorry for the slip-up yesterday about the SiI PM-aware controllers.

Cheers.

Miguel
 
So I have been reading the last page or so and it was related directly to a project I have going. Simply put, I have a case that has run out of sata ports but more importantly, room in the case. I have already converted 2 of the 5.25" bays to hold the hard drives. Based on what we know on the port multiplier in regards to it being able to expand the ports ability to have multiple drives, I would assume that an external 4 bay esata enclosure would suffer the same shortcomings. Something like this would satisfy the room needed for the extra drives and I assume WHS would also not take any issue with recognizing them as well. Is my thinking sound?
 
Kenworth said:
Is my thinking sound?
Click to expand...
I'd say "yes". That's a 5-port active PM external enclosure which includes a 2-port PM-aware eSATA HBA (good for as much as 10 external SATA drives).

That particular storage controller assumes you have a PM-aware HBA (Host Bus Adapter) based on one of a few SiI chips, including the 3132. If you don't connect it to an HBA based on one of those controllers, you might end up with only being able to access the first volume on the storage controller (or create a single volume out of the 5 possible drives). That's a common limitation for that kind of storage controller: you REALLY need a PM-aware HBA to be able to see more than one volume on a SATA/eSATA link.

For WHS, I'd recommend using it on JBOD mode (a.k.a. "bypass mode"), since it's the preferred way WHS likes to work with drives.

One last thing, though : do try to confirm the 5TB size limit. You might need to upgrade your firmware first to enable 10TB size support.

Cheers.

Miguel
 
Are there any tools or addons that I can use to have WHS tell me when a drive has bad blocks or other issues?

I was unable to open one of the files on my WHS, so I checked the event log. In it I saw thousand of Disk errors telling me there was a bad block in one of the HDs. Now mind you, WHS gave me no indication whatsoever that there was an issue. It was only after parsing through the event log that I found it.

I'd like to be able to catch this problem when it first happens, not after the errors have been going on for weeks. Any ways to do this other than checking the event log daily?

SMART was fine and healthy btw
 
kemekalx said:
I was unable to open one of the files on my WHS, so I checked the event log. In it I saw thousand of Disk errors telling me there was a bad block in one of the HDs. Now mind you, WHS gave me no indication whatsoever that there was an issue.
Click to expand...
Been there myself a couple of months ago, to my dismay.

First of all, WHS might complain about CRC errors or "in access" problems when bad blocks or pending sectors occur. That was my case, I had persistent CRC errors happening to a file sitting in the middle of the affected area of the HDD.

Now, the thing is, SMART does NOT warn about pending sectors, nor does it warn about only a single or a couple of bad blocks. It's just the way it's designed, there are trigger values, but the trigger isn't set to "1" (which would pop a red flag at the first pending or bad sector, even if the disk controller could resolve the issue).

kemekalx said:
Are there any tools or addons that I can use to have WHS tell me when a drive has bad blocks or other issues?
Click to expand...
That leads us to your question.

The best way to monitor what's going on is still a SMART software. Luckily, there is such an add-on for WHS. It's pretty decent, and it prints out every SMART attribute available, as well as a separate pending and bad sector count. I don't have the name or the link to it, though, since I've gotten it through "Add-In Central" (probably one of the best Add-ons I have EVER had, btw).

Hope this helps.

Miguel
 
drgnfang said:
This one perhahps?
http://www.homeserverland.com/downloads/m/whsaddins/6784.aspx
Click to expand...
Bingo!

If you check the preview image, you can actually read there is a separate, permanent information area at the bottom showing pending (temporarily inaccessible), reallocated (remapped to the "spare" area of the platter, which means a performance hit every time those sectors are accessed) and bad (marked as permanently inaccessible) sectors.

These three pieces of information are probably the most important on any HDD, since they show potential physical damage to the disk. Of course the load count and spin-up times also matter, but those usually don't carry risk of irreversible data loss...

Cheers.

Miguel
 
I am trying to build a new server to serve MyMovies3 to my 3 client pcs on my network. I am wondering if 2x500gb are enough for the system drives running raid1. I know Raid is not offically supported by WHS but I read in this thread people are doing it for redundancy of the OS. I want to ultimately run 10 2TB WD Green drives for movie storage. I am wondering if a dual core is enough or step up to a Quad. I currently run a Quad 9330 for my main pc and it is pretty quick.


At this point I have a Asus P5K Dluxe motherboard with an E6400 cpu and 2 gb of ram colleting dust. Will this stuff be enough for a server build?
 
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NO1B4ME said:
I am trying to build a new server to serve MyMovies3 to my 3 client pcs on my network. I am wondering if 2x500gb are enough for the system drives running raid1. I know Raid is not offically supported by WHS but I read in this thread people are doing it for redundancy of the OS. I want to ultimately run 10 2TB WD Green drives for movie storage. I am wondering if a dual core is enough or step up to a Quad. I currently run a Quad 9330 for my main pc and it is pretty quick.


At this point I have a Asus P5K Dluxe motherboard with an E6400 cpu and 2 gb of ram colleting dust. Will this stuff be enough for a server build?
Click to expand...

The 500gb drives will be fine. The system "volume" is divided into two partitions during install: 20gb for the actual system, the rest of the drive (or volume, if you are using a raid) for file tombstones and, sometimes, actual data. The tombstones take up very little space. With the latest version of WHS, data won't be stored on that second partition unless all of your other pool drives are full. In prior versions, that partition acted as a "landing strip" for all files that were copied into the pool. I use a 300gb drive and it is more than enough.

I've not set up raid1 for my whs system disk yet, but I plan to if I need to rebuild it before Vail (WHS v2) comes out. Most people seem to have no problems doing so. Just use your on board mobo controller and you shouldn't have any difficulties.

The equipment you already have will be more than adequate for serving movies. Having a gigabit network with a decent switch and nics is the next thing you should focus on.
 
leagle said:
The 500gb drives will be fine. The system "volume" is divided into two partitions during install: 20gb for the actual system, the rest of the drive (or volume, if you are using a raid) for file tombstones and, sometimes, actual data. The tombstones take up very little space. With the latest version of WHS, data won't be stored on that second partition unless all of your other pool drives are full. In prior versions, that partition acted as a "landing strip" for all files that were copied into the pool. I use a 300gb drive and it is more than enough.

I've not set up raid1 for my whs system disk yet, but I plan to if I need to rebuild it before Vail (WHS v2) comes out. Most people seem to have no problems doing so. Just use your on board mobo controller and you shouldn't have any difficulties.

The equipment you already have will be more than adequate for serving movies. Having a gigabit network with a decent switch and nics is the next thing you should focus on.
Click to expand...

The network is full gigabit compliant at this time. I am using a Netgear WNDR gigabit router and gigabit swith. I also have intel pro GT nics on my pc's at this time.

I did install the leak version of vail on one of my pcs and it is pretty slick but back to reality and have to install WHS pp3 for now..
 
I you do decide to go RAID 1 for OS (which I have ran for 5 months now) It does work good as a protective measure, but just keep in mind IT IS NOT A BACKUP. Anything you do to the drive will also be done to the mirror drive. The best reason for doing so is protection from hard drive failure. Do not use raid on the storage pool drives as the are best for WHS to handle via folder duplication, which you can choose which files to mirror and which to not.

My biggest recommendation for using RAID 1 with WHS is to get a half decent RAID card (not really expensive - $100 - unless you decide to do so) just do not get the cheap ones, they will degrade performance a lot. Make sure it can run at least SATA II speeds. Some people may say that it doesn't matter with access speeds with HDD's and the LAN is the bottleneck, but both do matter alot with WHS.(been there, done that, many different installs and diff. hardware) I am using a Highpoint 2300 card, semi-low budget($120) but does great for WHS. Currently running 500x2 RAID 1 and 12TB on 8 other HDD's (10 all together).

The reason I would say to get a RAID 1 card (running WHS OS)is it can make migrating WHS to another motherboard/processor a breeze. Using on board RAID will become an issue if you even think you may want to upgrade later.

RAID 1 is a wise option with WHS, it doesn't necessarily protect your data (as you can still get data back if WHS OS drives fail) but with 10 TB of movie & etc. it can save you a MAJOR amount of time in the case of drive failures. I've gone this route and have never decided to turn back.

Good Luck,
 
Dad_of_Three said:
I you do decide to go RAID 1 for OS (which I have ran for 5 months now) It does work good as a protective measure, but just keep in mind IT IS NOT A BACKUP. Anything you do to the drive will also be done to the mirror drive. The best reason for doing so is protection from hard drive failure. Do not use raid on the storage pool drives as the are best for WHS to handle via folder duplication, which you can choose which files to mirror and which to not.

My biggest recommendation for using RAID 1 with WHS is to get a half decent RAID card (not really expensive - $100 - unless you decide to do so) just do not get the cheap ones, they will degrade performance a lot. Make sure it can run at least SATA II speeds. Some people may say that it doesn't matter with access speeds with HDD's and the LAN is the bottleneck, but both do matter alot with WHS.(been there, done that, many different installs and diff. hardware) I am using a Highpoint 2300 card, semi-low budget($120) but does great for WHS. Currently running 500x2 RAID 1 and 12TB on 8 other HDD's (10 all together).

The reason I would say to get a RAID 1 card (running WHS OS)is it can make migrating WHS to another motherboard/processor a breeze. Using on board RAID will become an issue if you even think you may want to upgrade later.

RAID 1 is a wise option with WHS, it doesn't necessarily protect your data (as you can still get data back if WHS OS drives fail) but with 10 TB of movie & etc. it can save you a MAJOR amount of time in the case of drive failures. I've gone this route and have never decided to turn back.

Good Luck,
Click to expand...


I was going to use the Intel ICH10R on the motherboard but this makes sense. Thanks for the information. I am also going to use the ACO SAS card to expand 8 ports as well to run 2TB drives from.
 
Has anyone tried to run ps3mediaserver on their whs machine? My PS3 is having trouble to see it over the network, it does however see the windows media connect share. I've run ps3mediaserver on my xp machine, and it seems to work just fine. Any ideas?
 
New Installation Instructions

- Download PS3 Media Server from http://ps3mediaserver.blogspot.com/
- Install PS3 Media Server to your Windows Home Server by remote desktop
- Download PS3 Media Server For WHS add-in from We Got Served
- Install PS3 Media Server For WHS via Windows Home Server Console
 
I am confused, the add-in only allows ps3mediaserver functionality within the console, but does nothing to fix the issue regarding the ps3 finding the pms server.
 
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