Dragging my server up to date!!!!

[slaveofconvention]

So late last week I got a health warning on one of the ten drives in my Windows home server. WHS allows you to pull potentially faulty drives and replace them without any data loss UNLESS it's the primary drive with the O/S installed on it.

Guess which drive it was......

So I started the LONG (longer than I expected) process of backing up the 5-6TB of data on there so I could do a full reinstall on a new primary drive. I think one of the main reasons it's taken so long (apart of the sheer volume of data) is the fact that all 8 SATA ports on the motherboard are SATA-I ports with a 150mb speed cap but it's finally about done - I set the final TB to backup before I went to work this morning and as of now, there's about 3 hours to go (specifically movies O-Y - for some reason the move did Z first, then started with A-B-C etc)

While at work I popped into my local computer store and decided, pretty much on the spur of the moment, that now was as good as time as any to upgrade so here we go - wish me luck.

Current Specs:
Asus K8N4-E Deluxe
754 pin AMD Sempron 2800+ CPU (1.6 Ghz)
3x 512MB DDR400 (Total 1.5GB)
Multiple Hard Disks & Single Optical Drive
Nvidia 8400 PCI-e Graphics Card
Microsoft Windows Home Server (v1)
Coolermaster 600W PSU
Lian Li 343-b Cube case (4 years after buying this hugely expensive case I still love it to bits and can't get up the courage to take a dremel to it heh)

The drives and video card are staying the same - as is the case and PSU but pretty much everything else needed to be changed for anything substantial to be changed. As I've had 8 years of flawless service from the Board and CPU, the replacements are the same brand heh - who says there's no loyalty....

New hardware
Asus M5A78L Motherboard
AMD Athlon II 250 (Dual Core 3Ghz)
8 GB PNY DDR3 1333
Microsoft Windows Home Server 2011

Yup - new software to go with the new hardware - WHS v1 is a 32bit system so wouldn't have a clue what to do with 8GB Ram heh - and there are a load of other reasons to move on to the new 64bit Server 2008 based system.

I'm actually losing 2 SATA ports with this upgrade but I can live with that - as I've upgraded the drives over the years, I've ended up with a huge chunk of spare space (no complaints here) so I'm thinking I'll remove all of the sub-1TB drives, leaving me with a little under 8TB instead of the 9 I had before - as I have about 6TB data max, hopefully this'll keep me going until drive prices start heading back to more sensible levels! I can always add additional controllers if needbe - I have a single 2port PCI SATA card already but it's a 150mb thing so I'm not going to use it unless I have to.

AAAAAAANYway - even my wife is now complaining that I'm writing too much so I'll shut up and let you guys know how things end up heh...

Oh and yes there'll be some pics soon too before anyone starts with the smilies

[Airbozo]

Be aware that drive extender is no longer in WHS v2... The good news is that you can now use raid controllers. I have not switched to the new version due to the drive extender issue. Yet.

[slaveofconvention]

A little colour to break up all that text heh

The server as it stands (admittedly partially stripped - I've been on with this a few days now)

And a closer look at the motherboard side of the case - there's actually a single hard disk in this side too as I ran out of space on the other side....

I know the cable management is horrible, but there's a limit to how much you can do when you have 10 sata data cables as well as the usual other ones heh (and I havent actually ever tried to improve it yet)

The case has a whole second section too and this is where the PSU and the majority of the drives live....

And finally the best bit heh - the new toys....

And now just to wait for the backup to complete..... More soon (hopefully)

[slaveofconvention]

Be aware that drive extender is no longer in WHS v2... The good news is that you can now use raid controllers. I have not switched to the new version due to the drive extender issue. Yet.

To be honest, this is the only reason I didn't upgrade a while back. Really I'm not too concerned about this although, I admit, the exclusion of DE initially annoyed me to the point where I swore I'd never do it. I can imagine me doing this all again in a couple weeks and going back to v1 but I figured I should at least give it a go. I originally ran my server on XP so I'm long used to the "hassle" of manually managing drives - it isn't the end of the world, but I do still think it was a major dropping of the ball by Microsoft.

[Airbozo]

To be honest, this is the only reason I didn't upgrade a while back. Really I'm not too concerned about this although, I admit, the exclusion of DE initially annoyed me to the point where I swore I'd never do it. I can imagine me doing this all again in a couple weeks and going back to v1 but I figured I should at least give it a go. I originally ran my server on XP so I'm long used to the "hassle" of manually managing drives - it isn't the end of the world, but I do still think it was a major dropping of the ball by Microsoft.

Originally I was bummed about drive extender, but mainly because I spent weeks trying to force WHS v1 to use a raid controller and ended up giving in. Now I guess I have to dig out my raid controller again and bite the bullet. My buddy switched over right after release and loves the new version despite the missing SW. One thing he mentioned that was easier, was the remote media options. He can use his WHS like a jukebox from work for audio and videos.

[Fuganater]

RAID controller works just fine for me with WHS V1. The only problem is that it doesn't recognize drives over 2TB...

[slaveofconvention]

I always used a basic JBOD setup with WHS looking after everything. I kinda figured that as MS had gone out of its way to make disk management simple, it made sense to just let it do it's thang heh

[Airbozo]

RAID controller works just fine for me with WHS V1. The only problem is that it doesn't recognize drives over 2TB...

What raid controller? I tried so many cards and procedures to get raid working and never could. If your raid controller is working (in raid) in WHS1 you are in the minority. I even escalated this to Microsoft and was told it is not possible.

The 2TB limit is the OS btw.

[Fuganater]

Intel RAID Controller SRCSAS018E. Kaylin told me he had it. It was $150 on Ebay BNIB and I offered $75 and got it.

[slaveofconvention]

So I got a lil impatient waiting for the last of the backup to go through.....

One CPU installed.....

Followed by a pair of 4GB sticks of RAM.....

And (temporarily until I find something better) the stock cooler installed too...

That's all I could do until the backups were done but I just got in from the store and hey presto.....

Time to grab me a screwdriver I think.... The only thing left on here now is a little over 1TB of backups - which is a testament to the efficiency of WHS v1's backup system - that's nearly 18 months of backups on three desktops, one media center, two laptops and two netbooks plus an OLD backup of my desktop when I switched from Vista to Windows 7 - I kept the old vista pc images just in case....

In case you're curious, the 5 full hard disks are the drives I've been using for backup - the top 5 are the drives which are still installed in the server....

Time to shift some dust bunnies heh - probably tomorrow before I come back to this - I get on ok with my neighbours but 9.20pm is a little late to start up my compressor for some dust blasting heh