myrkr

Thanks for sharing that! I think that will probably be my next step is to get an LSI SAS card as I had a look at them before and they seem to be a very good option. For now I took the easy way out and went with option one and swapped out a 4TB drive for a 16TB one. So this bought me some time, but I do need to probably do something next time I run out of space beyond just a drive swap as this system is 11 years old now and could use an upgrade.

I think each person will have different needs with their specific use case. For some people noise is a factor and they might prefer 5400 rpm drives, while others want more performance and want 7200 rpm drives. Those aren't the only reasons of course, but it really comes down to individual needs. In my case I want max single mechanical drive performance alongside close to enterprise or above reliability. So these HGST drives fit the bill for my needs.

Went with a Western Digital WD Ultrastar DC HC550 I had done some research many many years ago and found that the Ultrastar 8TB seemed like a pretty solid drive with low failure rates based on the data available from storage companies. I've more or less stuck with them since then. I think Western Digital bought them years ago and that's what the HGST brand name is if I remember correctly. I think (but could be wrong) that WD didn't actually change anything and still has Hitachi producing these drives?

Thanks for the replies @Sirkassadand @Umfriend I agree that the drive replacement is definitely the easiest path to take, which is partially why it's been my main go to over the last 3-4 years. Each time I replace a drive I think "next time I'll more seriously consider upgrading the whole system". But that never seems to happen. lol Looks like maybe I'll just bite the bullet and do another drive swap.

I'm in the process of trying to figure out the best path forward with my home server. It's about 8-9 years old now, running WHS 2011 on an i3-4150 with 8gb memory. It's mainly used as a file server and streams media to a media player. The motherboard has 6 Sata connectors, the C:/OS drive is a Samsung 840 SSD, the other 5 HDDs are a mix of HGST drives ranging from 4TB-16TB. The system has been performing fine, usually I get around 120MB/s with any transfers and I'm happy enough with that performance for now. My main issue is I'm out of space and can't back up my movie collection (about 20TB). So given the age of the system I'm debating my options and have come up with the following 1) Replace one of the 4TB drives with another 16TB drive. This would solve the problem for about $350 dollars 2) Add a PCIe SATA expansion card to connect the x4 old 4TB drives I have sitting around. Though I'd need an external enclosure since my case can't hold any more drives. It seems like from reading reviews that these cards can be finicky and I don't really wanna deal with instability. So I'm not sure on this option. 3) Upgrade motherboard/cpu to a mobo that has at least 8x sata ports (ideally would aim for x10-x12 ports). I'm not finding a lot of decent options here though unless I'm missing boards it seems like most are $500ish dollars, plus then a cpu (haven't even looked for another cpu that supports ECC yet). 4) An option I'm not thinking of? Any advice or thoughts would be appreciated. Thanks

Thanks @Shaneand @Christopher (Drashna) Went through and did the uninstall and reinstall and my pool was restored back and is functioning normally again.

Looking for a little guidance so as to avoid making any errors that could cause damage. Avira Antivirus updated and for some reason the settings are different so it flagged all of my Stablebit Drivepool (and Stablebit Scanner) files on my WHS2011 system. I suspected this was a heuristic error on Avira's part, but did some searching in the forum to confirm that was true. My issue is that for whatever reason Avira is unable to restore the program files back into the correct spots, so instead it just dumped them into a folder on the desktop called "RESTORED". Clearly that is not very helpful as I don't know how to put them back with the right location structure for both Drivepool and Scanner within their original program folders. When I load the dashboard I find both Drivepool and Scanner are missing as they are disabled in safemode. What is the ideal method to fix this? I thought I saw some people mention to just uninstall Drivepool and Scanner, then reinstall them. I'm not overly concerned with Scanner, but will an uninstall/reinstall mess up my existing pool? And am I uninstalling at the OS level if that is the method to use? And then when I reinstall will they'll get picked up on the dashboard again and enabled? Thanks

Hello, not sure if this is exactly the right place to ask, but it seemed like the closest fit. I currently have a WHS 2011 server with both Drivepool and Scanner and it's been running great for years as a centralized source for all of my files. It's accessible to the rest of the network so all systems connected can connect (pending they have the right login details to access their shares). In an effort to consolidate systems and reduce the extra power consumption of running other systems 24/7 I was considering taking those systems offline and moving all of the functions over to the server since it's on 24/7 anyways. This brings me to my question, which is wondering what advice anyone might have for trying to keep my main shares (documents, photos, videos, etc.) separate from new content coming onto the server, basically some type of security gap between files that should be scanned by anti-virus before they enter the mix with the rest of the main pool. In my head I was envisioning some type of sandbox that files are dumped into first and scanned, and only once they're cleared they can be moved to the main pool. Right now I have an external hard drive attached to the server and content on it, which I then scan, but this isn't really that isolated as it's still connected to the server, and the server is transferring the files onto that external hard drive, so it is handling them in the process. To slightly complicate things, in some cases I want the server to act as my FTP agent, connecting to another server I have offsite with mixed content that others have access to as well (my son mainly). While I trust his diligence to not allow some type of compromised file on that server, I'd rather be safe than sorry and would love a way to use my home server to FTP into the remote server and download files onto the external drive and act like a holding cell where I can screen those files before they have access to the main server shares and pool. Happy to offer more information if what I'm asking isn't clear enough. Would greatly appreciate any feedback anyone might be able to offer. Thanks!

Been testing a little more and have found that on average my current speeds for copying from client to server are around 100-125MB/s. Something that didn't dawn on me before, and honestly something I can't really even remember in regards to my WHS V1, is the system drive supposed to be added to the pool? I looked around and couldn't find anything that gave too much insight, just something about the data on the system drive partition being added to the pool if I added it. It doesn't look like I can use the SSD optimizer plug-in however unless I add the SSD (system drive to the pool). I'm going to have to look more into the network bridging and see if I can make that work. The new motherboard I have has dual ports and does support teaming, however I couldn't find much documentation online that showed how well it worked with WHS V2. It appears that the underlying support is baked into the later OS's like Server 2012, and Server 2008 does support it, but driver support seems iffy. Thanks for all the help btw

Okay, that makes sense on the SSD Optimizer plug-in. Thanks for that information. Currently I do not have the Network IO Boost option enabled, so I'll try that out and see what kind of results I get. I did a little more testing last night though and found that when I transfer something from a client to the server that the speeds quickly max out my connection. Copying a single 4gb file for instance from the client to the server shows around 120-125MB/s. When I copy directly from my old WHS V1 server to the new WHS V2 server though it seems like my max is about 70MB/s, and on average like 50-60MB/s. I'm not exactly sure where the difference is coming from between the two, I'm guessing it's something to do with the way I'm copying files between the servers. I'm copying them from on the client, but between the two servers. So I'm not initiating the transfer directly from the desktop of the WHS V1 and then over to WHS V2 as seen on the network. I'm handling the transfer by copying between the shared folders on my Win 7 machine, over to the folders on WHS V2. I assume that because I'm using the client as the middleman I'm adding an extra piece into the equation which is slowing things down. But when I transfer directly to from the client to WHS V2 I get a saturated connection instantly. I'll have a look and do some of those tweaks as well and see what happens. As for the speeds on my old WHS V1 I'm not exactly sure how I accomplished it. Dumb luck? My WHS V1 setup wasn't anything special really, an Athlon X2 Regor, 2GB ram, Gigabyte motherboard with Intel GB. The router is a Netgear WNDR3700 connected to a Netgear 8 port switch. All the stuff is regular gigabit rated with Cat 5E. The OS drive was an old Seagate drive (7200.8?) and then the storage drives were a mix of WD RE 2TB and 1TB drives. I never really tinkered around much with the settings, I just left things as they were and on average large files would copy at around 100MB/s and often times I would see 125MB/s. I actually considered for a while with my new server build upgrading to 10GbE to take advantage of the faster speeds since my current 1GbE connection seems to be my limitation. But the cost was way to expensive for me to justify.

So I've read around the forums quite a bit, plus read the notes on the SSD Optimizer, and if I understand things correctly, the SSD optimizer plug-in would need two drives if I have duplication enabled. My question is, what if I don't enable real-time duplication and instead allow for duplication to take place later at night. In that case, could I use just a single drive with the SSD optimizer plug in and have it work correctly? Will it just use the SSD as the landing zone, and then move the single file to the drive of it's choice, and then later at night perform duplication? I wasn't sure if it was an automatic necessity to have two SSDs if I have duplication of folders enabled, but not in real time. On a separate but similar note, my interest in the SSD optimizer plug-in comes from wanting to max out the write speed, since I'm often writing big files (30-40GB) I'd like to not sit there and wait if I don't have too. So it seems like the SSD optimizer plug-in would be an excellent option. I've been a bit spoiled coming from my WHS V1 where I routinely saw 100+ mbps on big files and often would completely saturate the network and bounce around 120-125 mpbs for most of the transfer. After living with that as my normal I would like to make sure I optimize my setup to try and equal those speeds. Currently in my initial testing of my WHS 2011 with Drivepool and an 8TB pool made up of two 4TB WD RE drives I haven't seen anything faster than 60 mbps really during transfers. So I'm hoping I can make some adjustments to get the speed up. Thanks