RobbieH

I thought about going back to rack mount cases, but decided against it. I would be too tempted to go back to the whole setup I had in my last house - patch panel at the top, fancy power distribution unit, rack mount UPS's, rack mount all my switches and firewall, etc. For me, it is a slippery slope.

I have a really good cooler on it. When the server had a 610 in it, I way overbuilt the cooler because I wanted it to be as quiet as possible. Of course now with 6 drives in there, it's all moot now, the drives are louder than any of the fans. And I have it in my wiring closet now anyway, so I don't care about the noise. I made it through last night too. So, I think I fixed whatever was acting up. Previously, I had the RAM in the second two slots (the black pair). When I was looking at motherboard specifics the other day, I noticed that the manual says if only two slots are used, to use the blue ones, so I switched them. This is when problems started. So a couple of days ago after thinking about what had changed, I moved the RAM back and ensured all connections were firmly seated in both RAM, and power connections. All seems to be well now. I think it had to do with either where the RAM was, or maybe it was not seated well. Here is what I ended up with on the new server: Xeon E3 1246V3 240.00 MicroCenter Intel Server Motherboard S1200V3RPL 220.00 NewEgg 2x Kingston 8GB 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM ECC Unbuffered DDR3 1600 156.00 NewEgg WD Red 5TB 214.00 Amazon Cooler Master HAF 912 Mid Tower 43.00 MicroCenter CORSAIR CSM Series CS450M 450W 40.00 NewEgg I already have one WD Red 5TB that I'll pair up with the one that I just bought, and I have an SSD for landing and processing of files. I'm going to boot ESX off of a 32GB USB 3.0 thumb drive. The new 5TB drive arrives today, so I can start transferring data. I have the case and processor sitting on the desk behind me. The rest of the parts will be here tomorrow. I'm pretty excited to see how heavily I can load this system without maxing it out. As you can tell, I don't care so much about this or that case or power supply. I don't have a rack anymore (had a Chatsworth I used for years) and just want something I can sit on a shelf in my wiring closet. I see enough pretty racks and 1u servers and blade systems in data centers as part of my job. I don't need that at home.

I made it through last night without crashing, but it's been crashing every night other than last night. I'm hitting 99% processor even overclocked, and I only have until Thursday until the rest of my new hardware gets here, so I'm going to leave it as-is for now. Of course I'll have no reason to overclock the new Xeon. I picked up the processor and case from MicroCenter today, MC had the Xeon for a whopping $50 less than NewEgg, and I got the very last one they had. Once the new server is built, I can put this one back to stock and it should be good. But this is a Phenom Black, it should be able to handle a little overclocking.

Use WDIDLE3 to disable the head parking on the device. Let me know if you need the links, I wasn't sure if you have seen my other posts regarding this issue or not. I wouldn't worry about the black, IIRC they don't have this issue as high performance takes priority over energy savings. Did you get the warning from Stablebit Scanner? If so, you can look at the SMART status on your black and get the load cycle count.

Wow. Well, set that to disabled and that'll put a stop to it. In my system, I took the drives out one-by-one and put them on a different PC to set the WDIDLE.

Hey jandrews, I recently switched from DP 1.0 to DP 2.0 on my WHS 2011 box. Couldn't be happier. I like some of the features in 2.0. There is still integration into the dashboard, if you care about that.

Every time I lose a disk (which is suddenly quite often due to poor disk choices) I get corrupted backups. Usually I can fix them by running a repair, but over the weekend I had to remove my daughters laptop completely, run a repair, then add it back - all the way to the point that I had to remove the WHS Connector software from her laptop then reinstall.

Don't worry about the PC's power. My dad's HTPC is based on this computer. http://www.amazon.com/Intel-Next-Computing-Black-BOXDCCP847DYE/dp/B00B7I8HZ4/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1424728303&sr=8-2 It doesn't take much to make a very functional HTPC. I've been in your shoes at work, I'll take Netapp over EMC anyday. I hate working with EMC, but unfortunately I've been forced to since 2002 (although I did get out of operations 3 years ago!) To give you an idea, just our enVision implementation was four racks of collectors and arrays. Then there was all the storage...

On the greens you need to run WDIDLE3 and set it to disabled or 5 minutes. Otherwise they are going to have too many Load Cycles (head parks). I have heard of this causing premature failure of these drives when used in a 24/7 environment. I have also heard of WD denying warranty when the rated number of load cycles has been exceeded. Scanner or any SMART reader will tell you how many cycles the drive(s) have. I didn't know about this issue for almost a year, so I'm at over 143,000 load cycles on my green drive. Scanner keeps track of what the manufacturer rates these drives at, and Green drives are rated for 300,000 cycles. Reds are rated for 600,000 cycles. http://support.wdc.com/product/download.asp?groupid=609&sid=113 https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?threads/hacking-wd-greens-and-reds-with-wdidle3-exe.18171/ And so that Christopher doesn't have to say it, this is flashing your firmware so you do run some risk of losing the data on the drive, or even bricking your drive. I have not heard of anyone having issues with it though. When you find out how many load cycles you have, post it up. I'm curious.

Parts ordered today. Hopefully by Friday I'll be assembling my new server. My current one crashed again last night. I'm about to go change out the memory and check all the connections to see if that's the problem. Also going to turn off the 10% overclock, although it's been stable up to now. I bought another 5TB Red drive, so I'll have 2 5TB in the new server, along with the SSD boot. In the existing WHS 2011 server, I have two WD Green 3TB drives. That'll work. I'm going to need more copies of DrivePool and Scanner. How do I add new licenses to my existing license? My plan is to move all the media that is going to the new server using the WHS dashboard to the specific 5TB drive letter. No issues with that, right? Then once it is migrated and in the new server, I add the second drive and create the pool on the new server, and all is good.

I have Plex Media Server, MediaBrowser 3 Server, and Subsonic, all running on WHS 2011 with no trouble at all. It should work for you also. Just in case, don't go setting up a server that you think you are going to keep on Windows 10. If MS does like they've done in the past, you will have to rebuild from scratch when you go to the release product.

Yeah, kind of like ILO on the HP servers I'm guessing.

I won't be using the backup features, I'll keep my existing WHS 2011 for that and Blue Iris. I mean, I already have it, why not? I do need to check the HCL. I haven't even gotten that far yet. I got a real scare yesterday, I thought my motherboard died. I don't keep a monitor on my server, so I carried one in there and hooked it up, and it was hung on a BIOS error. I don't know what happened, all I had to do was go into and out of BIOS setup, and all was well. EDIT: I was looking at the HCL, and SuperMicro does not have any motherboards on the list. I guess SuperMicro is out of the question. This board it is. I'm a fan of Intel boards anyway. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813121781

How does DrivePool differ from Storage Spaces?

Here's what I have so far. What do you think? Xeon E3 1246V3 (this was a good suggestion) http://www.microcenter.com/product/442356/Xeon_E3_1246V3_35GHz_LGA_1150_Boxed_Processor SuperMicro X9SCL-F MLB - http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813182251 http://www.microcenter.com/product/431612/X10SLL-F_LGA_1150_Intel_mATX_Motherboard Had to change motherboards, I wasn't paying close attention and believed MicroCenter's note that said the CPU was 1155 2x 8GB RAM - http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820242041 I took one look at the price of the server OS's and decided the heck with that. I'd rather run VMWare and then like you said Windows 7, Linux, whatever in the VMs. I already have those licenses. I already have WHS 2011 running now. I'm going to keep it running for what it is used for, then build a new server for everything else. VMWare with Windows 7 and Linux in the VMs.

Perfect! I should have known that, I've toyed around in there enough I should have figured that out.

Well, I can always leave BlueIris where it is now and migrate everything else off that machine. Currently, BlueIris is on WHS 2011, and I could leave that machine spun up just for the cameras and workstation backups. The more I read about the different home server options from Microsoft, the more I think I will just go down the path of ESX and Windows 7, Linux, etc. for the applications. How is DrivePool configured and managed for use in a VMWare environment?

Is there a way to assign a drive to only be the repository for duplication? I was just thinking, I have an ST3000DM001 drive in my pool, and was thinking if it was only for duplication, I'd feel a whole lot better.

Hey all, I'm asking here because a lot of you are familiar with the same applications I'll be running. I am going to build a new server, and can't decide on a processor. I was all ready to go with an i7 4790, but now I'm getting a few people telling me I should look at Xeon processors. So the short story is, I am looking for motherboard and processor recommendations. I'll be doing the following: 1. BlueIris is my heaviest processor hog. Honestly though, I may leave it on my existing server and build a new one to sit beside it. If I do this, DrivePool will stay on the existing server (WHS 2011) and I will connect the new server to the old server over gigabit for it to get its data. Or, I may leave it there and put a couple of smaller drives in it, and DrivePool them, then move everything else to the new server. This is still open to discussion. 2. Transcoding - I have MediaBrowser 3 and Plex installed on my server. We use them around the house on different devices for streaming video media. Also, my father connects to my Plex server, he has been spending time in the hospital and enjoys the ability to watch movies on his iPhone 6. (It isn't anything serious, one knee replacement done, one to go). 3. Snatcher applications like CouchPotato and SickBeard. 4. This server will be running VMs. I had settled on ESX, but I may go with Hyper-V just to stay current with Microsoft stuff. I still can't decide on this, to be honest. VMs will be hosting all sorts of operating systems - Windows 7 for WMC and ServerWMC, several Linux applications, many will be network security related such as Snort, etc. And if I decide to retire the old server, WHS 2011 will be moving over. Or I may use Server Essentials as an upgrade - and if so I *believe* it supports Hyper-V VMs, so it might kill two birds with one stone. Regarding running 2 servers, I may slowly migrate things over to the new one so I can retire the old one, I haven't decided, but at least I have the opportunity to do it slowly. I'll probably start with a good sized SSD for boot, landing, processing, etc., and probably stick a 5TB WD Red in there to get me started for stuff I can move over. After that, it just depends on what I decide on having two servers at the same time.

Oh yes, scanner was warning me that my drives were failing.

Run WDIDLE3 on that green drive and set it to /s300 !!

Yep, a failing drive is exactly what caused my server to slow down. Found it with Scanner.

I'm starting to see 500GB SSDs for $199. That's pretty amazing. Certainly not as cheap as spinny drives, and not necessary for streaming movies, but they are getting cheap(ish).

OK, Load Cycle. I guess 142228 is a large number on my green drive. I need to address that with WDIDLE3. The reason I was wanting to see this was due to me adding my new Red drive. There is a firmware update to address the head parking, but when I tried to apply it, it said my firmware was already up to date. With a load cycle count of 57 on that drive, I'd say it is not a problem on that drive. I don't see anywhere that shows how many seconds this is set to, especially not in the Disk Control section.

Yeah and lost the second one of those 2TB Seagates yesterday, that's why I was asking in the other post about how to migrate off. Oh well, that's why we have DrivePool.