hansolo77

I actually sent him an email and he is willing to ship it to me.. cost would probably be like $50 to ship, which is still cheaper than NewEgg's price. I just wish I had some established credit so I could make payments instead of trying to come up with the cash, since I'm broke right now!

Lol... why does this have to be local pickup in Texas only?! http://pages.ebay.com/link/?nav=item.view&id=121713086026&alt=web

I'm going to hijack into this thread! This is a very intriguing process you're going through. I've recently been considering a major upgrade of my system as well. In fact, I recently bought a few more drives, better CPU, and a new controller card. I'm getting to the point now though where I've exceeded the drive capacity of my case, even with drive expanders that give you additional 3.5 drives in place of 5.25. So I'm looking for a cheap server chassis to start my ultimate build in. The 4224 looks like the perfect case, but it's kind of expensive for my income. I'm going to have to save up for awhile. I'm curious where you got yours from. Did you order direct or buy from a retailer?

I missed that you had replied to this... I currently have WHS 2011 setup to create a backup of my OS drive using the built-in WHS function. The problem I'm afraid may happen is the drive I'm using is in the last drive bay of my enclosure, and there isn't any fan holes, so that drive is constantly overheating. I'd like to have an offsite backup for safety sake should that drive actually fail. Years ago we had a fire, and my server OS drive was damaged and died. This was running WHS v1. Luckily, I was able to get the drive working long enough to do a CloneZilla copy to a replacement drive before it died again. I have an external drive enclosure that is USB. It's basically a hot-swap caddy that I can put different drives in on the fly. I had originally configured WHS 2011 to use that with a spare 200gb drive I had laying around. The problem with that is there is a power button on the caddy, and if I turn it off, WHS 2011 yells at me all day about the backup drive being unavailable. If I turn it on, it never shuts off, even if the computer is in standby, so the drive overheats really quickly. Currently, my OS drive only uses 27.8gb of it's 120gb capacity. I suppose I could buy a small USB stick (32/64gb) and just leave that plugged in. It's not going to get hot at all. Mechanical drives just create to much heat. But I'd also like to have an online option "just in case".

I've not looked into this much, as I don't have any of the providers you list. But I was wondering if the potential of this add-in could be used to back up your server's OS drive into the Cloud storage of your provider. And if so, how would one go about doing a restore should an OS drive become useless? I'm looking for something I can automate that will keep an "updated daily" of incremental (not complete every time) backups for my server, should the unforeseeable time occur that I lose everything. I've been asking around in IRC, and it looks like the Seedbox I'm subscribed to would allow me to use their drive space they allocate for me to be used as a backup. I could simply run an sFTP connection to it, and upload my OS drive right now. However, there's no automation to it, and no way to do incremental updates. Plus, I don't know if something like that is capable of completely backing up EVERYTHING (hidden/system files, etc). And as it would be, the OS would be there, but there would be no way to restore those files back without first reinstalling the OS and the FTP programs. Does such a thing exist that I'm looking for? Would CloudDrive provide this for me?

Alright thanks. Maybe I won't need to worry about it too long when I get that new controller card.

The beta you linked in a previous post (the one about why it didn't show up in the WHS dashboard).

The ID it gave me was - IDA2YXPE

What is the purpose of the SFF-8087 to SFF-8087 cable?

Alright, thanks for the tips, I'll look into it more.

... Wow you're good. It is a Silicon Image card, but not those 2 you listed. Mine is a SiL3112. I'm not sure if there is a firmware upgrade for it or not. As long as it won't affect anything, I'll just ignore it. In DrivePool, it does this on the 'hover', where I will hover over the Hitachi (2nd port) and it gives me the model/serial of the WD. Would this be why DP isn't writing any data to that drive, or maybe DP just isn't displaying it?

Yeah, those SAS cards sound sweet as hell. I don't know the first thing about them though. From what I gathered, the controller card has 2 ports. Plug 1 cable in, and it splits into 4 (4 different drives). Then you plug in another cable, and it splits into 4 more drives (totaling 8 drives). The thing that confuses me then is how these 8 can magically turn in to 32 or 64. Some product descriptions say their 1 card (with 2 ports) can control up to 64 drives. How is that possible?! They don't make 1->32 cables right? And then there are these expander things, not even sure what that's all about. I gotta be honest though. I really can't afford anything at the moment. My paycheck comes to about $200 a week, and I pay $60/week to my Dad for rent/utilities, and about $20/week on comic books (don't judge, they're way cool!). I also have a Seedbox subscription ($15/month) and USENET subscription ($25/month). All told, that's $440 a month, or $110/week I can spend on frivolous toys. Not to mention the occasional slow week (where I only work 20 hours, and get like $150 or so pay) or when I need to buy something like medication or gas. These things I just recently bought were paid with me working 2 very long weeks (32 hours each, a lot for me). As for options available to me. What should I try saving up my money for? I'm really thinking I need to upgrade the controller card. 6 drives on board (mobo) and 6 via 2 controller cards. If these SAS/RAID cards really can drive that amount of drives, it seems fairly obvious what the next thing should be, it's just a matter of deciding what to get. I looked at the various cards you guys replied to me about (9240-8i, LSI SAS 9207-8i, IBM ServeRAID M1015) and they all seem like great options, but outside my budget. Plus, I'm not sure what "cross flashed" means lol. Maybe I'll keep looking around and asking for suggestions till I find something doable. My current motherboard I'm using is an ASUS P5G43T-M Pro (link). That will help show where I'm coming from. Currently the CPU is now the Intel Core2Duo e8400. The top PCIe slot (x1) is holding the 4-port expansion card, the 2nd PCIe 2.0 slot (x16) is empty. The top PCI slot has the other 2-port controller card. The bottom PCI slot is empty. I've been reading up, and even though the PCIe 2.0 slot is x16, it will control x8 just fine. Thanks for the tips and advice. I really appreciate the background details about that HighPoint card, and your confirmations that it's not something I should get.

Hopefully this will be my last support issue! I have 2 drives. They are both using the same controller expansion card. When I installed them, I named each one in Windows Disk Manager to help me identify them. One is a Western Digital and the other is a Hitachi. The Western Digital is labeled as "PSU" (it's not safe at the moment, but it's sitting on top of the PSU) and the Hitachi is labeled as "Expansion Bay 5 - Server Backup". Before I added the Western Digital one into the DrivePool, I noticed DP was detecting BOTH drives as the WD. The only way I knew which was which was because I had named them in Disk Manager. The same was true in Scanner to a degree. I was going through the drives in my system and assigning them Locations for my SMS alerts. When I came to these 2 drives, They appeared in the Scanner screen with their correct Model Numbers, but when I check their Disk Details, the Hitachi is being detected as the WD (just like the DrivePool was doing). As it is right now, I have no way to bring up the actual drive details of the Hitachi. It always comes up as WD. (see image) I just want to know if this is a mere aesthetic issue, or a more serious underlying problem that I will experience in more detail as I go forward. If I add the WD to the DrivePool, is DP going to mistakenly add the Hitachi as well? If I assign the Hitachi as not in the pool, will Scanner still be able to scan the drive? When I was getting all my drives into the pool yesterday, I noticed it was spanning data across all the drives EXCEPT the WD. It's almost like it wasn't there (even though it WAS in the list). Could this be a problem with the controller? Could it be drivers? Or is it maybe something in the program?

Actually, without modifying any of the settings, especially in the advanced area, I found that the initial surface scan was done in parallel with ALL drives at once. I think that was partly why it was taking so long, because DrivePool was also actively scanning the drives to verify duplication. I'll double check the settings, but I'm pretty sure the only things I changed were the maximum temp reading on one drive because it doesn't get much air (see other post), and then maybe some tweaks to the "location" aspects.

Thanks for the information. This is definitely happening on just one drive, and it IS a WD Green. So I'm just going to ignore it. I've only had it maybe a year, and it is already over 475k "parks". Now I'm wondering if there is a way I can trigger a drive to spin down and not be active unless I'm wanting to use it. In my case I have a 5-drive hotswap cage. The fan on the back works great for 4 of the drives, but the last bay doesn't have any fan holes. I was actually shocked to see this. It's completely blocked by the backplane circuit board. I've decided NOT to include this in the DrivePool, and have actually configured it to be used ONLY for server backups (I don't have an external drive). Is there anyway I can configure this drive to spin down and maybe switch off except to maybe spin up 5 minutes before a backup? I don't know if your software can do it, or if I need some other program. I wouldn't want to universally have all my drives do that.

Never mind, I think I fixed it. I found a drop down window that displayed the surface blocks (with some red ones). In that menu was a sub-menu where I selected "mark unreadable sectors as unchecked". I then engaged the option to start the check, and if came back clean. Not very intuitive, but it worked.

Sorry I keep posting new topics, but I'm really having a hard time with Scanner! I was doing a manual scan of all my drives. It had already automatically scanned the file systems and everything was fine. Then I initiated the manual scan. It completed on 5 of my drives, hadn't started on 4 of them, and 3 of them are now marked as damaged. I think the server triggered a backup of my client I was using at the time, and the system couldn't handle any more multitasking. It just froze up completely. I was able to remote desktop in, but I couldn't get the dashboard to re-open so I told it to reboot the whole system. When it came back up, everything in Scanner is reporting I have bad sectors and damaged files. I tried to do a 'recover' and it just made a copy of the files where I told it to. That was good, because I don't think DrivePool had completely finished duplicating. However, now I still have bad 'sectors'. I'm pretty confident the sectors are fine, it's just the program lost track of where it was and is throwing up an error. Is there anything I can do without starting over again? I had this happen before when I was playing around with it (before I had the right installer). The only way I could fix it was by doing a complete removal of the program and all the left over files.

Wow you guys make me feel so inadequate. Here I've been bragging about my server to the nerds I work with, and you guys have servers in the +70TB! Mine is only 15TB. Lol. Man, I'd love to get my hands on some of that hardware you guys have. I'm using a mid-tower case that has 6 internal 3.5 bays and 5 5.25 bays. I converted the bottom 3 5.25's into a 5-bay hotswap. Currently my controller is the on-board mobo's SATA and 2 expansion cards (4-port SATA III and 2-port SATA II). I'm maxed on on the number of drives I can have with this setup (12 drives). They are all of varying capacities. I'd really like a large case that I can put 20 drives in. Those 4U cases are sweet, but I'm just an (above) average guy who doesn't know anything about server cases and boards. I'm considering buying a HighPoint 8-port card (link) that will replace the old 2-port one. But I'm totally lost when it comes to the SAS connectors. I want to learn, and I've been researching, but everything is just too damned expensive! What kind of jobs do you guys have anyway? LOL. I'm on a medical restriction because I can't cope with stress and anxiety, and can only work 20-30 hour weeks, so I work in a grocery store. Doesn't pay very well, so I have to live at home with my Dad. I just went through a big upgrade. That's what introduced me to StableBit. I really wanted to offload my Emby (Media Browser) server installation to my home server, but it had WHS v1 installed on it, which is limited to x86. Emby required installing an SQL database, which required x64. So I knew I had to upgrade the OS. I just went though 4 weeks of buying stuff to make WHS v2011 the best it can be. Originally running on a Celeron 420 processor, I'm now running on a Core2Duo e8400 (which is better than my media center computer!). I also got a 4TB Seagate NAS drive. I wasn't aware of the 8TB drives you guys seem to be using now. I'm planning on getting another 4TB because it's half the cost. I also got me a 120gb SSD drive (my first ever) to install WHS 2011 on. I really like it, it just sorta hangs there (taped (I know cheap)) on the side back side of the mobo tray out of the way and never goes above 30c in temps. I love that! I'm currently looking at a RAM upgrade, as the last RAM I bought was some cheap, generic stuff to just increase from the 2x500mb I had to 2gb. My motherboard can support 8gb total. Should I bother? Anybody got any pointers? Anybody know where I can get some good prices on better hardware, and what would you recommend? Right now, I'm just kinda floating with the storage I have, waiting for a drive to fail, then buy something LARGER to replace it with. Not ideal, but it helps with the pocket.

Ok, I'm definitely going to buy DrivePool when I get paid. I'm still "on the fence" about Scanner. I've completely uninstalled (and removed all previous settings) and reinstalled the correct version (via wssx file). I've been letting it go through it's paces and seems to be working much smoother now. In fact, it might just be my new processor I installed yesterday. Anyway, I've noticed a lot of SMART warning popping up in my WHS Alerts about overheating. I've ignored those issues for now because I've been doing a lot of "pooling" with to migrate my storage from WHS v1 to the new WHS 2011. However, a couple of the Alerts have been specific to things like exceeding Load Cycle Count. From the details, this is a report of how many "parks" it has done. I've had a couple of these drives for a few years now, and I expect them to die eventually. But it got me to thinking. In the "Disk Control" area, I can configure different aspects of some of these drives. I'm curious what the best practices would be for a WHS that does daily client backups and then runs on-demand for video file sharing. I believe in WHS v1 I manually went through each drive's Windows Properties and configured them to use Quick Removal modes, and configured the power scheme to never power down the drives. However, one of my drives is exceeding that recommended Load Cycle Count (most likely from power ups and suspends). Is there a preferred method to configure my drives so they'll last longer?

OK I will try this one tomorrow. I'm in the process right now of restoring a 4tb drive's worth of data into the new storage pool, gonna take me another 11 hours or so. Loving the DrivePool. One thing I noticed about the Scanner software (even though it wasn't the wssx one)... it seemed to be running very slow. While I was configuring it and letting it run it's scans, it seemed to take an awful amount of time doing the scan on even a small 500gb drive. Like 3 hours at least. Is that typical behavior? I have 12 drives in my system, and if it takes that long to run a scan on my SMALLEST drive, it would take forever to scan all of the drives. And with a schedule of 30 days, it would be scanning the whole time. Isn't it advertised that the Scanner uses a "fast" surface scan? I dunno, maybe I misread it. Thanks again for replying back. I'll be in touch if I have any other issues or questions.

I'm expirmenting with StableBit DrivePool and StableBit Scanner before I decide to buy it (thanks for having this offer available!). When I installed the DrivePool program, it appeared in the Dashboard with no problem. However, when I installed the Scanner, it never installed anything to the Dashboard. It looks like the only way I can access this program directly is through a Remote Desktop to the server. If this is the case, I don't know if I'll be using this software, as I already have HD-Sentinel running and it does pretty much the same thing. I was hoping to have some form of Dashboard integration. Is there something I missed in my installation, or a setting I need to enable? Also, I'm using WHS 2011. BTW, DrivePool is working great! I appreciate it's function to not remove existing data. That enabled me to have a backup of my old server's data prior to upgrading. I know this isn't the right forum for that, but I just thought I'd mention it!