I won't reply to the specific question, but the USB multiplier is not restricted the same as the eSATA one. The eSATA is limited to 4 external bays in the EX47x (1 in the EX48x) but the USB ones can support up to 8 drives. Check out Sans Digital models.

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....JBick

EX475, 2 GB, LE-1640
PC1: Vista-->W7 Ultimate/32, (D-Drive RAID-5 Array)
PC2: Lenovo Laptop, Win XP Home SP3
2xLinksys WRT54G v1.1 and 2xNetGear GS105 Gbit switch

I have 7 - 1.5 TB drives and the original 500 GB system drive in my MSS. A lot of people are using the 1.5 TB drives in the MSS.

Thanks, cavediver and JohnBick. I thought 1.5's were ok. Since I am having so much trouble with my eSATA tower with 5 bays and given that the USB towers seem to work fine, I will probably just take my losses on the eSATA tower and buy a USB tower and populate it with 2TB drives as the price comes down for these drives. I know about the WHS 16TB maximum limit for the data pool but that should be enought space for my needs. However, that may be my "famous last words" comment. I am old enough to remember when Mr. Gates made his, now famous, quote about no one ever needing more than 64kb of RAM in their PC.

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It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.
Aristotle - Greek critic, philosopher, physicist, & zoologist (384 BC - 322 BC)

NewEgg has them now for $299 with a limit of one per customer.

If they were around $220 or $230 I would pick a few up. But at $300 I'll wait for prices to drop. Plus I don't see the new WD 1.5TB drives on NewEgg yet either.

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3TB MSS EX490(upgraded CPU-E6300(2.8Ghz dual core Pentium)),
4GB memory
57TB unRAID1a--49TB unRAID2--76TB unRAID3

So who is willing to get? Price is still a little tough to swallow. 1TB WD GP drive is $99 on newegg, so $0.10 per GB vs $0.15 GB for the 2TB. How long do you think before the price comes down???

_________________
Cheers,
Damian

DIY WHS - 12.5TB and growing, too many gadgets to list

Did you read the MediaSmartServer blog today?
Blog - http://www.adigitalhomeblog.com
"Like a midget at a urinal, stay on your toes!" - Lieutenant Frank Drebin

Hi George,

I spoke with Lara about this, and as you suspected there apparently was a miscommunication. Here's what Lara told me:



I hope that addresses any confusion.
Alex

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Alex Kuretz
Remote Notification: Monitoring and alerting for your Home Server via email, Twitter, text message, RSS, push notifications, and on your Mac desktop
Have you tried our Add-Ins?

Thanks Alex and I clicked the Thanks link too. I appreciate your helping with the clairfication. I sent and email to Lara just yesterday asking for the same info but I bet she has not had a chance to get throught all the email she must get yet. I agree. What Lara said and you reported in your post DOES explain what she said. I am sure that is what she meant, now that I have seen her/your explination.

On the other hand, I see that cavediver has seven 1.5TB drives and the original 500GB drive in his EX-470, so it is obvious that he has 1.5TB drives in some sort of Tower connected to his server and apparently they are working just fine. I know Lara is saying the specs do not suppot a 1.5TB drive and she was just reporting that. Understood. Based on cavedivers experience at least his tower seems to support the 1.5TB dives in his specific server configuration. Of course, I can not generalize that to say 1.5TB will work in all attached towers, but having one data point that works is an indication others might. But Lara's advice is appropiate; one needs to check before they buy. I did not do all the checking I should have done before buying a Venus T5 eSATA tower and I have spent lots of time and money paying for that mistake!

_________________
It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.
Aristotle - Greek critic, philosopher, physicist, & zoologist (384 BC - 322 BC)

I have the Sans Digital TR4M-B esata box. I actually have two of them. One has 4-1.5 TB Seagate drives attached to the MSS and the other also has 4-1.5 TB Seagate drives and is attached to my main pc. I'm using the box attached to the pc to back up my MSS video share.

Yes, cavediver, I have read about the Sans Digital towers. Unfortantly, it was too late to save me from ordering the Venus T5 from American Media Services. I have had nothing but headaches from that eSATA tower, but I must admit some of the problems were self-inflicted. I wish I had the Sans Digital box instead. I have heard good things about it and the support thread from the company rep on this forum is great!

Thanks for letting me and others know what eSATA box and type of 1.5TB drives you have and that those drives are working well in that box.

BTW, since you obviously have a need for HDD space, are you at all considering the new WD 2TB drives or do you have all the storage you need for the forseeable future?

_________________
It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.
Aristotle - Greek critic, philosopher, physicist, & zoologist (384 BC - 322 BC)

I do not have all the storage space I need. I'm considering adding a Sans Digital TR4U USB enclosure to my MSS, but I'm not sure if it will have the thruput necessary for streaming blu-ray files to my Popcorn Hour. I will only consider the WD 2 TB drives when the price comes down to below $0.10 per gigabyte. Seagate 1.5 TB drives can be found for $129.00 which equates to $0.09 per gigabyte based on 1397 GB available.

I agree with you about the price of the 2TB drives. The price is too high for me right now. I will wait for it to come down before adding the 2TB drives.

This MAY be off topic. I will leave that to the moderators to decide. If so I could start a new thread? However, I was wondering, cavediver, why you chose to put the backup tower on your pc instead as a Server Backup drive on the server itself. Was it because of the availability of connectors (eSATA and USB) on your MSS? I have a lot of legally obtained movies and I am struggling with various ways of storing these large files (without duplication) and then using server backup instead (the kind introduced with PP1) to have copies in case of a catastrophic failure of some type. There are lots of permutations and combinations I can see to use to deal with backup of these files. You seem to be going a certain way and I was wondering why? Apparently, you have decided to avoid the Server Backup Solution for Share Folders introduced with PP1. I am doing this too, but this week I had that raised as an issue from HP Server Tech Support. Apparently they won’t support using USB drives that are connected to the server and used for backup of a share folder. Maybe that is why you connect the tower to your pc? Your thoughts on the direction you chose would be appreciated.
I thought this public discussion rather than a PM might be useful because others may have the same questions as I do and you seem to be way ahead of me on this. Maybe I and others with a similar problem could benefit from your decisions in this area.

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It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.
Aristotle - Greek critic, philosopher, physicist, & zoologist (384 BC - 322 BC)

You beat me to this, I was going to ask the same question. Are you guys not using duplication because you don't want to use up HDD space of the MSS? I currently have duplication enabled and am now contemplating setting up an additional backup to take offsite. I think there may be a backup thread already, but I couldn't find, so if anyone knows we can take this conversation there.

_________________
Cheers,
Damian

DIY WHS - 12.5TB and growing, too many gadgets to list

Did you read the MediaSmartServer blog today?
Blog - http://www.adigitalhomeblog.com
"Like a midget at a urinal, stay on your toes!" - Lieutenant Frank Drebin

My video share is at 5.88 TB now and I do not have it duplicated. Because the video share is so big, I could not have attached a TR4U to the MSS and used it to backup the video share. The server backup will backup to only one external drive and there is not a drive big enough. Also, I wanted a backup and complete redundancy with my video streaming so I attached another TR4M to my main PC and copy (manually), the videos to it as a backup. That way if my MSS dies, I can install myihome on the PC and be back up and streaming in a matter of minutes. My Popcorn Hour sees my PC on the network, so it won't be any problem to switch from the MSS to the PC for streaming. I actually do it the other way around for my music (and this is only because I had this setup before I got my MSS and haven't taken the time to switch it around). I stream music to a Squeezebox from an external USB drive attached to my PC and have a duplicated copy on the MSS. If something happens to the PC, I can load Squeezecenter on the MSS and stream to the Squeezebox from it. Also, the drives attached to the PC in the TR4M are each individually formated to NTFS, so each one can be put into any windows computer and the data will be available.

I am very glad to see there is more interest in this backup discussion. I have had questions about it for others for a long time. But since I started this moving in an Off Topic fashion, I am going to create another thread to contine with the discussion.

I wanted to only ask cavediver about why he connected his tower to the a PC instead of to the server for backup, but with this amount of interest I realize I too have much more I would hope we could discuss. That calls for a seperate thread.

Damian, I will reply to your question in the new thread I will now go create. I will come back to this post and update it with the new thread link so cavediver and you, Damian, can come over to that thread. Also others who are here and would like to continue please, please come too. I hope we can get a lot of discussion going on the new thread.

I will Call the new thread " Backup Strategies-Which Combinations are Possible; What is Best?. Back in a minute or two with the updated link here.

Update: Here in the linked page on this forum:
viewtopic.php?f=1&t=3336

_________________
It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.
Aristotle - Greek critic, philosopher, physicist, & zoologist (384 BC - 322 BC)

Thanks cavediver. I am sorry. I did not get the other ON TOPIC tread started before you ansered here. Thanks for your answer. I have seen it. Do you mind also posting it on the new topic thread? I will reply there if that is okay with you and I probably have another quesiton for you about this as well. If you don't want to move you reply over to the new topic that okay. Sorry I should have just moved to the new thread right away instead of asking you to reply here.

I am going over to the new thread now. Thank you for your reply. I hope you will come over and post there too.

_________________
It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.
Aristotle - Greek critic, philosopher, physicist, & zoologist (384 BC - 322 BC)