Thanks

I currently have the stock 500gb as the system drive...and even though I had the new 1TB drives (3) at the time or purchase I never thought about swapping the drives around.

If I wanted to increase the initial storage in the box by another 500gb, ie replace current 500gb with 1TB, is there an easy way to do this to guarantee I wont lose any data???

Help appreciated

Sorry if this is a newbie question.... Overwhelmed with the amount of info here. I've been reading for the last 6 hours after purchasing the EX475, but haven't opened the box yet.

I plan to remove the 2x500 HDD (and use them elsewhere) and then install four 1TB drives into the MSS.

QUESTION (sounding like Jim Halpert): "How can the MSS be setup so that WHS does NOT pool all the drives?" (I mean, I want Drive0=C:,D: and Drive1=E: and Drive2=F: and Drive3=G: .... then external drives to follow as H: I: J: K: L: etc... )

Is Dwight Schrute here to provide an ANSWER ?

Thanks in advance. I'll keep reading through the forums... maybe Dwight was already here. LOL

well, you will have to remote into the MSS and go through the admin console and add them like you would any other drive and not do anything in the console.

I do have to ask, why would you not want to pool the drives?

I'm reading and learning more... I am NOT an IT guy... Newbie scared of networking etc...

I've always kept separate drives for OS, for DATA, for PHOTOS, for VIDEO, etc. That made for easier backups. I want to be able to easily and quickly remove, say my PHOTO drive and put it into an external enclosure that I might take with me to another location.

This is not meant to be sarcastic... but what are the benefits of POOLING the drives? I mean besides having a huge amount of contiguous uninterrupted storage?

I'm not sure if I want to use the Duplication and Backup functions either... I usually manually backup my DATA. Am I living in the 90's ??

using the built in shares in WHS and pooling all the drives is mainly for simplicity. WHS will also monitor the drives to check on their health, and will alart you to problems. If you created different drives you will have to manage them manually.

Now, as for what you will see on the client pc's, you will not see any difference from using different drives or using the share folders in WHS as they will function exactly the same and look like folders. Now, if you decide one day you want to have another folder(drive) for what ever reason, all you will have to do is create another folder in the connector software and will also make it extreamly easy to manage who has access to it.

Now, if you want to take it out and carry it with out, then the only option is to manually manage it yourself and not let WHS do it. Now, the beauty of WHS is you can log into your server from anywhere in the world and access ALL of your data and even your PC as if you are sitting at your desk.

The duplication is an added layer of data protection, just in case one drive fails catastrophicly, you will not loose that data. For example, the bearing lock up on the drive, then they ONLY thing you can do is spend alot of money to recover that data. If you use duplication then you remove the bad drive, add a new one in, and you didn't loose anything.

The backup function...... oh, it has saved my life. Have you ever messed up your PC's configuration, like playing around in the registry, and then all of the sudden you can't boot your computer anymore? and you can't repair it? then the only thing you can do is format the drive and install everything again, and can take hours. Using the PC backup all you have to do is boot off the PC restore disk, and in like 45 mins youre computer is back to where it was yesterday. This is one of the features that people take for granted until you use it and it saves you all day to restore your computer.

Hmmm.... so if I assign drive letters then I lose health monitoring?


Remote access won't work if I manage my own drives? That's not good ...



But wouldn't this mean you're losing half the storage space for redundancy? How is duplication different from a RAID, then?


This is not practical for me because my PC contains 10 HDDs totally 3350 GB of storage. I manually backup my "mission critical" files, and live with the fact that I would lose a lot of "working files" and downloaded utilities etc...

THANKS for your input. I have to reconsider this, I guess. I'm so used to knowing that "my Data is on D:", and "my Video is on V:", and "my Photos are on P:", etc. I was always intimidated by "//server/shares/user/data" kind of lingo.

You can exclude directories on your PC so they won't be backed up, thus avoiding the issue of backing up your entire 10 drive 3TB PC.

You can also map drives to the shares on the server, so that V: points to the Video share, D: points to Photos share, etc.

There's tons of discussion around Drive Extender and the way WHS does redundancy, but in a nutshell if you set all shares to be duplicated, then yes, you're losing half your storage capacity to rendundancy. This is different than RAID in that:
a. you don't dedicate an entire volume to duplication, only the specific shares you've set to be duplicated
b. the file system is NTFS, in a worst case scenario you can put the drives into any PC and recover your data
c. Any size drives can be mixed and match

I think you should keep reading about how people use the system, and ask us more specific questions if you want help.

my jaw dropped on the amount of storage.... wow..

anyway, yakuza hit the nail right on the head about everything. I do believe that you will loose the health monitoring in the sense of how WHS monitors it. Now, you can still manually go and look, but being able to contol it through the console i believe, will not work anymore.

As for remote access, i do not believe you can access anything but the WHS shares. So if you create drives instead of folder shares, i don't think you will see them in the web folders page.

yakuza is right that it isn't RAID, it just writes the files on two different drives, but you don't have the system duplicated also, just the folders you want. Yes, you will loose, in a sense, half the storage space, but if you have ever lost data before, this is a great great feature. This is also not to mention, you can fill your MSS up with the largest drives there are. (4 internal sata, 4 external, and an esata enclosure with 4 drives in it for a total of 12TB), and in the future when you run start to run out of space and there are 1.5TB or even 2TB drives out in the world, you can remove them as you get bigger drives.

the //server/share type of lingo is what happens when you share anything over a network, but you can map them to drives so vidoes can still be V and data can still be D.

What I do is I have moved all the data (music, video, pictures, everything) off of my PC's and everything is on the server. I only keep an 80 gig HDD as my system drive and a 160GIG to record on my TV shows and that is it. everything is now on my MSS so that i can access it anywhere. I have mapped drives over to the folders on the WHS, then i redirected the videos, music, picutres, and document folders in Vista to these folders so they are all stored on the MSS and not on this computer.

THANKS smwoodward and yakuza ...

I read the MS Windows Home Server Drive Extender Technical Brief and now I understand WHS a bit better. Still newbie to this, though ...

I wonder if anyone has built a fireproof room or enclosure for storing their MSS. I still believe in off-site storage for data backup ... so don't know how I will incorporate the MSS into the scheme.

Anyway, THANKS AGAIN.... Going to find the WHS Dummies book now...

Now PP1 has added features to give you an easy option for off site backup. When you add a drive to WHS, it ask you if you want it to be part of the pool or if you want to use it as backup. If you use it as a backup, you can backup all the shares on the WHS to another disk. Now this server backup is not automatic, you have to tell WHS to back it up. What you can do for this is to have 1 HDD for each share you want to back up, example 1 for Videos, 1 for pictures and so on. Label the drive as to what the backup is, and when you attach it to the WHS the next time it will remember what that drive is suppose to backup, you click backup, leave it over night, then unhook it the next day and take it where ever you keep it. Take a look here at the wiki http://www.mediasmartserver.net/wiki/in ... ome_Server I forget who wrote it, but they did a great job in showing how the server backup works to provide offsite backup.

Thank Cougar, he's been awesome with the Wiki.

I'd like to clarify a few things, as my server will be here any day. I plan to replace the OS HDD, as well as add some other HDD's to the pool. I expect to do this, before even using the MMS.

My expected configuration:

Drive 0: WD Black - 640GB (for OS)
Drive 1: WD Green - 1TB
Drive 2: WD Green - 1TB
Drive 3: The original OS drive that came with my MMS 470


If I do the swap, and follow the directions for a factory reset ... I should be okay? Correct?

The original HDD that came with the MMS (and still has a copy of the OS) will be okay in slot 4, since I'm doing a factory reset?

viewtopic.php?f=5&t=12

Don't quote me but, I think you have to follow the directions in the above thread if you want to reuse the OS drive.

_________________
Chris Bickerstaff
HP MSS DataVault X510
Core 2 Quad Core Q9550s
4GB Mushkin Ram
TR4MB eSata Enclosure
TR4UB USB Enclosure
Netgear WNDR3700
UPS APC 1500 XS LCD

Cool, thanks.

Based on this post in the thread viewtopic.php?p=160#p160

I think I should be okay.