It would be cool to have the WHS mount the ISO and stream it. If they just add MKV support to the WHS and 360 I'll be golden.

Can I discard the original 500GB drive & use another 1TB drive in Bay 3?

Sure.

Well, I wouldn't "discard" it.

I should have said "shelf" it!
I can't think of any good reason to "discard' a quality 500 gig drive?

May sound dumb, but I dont want to pull the drive out but what type of drives does the server take? I have this old drive from my dell computer I would like to pull the videos and pics out is that possible? It saids on dirve ATA? Does it take a ATA?

yes, "SERIAL" ATA... "SATA". the one with the THIN cable.

NOT the one with the long 40-pin floppy cable. (that's IDE)

Sorry to disagree, but an ATA drive is a IDE drive, and is not a SATA drive. The EX470 and EX475 come with either one or two Barracuda 7200.10 SATA 3.0Gb/s 500-GB Hard Drive ST3500630AS SATA drives. That has a connector like this while a ATA drive has a connector like this, To use your ATA drive you will need a USB enclosure like one of these.

Advanced Technology Attachment (ATA) is a standard interface for connecting storage devices such as hard disks.

Many synonyms and near-synonyms for ATA exist, including abbreviations such as IDE and ATAPI.

with the market introduction of Serial ATA in 2003, the original ATA(IDE) was retroactively renamed Parallel ATA (PATA).

So, IDE is known today as PARALLEL ATA, and the new generation drives are known as SERIAL ATA.

So, both drives are ATA, but you have to clarify WHICH kind of drive.

The pics in the illustration do clarify the types of cables used.

SATA (Serial ATA)



Parallel ATA/IDE

I took out a slot now where are the wires at to connect it??? I looked inside drive bay 2 and see nothing to connect to anything.

If you are talking about taking one of the "drive bays" in the MSS out (which you are referring to a "slot") . . . . then they are NO cables.

The drive mounts in the tray, and SLIDES back into a backplane which contains the SATA interface port....

There aren't any cables to attach.

If you pull an empty drive tray from the MSS you'll notice the back end of the tray has a solid black piece of plastic across it. This is used to control air flow within the case, when a drive is mounted in the drive tray this plastic folds down, and the back end of the hard drive is exposed. Then the tray and the hard drive slide into the case and plug into a mating receptacle on the backplate, (an extension of the motherboard). This is just like how hard drives are mounted into most note books. But note books take a smaller 2.5" hard drive. As a general rule most desktops use two cables one providing power and the other a data connection. I hope that helps.

HELPS a bit, but I wanted to add in another drive a 1tb barraccuda something LOL and thought i would have to hook up some wires to it or something....

Question:

If I want to replace my OS drive to 1TB, do I absolutely need to put the previous 500GB OS drive in slot 3 or can I just leave it out?

I want to only add 1TB drives, so the factory 500GB will be removed.

Thanks