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PostPosted: Fri May 07, 2010 7:40 pm 
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Here's the deal: I'm running out of space. I have one more SATA port, to which I cna connect an additional drive, although it will need a mouting kit to go in one of my case's 5.25" bays. That will give me enough space to clear off one of my 750GB drives and repalce it with a 2TB drive. And repeat for the second 750GB drive. That will double my space, enough for now. Maybe when 4TB drives come out I could repalce the pair of 1TB drives. Anyway - that's one way I could go.
Problem: I have everythign hooked up to a Gig-E switch, although my PCH A-110 is only 100Mb. When watching a movie, all is fine unless I've recently copied files to the system and it starts up rebalancing. Then all bets are off, the playback will freeze and I won;t be able to continue watchign untilt he balancing finishes. Based on what I've read, this is PROBABLY because I used a 5400 RPM Green drive for my system disk (as well as all the others). I have 2GB RAM and an AMD 4050E dual core CPU, so I don't think that's the problem. If it truly 100% is the system disk, I can replace that. But if it's something to do with my ECS motherboard or some other factor in the system design, I'd rather just build a new server. Advice?
Should I go with new - since a recovery install can go out and scan all drives and rebuild the tombstones, would it be feasible to build the new box and load it will all my existing drives and do a recovery install, then go back and add/repalce whatever drives I wanted, or should I bite the bullet and build the new server completely clean and copy my files over> I'm running about 3.5TB used right now.
I was leaning towards an I3 Clarkdale CPU and getting one of the 8 port SuperMicro SAS cards with forward breakout cables to run the SATA disks, plus an Intel NIC (instead of the motherboard one, since they seem to perform better). The case I have in mind would hold at least 9 drives, 1 of the MB for the system disk and 8 from the Supermicro board. Fully populated with 2TB drives that would be 16TB plus the system disk, 4x what I have now.
All thoughts and suggestions entertained. Whatever I build, there will be pictures (they're out there for my existing server as well)
--Randy


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PostPosted: Fri May 07, 2010 10:11 pm 
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rrinker,

Your problem is not the 5400 RPM drives but the hardware running them not being able to handle everything occuring when your streaming. I can say this because I did experience this with my EX470's but I do not experience this with my ProLiant and all I can say is its all hardware related. I am not saying your hardware is bad, I am just saying based on what you describe is that your hardare is not able to deal with all that activity at the same time. I mean no disrespect here its just an honest observation.

I do think your on the right track considering building a new server and if you build it well then the issues you mention will go away. My HP ProLiant has 2 Duel Core AMD Opteron 2.4 Ghz Processors so I have 4 cores running. It also has 2 Gigabit and 1 1/100 LAN Ports, 3 GB of RAM and fans that when run at high speed can drown out the best of superbowl parties. My server also has several WD Green 1TB and 2TB EADS Drives and 2 Hitachi 2TB Deskstar hard drives which are 7200 RPM but much of what I stream is from the WD drives so I knwo its not the drives causing your the issues. Also when demigrator and all the other things are running on my server it has no impact on its ability to stream movies either in the house or on the internet.

I hope this clears up things on the 5400 RPM Drives for you. I will say I like my Hitachi drives which only run about 2-3c higher temp them my WD Green Drives and cost less then the WD drives so I am planning on adding more in the future but based on price I will buy either one of those drives because they serve me well. On another note I do see the EARS drives selling for less then the EADS drives but right now I am not ready to commit to Advance Format Drives.

Good luck with your build I know you will have fun with it if you decide to build a new server.

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PostPosted: Sat May 08, 2010 1:34 pm 
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Comp1962,

I run into similar issues, but I am not convinced it is the hardware. I think it is WHS based upon reading a lot of these threads, you even replied to one saying you had the same issue back in January. Since I have three PCs set up to archive TV to my WHS I can't avoid the issue of going slow with data.

I have a 3.0Ghz AMD Regor, 4GB ram (3GB+ usable), and 2 intel CT gigabit cards. I pulled one drive out of the storage pool, copied some blu rays to it and shared it to play on another PC. Playing a blu ray from that WD15eads (green) drive and copying another blu ray causes no issues. Do the same through the storage pool and I have issues. To me there is something in my WHS setup (maybe DEmigrator.exe or something else) that is causing the issue. I have since moved ALL movies to drives in my WHS case, but outside of the storage pool and no issues now. I just back up the data onto other drives and store them in case a drive fails.


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PostPosted: Tue May 18, 2010 5:55 pm 
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Do a simple test, find a repeatable circumstance that causes the stutter/hiccup.
The stop the demigrator service and repeat the test.
I have seen this same issue,
1, only when dealing with Blu-ray's, not with DVD's
2, Even occurs with gig networks
3, Even occurs on super fast 3ghz/4gb clients
4, Cpu utilization is low WHS server running I7 940 Proc
5, very sporatic Drive process shoot through the roof
6, Drive speed does seem to play a role 7200rpm drives less effected than 5400rpm drives. (USB unusable)
I can induce by watching the same blu-ray movie on more than one playback device started a few minutes apart, then kicking off movie management software and playing with that movies data.
My Theory : Slower drives have a hard time keeping up with reading the much higher load rate blu-ray data.
I have been staying away from 5200rpm drives altogether and most new drives are 7200rpm for my system.
Stutters are nearly non existant, but I still have one or two old slow drives.

Hoping vail will completely eliminate this issue, by setting Demigrator to a much lower priority and a more efficient method of storing/accessing data.

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PostPosted: Tue May 18, 2010 6:03 pm 
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I have all green (5400 - 5900 rpm) drives in Andromeda. I do not have the stuttering problem unless I start watching a newly copied movie and duplication starts for that particular movie. It stops immediately after the movie is duplicated. Regular hourly DE balancing does not cause stuttering.


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PostPosted: Fri May 21, 2010 7:05 am 
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I'm pretty sure it's a combination of the demand placed by DE Migrator plus the slow drives and the SATA ports on the ECS motherboard I used. It definitely stops as soon as DE Migrator finishes. Although I did notice while doing a manual balancing, the new Samsung 2TB drives I just put in had significantly higher throughput. I haven't tried watching any movies since I installed those new drives. Andromeda has the SuperMicro cards, right? I'm tempted to just get one even if the motherboard I end up using has a half dozen or so SATA ports just because they seem to work well. One thing I tried was making sure I disabled every onboard device that I wasn't using to make sure I didn't have any possible interrupt conflicts, since this mobo has integrated audio and video as well as serial/parallel/usb.
I'm also sort of now forced to go with the new server idea, when I was pulling the drives and swapping them around I broke one of the SATA ports on the motherboard, so while I now have 6.7TB I'm short 750GB because I ended up having to pull two drives instead of one.

--Randy


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PostPosted: Fri May 21, 2010 7:16 am 
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Yes, Andromeda has 2-SM SASLP cards.


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PostPosted: Thu Jun 03, 2010 6:48 pm 
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Well, my hand is forced. Went away for the weekend so I shut everything off. Came back, the WHS box would not power up. Power suppyl starts when jumpering the green wire to ground. System does not start when shorting the power switch connections on the motherboard, so it's not the power supply or the switch on the case.

That plus the busted SATA port says it's time to say goodbye to this system (and with this experience I will NEVER buy ECS motherboards) and get a new one.

I can't justify a big giant Norco case, much as I'd love to have insane amounts of storage to brag about. Newegg has a nice combo deal on a Gigabyte H55 motherboard, I3-530 CPU, and Antec Sonata case. That's 4 internal drive bays, plus I'll put my system disk in oen fo the 5.25 bays with an adapter, and theoretically I could put one or two drives in the floppy bays. Motherboard has 6 SATA ports. I'm adding in an Intel NIC to this one, no more Realtek motherboard stuff. WD 750 Black drive for the system disk (hard to justify smaller, they're not much cheaper), I'll buy one more 2TB drive, then start moving my old drives as I copy the data off. With what I have on hand that would give me about 7.6TB total space, more than I actually have in the dead box, and more than double what I had previously in the dead box. If the floppy bay works for a hard drive, I can actually run at 8.6TB with room to take it to 10.6TB by replacing the last two 1TB drives with 2TB ones.
Total cost for the system with the 750GB drive plus a single 2TB drive with shipping is about $632. Not too bad, but I wanted to hold off longer. Oh well.

--Randy


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PostPosted: Thu Jun 03, 2010 7:27 pm 
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walkabt wrote:
Comp1962,

I run into similar issues, but I am not convinced it is the hardware. I think it is WHS based upon reading a lot of these threads, you even replied to one saying you had the same issue back in January. Since I have three PCs set up to archive TV to my WHS I can't avoid the issue of going slow with data.

I have a 3.0Ghz AMD Regor, 4GB ram (3GB+ usable), and 2 intel CT gigabit cards. I pulled one drive out of the storage pool, copied some blu rays to it and shared it to play on another PC. Playing a blu ray from that WD15eads (green) drive and copying another blu ray causes no issues. Do the same through the storage pool and I have issues. To me there is something in my WHS setup (maybe DEmigrator.exe or something else) that is causing the issue. I have since moved ALL movies to drives in my WHS case, but outside of the storage pool and no issues now. I just back up the data onto other drives and store them in case a drive fails.


Back in January I was running only EX470's and just getting my current server ready to go. So any issue I may have mentioned back then was related to the EX470 which still serves me well but my new server is a totally different animal.

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Migrated from WHS2011 to WS2012E: HIGHLANDER

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~ Gigabyte GA-990FXA-UD5
~ AMD Phenom II X4 995 3.2 GHz
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PostPosted: Thu Jun 03, 2010 7:31 pm 
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rrinker wrote:
Well, my hand is forced. Went away for the weekend so I shut everything off. Came back, the WHS box would not power up. Power suppyl starts when jumpering the green wire to ground. System does not start when shorting the power switch connections on the motherboard, so it's not the power supply or the switch on the case.

That plus the busted SATA port says it's time to say goodbye to this system (and with this experience I will NEVER buy ECS motherboards) and get a new one.

I can't justify a big giant Norco case, much as I'd love to have insane amounts of storage to brag about. Newegg has a nice combo deal on a Gigabyte H55 motherboard, I3-530 CPU, and Antec Sonata case. That's 4 internal drive bays, plus I'll put my system disk in oen fo the 5.25 bays with an adapter, and theoretically I could put one or two drives in the floppy bays. Motherboard has 6 SATA ports. I'm adding in an Intel NIC to this one, no more Realtek motherboard stuff. WD 750 Black drive for the system disk (hard to justify smaller, they're not much cheaper), I'll buy one more 2TB drive, then start moving my old drives as I copy the data off. With what I have on hand that would give me about 7.6TB total space, more than I actually have in the dead box, and more than double what I had previously in the dead box. If the floppy bay works for a hard drive, I can actually run at 8.6TB with room to take it to 10.6TB by replacing the last two 1TB drives with 2TB ones.
Total cost for the system with the 750GB drive plus a single 2TB drive with shipping is about $632. Not too bad, but I wanted to hold off longer. Oh well.

--Randy


The Norco Case only makes sense if you need lots of drive capacity and would look weird with only say six drives installed when you can have 20 drives plus space for 2-3 more drives depending on the model used. So size the case based on what you feel you will need and maybe a few extra bays incase you find your needs growing but then you can expand outside the box too.

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PostPosted: Thu Jun 03, 2010 8:31 pm 
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Well, the dead one I thought would have enough room - at the time the 1TB drives were like double the price of the 750's so I built it based on the idea that i could eventually upgrade to 1TB drives when the cost came down. Of course I wasn;t completely sure of what I could do with it, either. I was only ripping standard def DVDs, no hi-def stuff, and figured I've have plenty of space. Fast forward and 2TB drives came down to a reasonable price and I was starting to upgrade to those as I had compeltely filled the existing space. Having the SATA port break off was annoying but I still had double the space. If I build what I've picked out I can go to 10+TB which SEEMS liek plenty for now, that's nearly 3x what I had on the old box and it took me 2 years to fill that. Hopefully by the time it gets near full, 3 or 4TB drives will be out - and probably not work with 2003. The I3-530 should handle Vail though. The old box also had performacne issues, if I was trying to stream a movie and disk balancing started, even if it had been days since I last copied something to the server, it would cause the playback to stutter and freeze until the completion of the balancing - then it would go back to normal. At this point I'm guessing it was a motherboard issue, irq conflicts or something, even though I did disable stuff not being used like the sound.
Actually, if I was goign to build in one of the Norco cases I was thinkign of the slightly smaller one, not the moster you have. I think that one holds 10 drives or so. I can say that right NOW I do not need 20TB of storage. I don't THINK I will need 20TB of storage next year. I think 10TB will hold me for at least a while.
Mostly I'm seriously ticked off about this, EVERY other computer I've build in the past 6 years (for myself and others) still works. I have older ones that work too, although worthless these days for anything but command line Linux, or Puppy. This one isn't even 2 years old and it's dead as a doornail, and it was all low-stress. Low power Athlon CPU, green drives, extra fan to make sure airflow went over the drives, no graphics card. No game playing, no overclocking. One of those things I guess. The whole reason I built WHS instead of a regular 2003 or 2008 server is because I didn't have to babysit it, it just WORKED. Which it did, very well. I do this stuff for a living, so I'm long over my days when my personal machines were Frankenstein creations with spare parts and I changed hardware on an almost daily basis. I just want my computer to WORK now, without constant messing around.

--Randy


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PostPosted: Thu Jun 03, 2010 9:47 pm 
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I hear you there. Hey I just want to turn my stuff on and have it work and run well. I do not care all that much for high end stuff anymore. My personal needs are simple I just want my stuff backed up and I do enjoy my own little video and music on demand system. WHS just works and for the most part it works very well. I try to use the KISS method when ever possible.

I wish you luck with your new build and hope is server you well!

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PostPosted: Fri Jun 04, 2010 9:16 am 
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This is my next case for an i7 Server build.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... -_-Product

Very happy with Chenbro. I currently have their small footprint ES34069 case and love it. Will buy case above for new server, and turn the other into a HTPC.


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PostPosted: Tue Jun 08, 2010 12:57 pm 
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Parts ordered, checked the cart today and there were a few price drops so I just ordered the stuff. I will take pictures when I put it together like I did with the old one.

--Randy


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PostPosted: Fri Jun 11, 2010 5:10 pm 
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Build it underway as I type this. I've been taking pictures. OS is loaded but I have to install drivers and also the Intel NIC. Then comes the fun of pulling my drives from the old server and copying the files over. Pics to follow.

--Randy


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