I have a EX490 that had drive problems a few months ago. All of the sudden the drives in my external enclosure (Mediasonic 4-drive) started failing. So I got a new external enclosure, the Sans Digital TowerRAID TR5M. For various reasons I decided to restore WHS on my EX490 and then manually copy the files from my 7 drives to the drive pool and add the drives back one at a time as I copied the data off of them. I didn't start this way, but after many hours on the phone with support, we both decided this was the best route for me. At the time, my MSS was in it's last month of warranty.

Since then, I've had ongoing issues and always assumed they were all caused by faulty drives. Prices being insanely high right now, I couldn't afford to get another drive to dump data off to, so I lived with no external drives, knowing eventually when I had the money, or the time, I would move the data around and add the drives back to the pool.

Fast forward a few months and now I finally found the time to start shuffling the data on these external drives around and adding them back into the pool. They're still all in the TR5M. I added one drive back in, and within a couple hours it was failing in the WHS console. So I added another drive, thinking I could replace the failing drive, but within a couple hours of adding the new drive, it too was failing. So I got another external enclosure and hooked it up the WHS, put the drives in, and sure enough, those started failing as if they were in the first. After all this testing, I've come to the conclusion that the port multiplier on the MSS has failed, not the drives. What's really got me angry is that I started this support ticket when my machine was still under warranty, but of course now it's been several months and there's no way I'll get any sympathy from HP.

So I'm wondering if there's any way for me to replace the port multiplier in the EX490? I sure hope so, otherwise I'll have to build a new home server. We can't really afford it, but we also can't afford to be without one.

Sorry for the long post, and thanks for the help!

Eddie

Sorry but no, the port multiplier is soldered onto the motherboard and there are no expansion slots.

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Alex Kuretz
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Oh well, couldn't hurt to try. Now it's over to the user build forums for opinions on my next WHS... I suppose I could keep the EX490 as a backup. The internal drives work fine.