I wanted to share my experiences upgrading my EX490 to WHS 2011 with 4TB drives.

My Target state:
- EX490 with E8500 processor - done
- 4 x 4TB drives (I got to 1 x 2 TB for booting and 3 x 4TB drives) - done
- WHS 2011 - done
- Home sharing through itunes
- Managing the 14TB is some sort of mirroring (work in progress)

Steps and lessons learned for the WHS 2011 upgrade:
- i put in the 4TB and booted from a USB stick (described very well in forums) and worked like a charm. However the 4TB was only recognized as 2TB and possibility of losing the rest as i could not reallocate the 1.8TB remaining. so i thought i could use the 1TB or 2TB that i originally had in my EX490 to do this. Boy, i was did not expect what happened next
- so i reformatted and deleted the partition on the original 1TB, and thought i will go through the same process again. After 2 days of trying, could not get anywhere. even the cfg.ini was deleted and recreated, but nothing. i even recreated the USB from the WHS server media using the MS tool, NOTHING. very frustrating. i tried with the 2 TB, the 1 TB the 4 TB with all kinds of configurations, and nothing. What was really helpful is that i purchased an ESATA docking station (for copying files and managing disks) for the drives and it came very handy. so i got the USB stick, connect it to my laptop, removed the HD on the laptop, and connected the 2TB thru the ESATA dock to the laptop. I booted the and started the WHS2011 installation, and then there was an error. Viola, i found out the issue. its something to do with the USB stick after looking at the log. did not want to waste more time, so I rebooted and used the WHS2011 on the DVD. IT WORKED. I was able to install WHS2011 with no issues. It went thru the process until it asked for network drivers. i shut down the laptop at that time. Took the 2TB out of the ESATA and into my EX490 and rebooted my laptop with its original HD and the EX490. I pinged the Ex490 and it responded (i go the ip address from the router) and then connected and continued the installation. Worked like a charm.

- The 4TB were recognized by the WHS2011. so i have 2TB in slot 1 (bottom), 4TB in the remaining slots. looking into best way to leverage them. (either RAID 5 or mirroring).

Glad to see you got things sorted out. The 4TB Drives I am running specifically state they are not for OS installation and to use them fully you must configure them to be GPT. I initially installed 5 of them when I was running WHS2011 with Stablebit Drive Pool and they worked perfectly but today I am running WS2012E.

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Exploring the possibilities!

Migrated from WHS2011 to WS2012E: HIGHLANDER

~ Norco 4220 Enclosure
~ Gigabyte GA-990FXA-UD5
~ AMD Phenom II X4 995 3.2 GHz
~ 8 GB Corsair Vengeance DDR3 1600 (PC3 12800)
~ 3 Supermicro AOC-SASLP-MV8

Thanks for the insight, I figured the 4tb would work in the hardware but it is good to know for sure!
I'm hoping the 5-6 tb drives coming out this fall will work as well, I assume they will have to be GPT as well.
I am shooting for a ssd raid in bay 1 (via icydock 2.5 x2 raid bay) and (3) 5-6 tb drives for storage. Win2012E would be the OS and will most likely use storage spaces in the OS.
Again Thx

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[X510 CPU/RAM/All 2 TB Red's] [X510 CPU/Sync'ed Backup/All 2 TB Hitachi's]
[X510 /2 in box]
[X710 LIAN LI DIY W2016E] Stablebit Drivepool [EX-503 LIAN LI 5-bay USB3 External]
Fear the Cloud

So i have added 3 x 4TB in RAID 5 configuration using the Disk Management. That setup created an 8TH drive G that I moved my media folders to. Its working great so far. I did not a need for Stalebit so far.

I'm planning on cloning the 2TB OS drive and using the 8TB as my media storage.

I setup VPN connection and can play my media remotely using 8player and viplay apps.

Now looking at add-ins.

For WHS2011 previously and WS2012E now, were you doing server backups? If so, how did you plan to do server restore if your OS/System disk stopped working?

Thanks.

When you run the Server Installation Disk you will be given the option to recover from a backup. The backup can be read from the OS Backup Drive or if you had the server backup the OS to an external Drive something I am not sure if you have the option to do in WHS2011 but you can have the WS2012E do it a backup to an external drive for a recovery.

Its a very simple process. I have a dedicated backup drive configure in both my WHS2011 and WS2012E Servers just for the sole purpose of performing a Recovery or Restoration of the System Drive. The backup takes place twice a day but you can reconfigure that if you like but I chose to use the default backup settings.

I ran into an issue that I was not going to waste time troubleshooting so I performed a recovery on my WS2012E server it took less then 1 hour and I restored my server back to when I knew it was running correctly. Very painless process and once done there is no need to reconfigure the server as it recovers everything on the System Drive. I might also mention that my System Drive is an SSD so that could explain why the recovery did not take a great deal of time.

There is no comparison to the recovery method used in WHSv1 its like night and day. Also without a backup you would be forced to reinstalling everything back onto the server which means reconfiguring everything and reinstalling all the software you have added to the server which is a big PITA. I will also mention my backup drive is not all that large either only a 320 GB WD Scorpio Black 2.5" Drive which fits perfectly in the top of my Norco Enclosure.

_________________
Exploring the possibilities!

Migrated from WHS2011 to WS2012E: HIGHLANDER

~ Norco 4220 Enclosure
~ Gigabyte GA-990FXA-UD5
~ AMD Phenom II X4 995 3.2 GHz
~ 8 GB Corsair Vengeance DDR3 1600 (PC3 12800)
~ 3 Supermicro AOC-SASLP-MV8

Sounds very promising but it looks like I'd need the VGA assembly if I tried to do this with an EX495, right?

Well there is a way to get WHS2011 installed on the server without a Debug Board and for a recovery I am sure it could be done but the DEBUG Board just makes things a lot easier to work with and troubleshoot. If your NIC ever fails the DEBUG Board will allow to easily install a USB-LAN Adapter to get the server back online but even if your server was having a connectivity issue a DEBUG Board would allow you to gain access to the server so its a WIN WIN Situation.

_________________
Exploring the possibilities!

Migrated from WHS2011 to WS2012E: HIGHLANDER

~ Norco 4220 Enclosure
~ Gigabyte GA-990FXA-UD5
~ AMD Phenom II X4 995 3.2 GHz
~ 8 GB Corsair Vengeance DDR3 1600 (PC3 12800)
~ 3 Supermicro AOC-SASLP-MV8