MediaSmartServer.net :: View topic - 3TB system disk on WHS2011

I'm playing with the idea of installing WHS2011 on my X510 Data Vault. My question is if it would be possible to use a 3TB as the system disk. I have seen people performing hacks to get their 3TB disk recognized by WHS2011, by making it look like two separate disks. Hence my question.

Technically you can add 3TB drives to WHS2011 and use them as 1 whole drive but this is not the suggested way to use them.

I was a guest on the BYOB podcast and during the second half we discussed WHS2011 and this http://media.blubrry.com/homeservershow ... -Live4.mp3

But there are a few things to consider.

Microsoft want to allow you to backup your data to a backup drive, however the process used can only backup using a maximum 2TB VHD. So if you have 1 share larger than 2TB on a single drive, you will not be able to include it in the backup option, this is 1 reason why the drive is formated with 2 partitions and as MBR drive.

However since WHS2011 is 64 bit, the underlying OS supports 3TB GPD disks, so if you bypass the Dashboard to add the drive to WHS which will create 1 2TB MBR partition and the rest as a 2nd MBR partition, and instead use the Disk Management tool to add the drive and using Disk Management format the drive GPT, then you can use the entire drive with a single partition, but remember as mentioned above, you will not be able to backup this drive.

So you can use the whole drive with 1 partition but this is not the supported way to do it.

I don't know if any of the HP WHS hardware supports EFI (and to enable it you'd have to get to the BIOS of course).

I have yet to purchase a 3 TB drive yet but its my understanding that 2 TB is the limitation of WHS for a single drive which is why 3 TB drives need to be partitioned into two or more partitions. For now I am just sticking with 2 TB drives and one day when WHS can utilize larger drives in a single partition then I will make the move.

By the way, since I am using an external raid 5 I've turned off shadow copy to save space.

Author:	schliemann [ Fri Apr 15, 2011 2:33 pm ]
Post subject:	3TB system disk on WHS2011
I'm playing with the idea of installing WHS2011 on my X510 Data Vault. My question is if it would be possible to use a 3TB as the system disk. I have seen people performing hacks to get their 3TB disk recognized by WHS2011, by making it look like two separate disks. Hence my question.

Author:	MetaLRasaM [ Fri Apr 15, 2011 6:24 pm ]
Post subject:	Re: 3TB system disk on WHS2011
schliemann wrote: I'm playing with the idea of installing WHS2011 on my X510 Data Vault. My question is if it would be possible to use a 3TB as the system disk. I have seen people performing hacks to get their 3TB disk recognized by WHS2011, by making it look like two separate disks. Hence my question. I'm pretty sure you don't need a hack to get it to work, WHS 2011 recognizes 3TB HDDs, but from what I know, once you "use" the HDD for WHS and add it as storage, it will partition it into a 2TB and a 1TB "folder". Which is super silly, because my movie collection is larger than 2 TB and this is going to be a big letdown for me.

Author:	Diehard [ Sat Apr 16, 2011 9:43 pm ]
Post subject:	Re: 3TB system disk on WHS2011
WHS2011 supports HomeGroup so even if your movie collection spans over several drives, you can add all the drives to HomeGroup and then it will show up as 1 folder regardless of how many drives there are or on which drive your video is on. You do not need to search each drive for your video. 2011

Author:	Comp1962 [ Sat Apr 16, 2011 9:45 pm ]
Post subject:	Re: 3TB system disk on WHS2011
I have yet to purchase a 3 TB drive yet but its my understanding that 2 TB is the limitation of WHS for a single drive which is why 3 TB drives need to be partitioned into two or more partitions. For now I am just sticking with 2 TB drives and one day when WHS can utilize larger drives in a single partition then I will make the move.

Author:	Diehard [ Sat Apr 16, 2011 10:11 pm ]
Post subject:	Re: 3TB system disk on WHS2011
Technically you can add 3TB drives to WHS2011 and use them as 1 whole drive but this is not the suggested way to use them. I was a guest on the BYOB podcast and during the second half we discussed WHS2011 and this http://media.blubrry.com/homeservershow ... -Live4.mp3 But there are a few things to consider. Microsoft want to allow you to backup your data to a backup drive, however the process used can only backup using a maximum 2TB VHD. So if you have 1 share larger than 2TB on a single drive, you will not be able to include it in the backup option, this is 1 reason why the drive is formated with 2 partitions and as MBR drive. However since WHS2011 is 64 bit, the underlying OS supports 3TB GPD disks, so if you bypass the Dashboard to add the drive to WHS which will create 1 2TB MBR partition and the rest as a 2nd MBR partition, and instead use the Disk Management tool to add the drive and using Disk Management format the drive GPT, then you can use the entire drive with a single partition, but remember as mentioned above, you will not be able to backup this drive. So you can use the whole drive with 1 partition but this is not the supported way to do it.

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Author:	MetaLRasaM [ Sun Apr 17, 2011 11:08 am ]
Post subject:	Re: 3TB system disk on WHS2011
Diehard wrote: Technically you can add 3TB drives to WHS2011 and use them as 1 whole drive but this is not the suggested way to use them. I was a guest on the BYOB podcast and during the second half we discussed WHS2011 and this http://media.blubrry.com/homeservershow ... -Live4.mp3 But there are a few things to consider. Microsoft want to allow you to backup your data to a backup drive, however the process used can only backup using a maximum 2TB VHD. So if you have 1 share larger than 2TB on a single drive, you will not be able to include it in the backup option, this is 1 reason why the drive is formated with 2 partitions and as MBR drive. However since WHS2011 is 64 bit, the underlying OS supports 3TB GPD disks, so if you bypass the Dashboard to add the drive to WHS which will create 1 2TB MBR partition and the rest as a 2nd MBR partition, and instead use the Disk Management tool to add the drive and using Disk Management format the drive GPT, then you can use the entire drive with a single partition, but remember as mentioned above, you will not be able to backup this drive. So you can use the whole drive with 1 partition but this is not the supported way to do it. That's actually pretty interesting to me...so the only problem with using a 2TB+ hdd is not being able to back it up if I use it as a storage without having WHS partition it? So does that mean I can have a folder which is larger than 2TB? But it isn't supported by MS due to the backup feature? If that's the case then I'm golden!

Author:	Diehard [ Sun Apr 17, 2011 3:52 pm ]
Post subject:	Re: 3TB system disk on WHS2011
Correct

Author:	StuR [ Mon Jun 13, 2011 1:07 pm ]
Post subject:	Re: 3TB system disk on WHS2011
schliemann wrote: I'm playing with the idea of installing WHS2011 on my X510 Data Vault. My question is if it would be possible to use a 3TB as the system disk. I have seen people performing hacks to get their 3TB disk recognized by WHS2011, by making it look like two separate disks. Hence my question. As I recall, WS8 R2 (OS under WHS 2011) supports larger than 2TB boot volumes on EFI hardware using GPT. The legacy MBR partition scheme has a 2TB limit. I don't know if any of the HP WHS hardware supports EFI (and to enable it you'd have to get to the BIOS of course). Stuart.

Author:	erail [ Mon Jun 13, 2011 1:53 pm ]
Post subject:	Re: 3TB system disk on WHS2011
All I did was format a 3TB drive GPT in Windows 7 64 bit and then put it in the WHS 2011 MSS and added it to storage pool with Stablebit pooled addin and it shows up as a single drive with 2.7+ TB capacity. I beleive it will also work without stablebit and I don't care about backup since I backup with other servers.

Author:	EricE [ Mon Jul 04, 2011 8:34 pm ]
Post subject:	Re: 3TB system disk on WHS2011
StuR wrote: I don't know if any of the HP WHS hardware supports EFI (and to enable it you'd have to get to the BIOS of course). I'm too cheap to spring for or make a VGA cable to interact with the BIOS, but I can confirm the EX490 will not boot off of a 3TB drive partitioned with a greater than 2TB partition. And actually, it's moot because the WHS 2011 installer won't use GPT - it forces MBR. Even when I paritioned/formatted the drive as GPT in advance, the WHS installer re-did it as MBR. Which wastes the last about 750GB on the 3TB drive since you can't access it with MBR as the partition table. So your boot drive must be MBR (luckily I had an extra 650GB drive laying around I could use) but any other drives can be manually partitioned and formatted with GPT and be over 2TB. That's how my two data drives are. I don't care about the MS built in backup utility for WHS - I use crashplan to duplicate all my stuff off site to my parents house EDIT: And EFI only matters on boot - which, as I point out, is a moot point since the WHS installer will only format/partition with MBR.

Author:	AussieMatt [ Sun Aug 21, 2011 8:11 am ]
Post subject:	Re: 3TB system disk on WHS2011
Any word if they will later allow the 3TB+ drives? I dont mind (tooooo much) chopping a 6TB RAID into 2TB volumes but I dont want my external 3TB USB backup to be partitoned, also why cant the client and host backups be on the same disk? And more so why cant I use the same physical disk and have it partitoned to have the client and the host backups on the same hdd?

Author:	wiwarren6400 [ Wed Jan 11, 2012 6:53 pm ]
Post subject:	Re: 3TB system disk on WHS2011
I am currently running with 3tb pool and 3tb external raid. From expeience of origianally trying to join the 3tb raid to the pool I've found that as long as you do not try this you can use anything above the 2tb range. The 2tb limitation hit me when I tried to use the raid as part of the pool (first time setting up WHS some time ago). WHS would re-allocate the drive as a 2tb volume and not use the remainder (as noted in windows disk manager). Which puzzled me since I was not familiar with the limitation and couldn't figure out why my 3tb raid that did show as and was formated origianally in disk manager all of a sudden became 2tb after adding to pool. After using disk manager to once again format the raid as 3tb I added individual drives (seperate from raid) and then added them to the pool. I now have a 3tb pool with an external 3tb raid to backup to. By all indications I should be able to go larger when the need arrives (which may be soon). By the way, since I am using an external raid 5 I've turned off shadow copy to save space. I have more than enough space so far to match the rate of backup for both the WHS data and my client computers. When I take my WHS past 3tb I will have to revisit the external raid and possibly add a larger raid for WHS and keep the current for client based on good practice of backup storage should equal at least 50% to 75% of operating space to backup.

Author:	EricE [ Thu Apr 05, 2012 7:27 am ]
Post subject:	Re: 3TB system disk on WHS2011
Comp1962 wrote: I have yet to purchase a 3 TB drive yet but its my understanding that 2 TB is the limitation of WHS for a single drive which is why 3 TB drives need to be partitioned into two or more partitions. For now I am just sticking with 2 TB drives and one day when WHS can utilize larger drives in a single partition then I will make the move. WHS 2011 works fine with 3TB drives - it's the very lame Windows Server 2008 backup utility that WHS relies on that can't handle single partitions greater than 2 TB. Which isn't a problem since I don't use Microsoft's backup anyway. Aside from the completely ridiculous 2TB limitation, the backup utility can't automatically maintain and prune older backups which is also nuts - so I'm using a third party backup. It's not integrated into the WHS console but since you can easily RDP into WHS it's not really that big a deal. I'm hoping the next version of Windows Server/WHS has a much better backup utility because I can't believe just how lame the Server 2008 backup is. It really frustrates me with SBS Server. I had an SBS Server 2003 at a non-profit I supported and I could easily target the WHS I configured for them to backup their client computers to house the SBS backups as well - it worked like a dream! But the new Server 2008 backup utility that's in the SBS 2011 Standard I recently upgraded them to with it's stupid imaging requirements won't "talk" to anything but a USB Drive which is incredibly annoying. I actually went backwards in functionality with the newer version of SBS!

Author:	EricE [ Thu Apr 05, 2012 7:31 am ]
Post subject:	Re: 3TB system disk on WHS2011
wiwarren6400 wrote: By the way, since I am using an external raid 5 I've turned off shadow copy to save space. RAID and Shadow Copies are not related in the least. Shadow copies let you take snapshots of your drives to give you a history of files. If you goof something up, instead of having to go into a backup to retrieve a previous version of a file, you can restore from a shadow copy. They are also incredibly space efficient since shadow copies only store the difference between the base file or last shadow copy snapshot and the current version of the file. You can control how much space they consume - or redirect the shadow copies to an entirely different hard drive (not a bad idea for a really busy server with intense drive I/O). To me they are one of the best features of NTFS and provide a little extra flexibility - but if you do want maximum drive space you can certainly keep them off.

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Author:	REDEATH [ Mon Jan 28, 2013 8:00 am ]
Post subject:	Re: 3TB system disk on WHS2011
After much trials and tribulations I followed some advice here and stuck my 3 TB WD RED drives in my WIN7 64bit PC and made GPT partitions then stuck them in my HP N40L WHS 2011 and Mirrored them and works fine but as stated several times WHS back up wont back up this 3TB volume hence why I got 2 drives and mirrored them.