.. so far so good ! ! Lord knows I had some issues to deal with, and things to work around, but after a few days (and help and guidance from Comp), I had it set up and working just fine. I bought my EX470 back in 2008 and it has served me well, getting a RAM and CPU upgrade(s) along the way, starting with a 1640-LE and then on to an X2 3800+EE.
I then had several 3TB drives that I bought for an external enclosure to hook up to the MSS, as I had filled all of my internal bays and needed more storage. That 4.5TB sounded sooo unfillable a few years ago !! I found the 3TB drives in the ext. enclosure would cause my MSS to not boot, so I gave up on that plan. Jumping forward a few years, and I found my primary MSS drive to be failing, requiring a weekly repair and a full chkdsk scan from a batch file that I had on the server's desktop. It was now time to take the plunge !!
Luckily, I had ample drives available that I could remove all WHSv1 drives and drop in larger drives. In case of utter failure, I could revert back to where I was before undertaking this job. Another huge plus for me was adding a Gen3 VGA dongle that I eventually felt would eliminate any future issues that I might encounter. I fought off buying it for over a year until it became apparent it was too important to not have hooked up.
The install itself went smoothly, but one of my 3TB drives did not report the proper size. Both drives were formatted as GPT and were not a primary drive, so after adding Stablebit and rebooting the server, things were back to normal and showing the proper capacity. My next issue was the backups not completing. This was an easy one, and I should have known better, but of course Windows Updates needed to be installed, and of course a reboot needed to be done, so my backups were being interrupted by this !
Next issue to deal with was the external enclosure, which received some of the drives from the original MSS after I determined that WHS2011 was running fine and I had backups of all of the networked PCs. It was not being identified by the WHS at all. Again, this was an issue I had with the box waaay back when I first got it, and I had forgotten the trick to make things work - the enclosure had to be TURNED ON FIRST before the server was booted up. I never power off the server, or if I did, the enclosure was turned on after the fact. Again, an easy fix that I had knowledge of but forgot in my hour of need.
First impressions after getting WHS2011 up and running ... holy crap .. its slooow !!
Well, I seem to have forgotten how slow WHSv1 was when it was freshly set up. There was a lot going on behind the scenes here (134 Window Updates later ... yea, you've been there too, I know it). After a day or two, the server calmed down a lot and the temps are reasonable for an x2 chip - 31-36c tops. After 3+ days of non-stop creation of full images, (including about 4TB of movies) I now had full backups of all networked PCs.
The Good:
64 bit native restores !!! No more searching for the 32 bit Vista drivers for a machine. I did manage to copy these from the WHSv1 to a thumb drive, simple because I have needed them in the past and knew enough to be prepared.
3TB+ drive support ! 2TB seemed like a lotta space ... until you needed a lot more space.
The Bad:
The WHSv1 interface seemed like a thing of beauty to me now. It was thorough, it offered a lot of detail, and add-ins were numerous. WHS2011 - wow. Its a barren landscape compared to the granularity of v1. I don't need much, but 2011 isn't offering much, so get used to it. I don't like change, so maybe the old way was just too much information, but it feels like it would be right at home on a Mac - hide the underbelly so the cluless home user can't see what is really going on.
The Ugly:
Unresolved - remember the ext. enclosure difficulties I had ?? Well, they are not actually all solved. WHS will simply not see the second drive in the enclosure plugged in via eSATA. Note that I have an eX470 that offers port replication, so I know I am OK there. I plugged the box into another PC that sees both drives JUST FINE ! Plug it back into the MSS - only one drive. Note that I pulled 2 drives out and plopped two larger drives into it - no jumpers needed changed internally !! I double-checked the manual, and like I said, it works fine in another PC. My workaround - plug it in via it's USB 3.0 port to my WHS (which only offers USB 2.0 - but it sees both drives).
In the end - I'm a happy camper. I now have 10TB of space and a 3TB archive of the shared folders. That more than doubles my space from WHSv1, and allows me to use those 3TB drives and also re-purpose the old 1-1.5 TB drives from the old v1. Again, many thanks to Comp for helping me out through this ordeal. He truly is a wizard when it comes to WHS hardware/software. I really do miss my drive lights, but I am not tossing in the towel on that yet .. I will find something to mimic the lights. I see a lot of guys rolling their own DIY servers these days, but I am content to let my MSS continue to do its nightly backups. I don't use it for streaming - I have an HTPC for that, but what it does it does well, and I'm glad I bought it many years ago. It has saved my bacon at least once a year since I have owned it. Here's to many more years of 24/7 operation from my tiny WHS.