I've got what I'm planning to be my "final" WHS 2011 build on my EX487. I'll be adding drives to it, sure, but outside of that it's running just the way I like it. It's got WHS 2011 with the latest Windows updates, Drive Bender v1.2.2.2 for pooling and Diskeeper 2011 to keep the disks defragged.

I set up duplication and copied about 2.2 TB to the server...it took about 23 hours to copy it all over Gigabit. The bottlenecks were likely the USB 2.0 disks on the source (EX490) and a USB 2.0 disk on the destination (EX487). Drive Bender duplicating the data probably contributed to this, but overall I was pretty happy.

And so I connected the first PC to the EX487 to try backing up using WHS 2011 (everything else still backs up the EX490 running WHS v1). According to the Windows Server event log (Computer Management > Event Viewer > Applications and Services Logs > Windows Server), the backup was started at 11:58pm local time last night. It is now 1:23pm the next day, and the backup is 23% complete. At this rate, it should run another 2 days before completing!

By my calculations on the five drives in this desktop (3 x SATA, 2 x USB 2.0) I have 1177.2 GB of data to back up. The USB disks hold 284 GB of the 1177.2 GB.

Since this is the first backup of any computer to WHS 2011, every morsel no doubt will need to be backed up--that is, assuming backup is just like WHS v1 with single-instance storage. Subsequent backups, as well as backups from other PCs with identical files, should certainly take less.

In any case, should this initial backup take 3 days??? There are no errors or warnings on either the server or the desktop indicating problems.

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Matt Sawyer
Owner, Dojo North Software, LLC

HP EX490, 4GB, E5300, 15TB - Server 2012 - Sharing and Streaming
HP EX487, 4GB, E5300, 13TB - Server 2012 Essentials - Backups

Definitely seems excessive to me as well; I backed up about half that in about half a day on my first PC i joined to 2011 although nothing but SATA disks.

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It's surged to 65% so maybe it was the USB disks. If it had to create shadow copies on those--it seems backup in both WHS v1 and 2011 makes use of VSS and one of the other disks has .5 TB in virtual machine VHD files from a VirtualBox (which is NOT running). Hopefully subsequent backups will be faster!

_________________
Matt Sawyer
Owner, Dojo North Software, LLC

HP EX490, 4GB, E5300, 15TB - Server 2012 - Sharing and Streaming
HP EX487, 4GB, E5300, 13TB - Server 2012 Essentials - Backups

The backup wound up finishing last night. Good thing too, because both the EX487 and the desktop rebooted compliments of Windows Update. Yesterday being the second Tuesday of the month meant one thing...the dreaded Microsoft Updates Tuesday!

A second backup had started, and the reboot killed that, but at least the initial backup was completed so subsequent ones should be a LOT shorter!

As for what was causing the bottleneck, I can't tell. Drive Bender was running flawlessly. Neither the desktop nor the server showed any errors or any other indications of trouble, so I'm just not sure what the problem was. I've deleted the backup database (WHS v1) before and created backups anew, and while it is true that only one, maybe two, PCs will back up the first night, since it's an initial backup, I don't recall it taking the better part of a day.

I'll start adding other PCs, one by one, to the EX487 (taking them off the EX490 WHS v1) and see how they behave on their initial backups, although everything I have runs either 64-bit Windows 7 or Server 2008 R2, so there should be a lot of files that don't need to be backed up again. And things like iTunes libraries that exist in multiple locations should also not require a repeat backup.

_________________
Matt Sawyer
Owner, Dojo North Software, LLC

HP EX490, 4GB, E5300, 15TB - Server 2012 - Sharing and Streaming
HP EX487, 4GB, E5300, 13TB - Server 2012 Essentials - Backups