I recently rebuilt my EX490 server after it stopped booting WHS v1.

My system is a 2TB EARS drive without jumpers as everything I've read says with 2011 nothing special is required to use EARS drives with the advanced format stuff.

However now that I'm transferring large amounts of data from my other drives into the new server I'm having issues where the server is almost non responsive, streaming anything from the server is awful as the video judders and pauses..... The quad core CPU in the server is doing pretty much nothing and network traffic is zero on the server. The transfers from old drives to my new EARS system disk are about 40Megabytes per second...

If I cancel the transfer then everything speeds up and works perfectly.

When I transfer files between my old drives in the server I'm getting transfer speeds of about 90 megabytes per second which is great and the server doesn't slow down at all... This is what is making me suspect the EARS system drive....

Has anyone experienced anything like this or does anyone have any ideas of what I should look out for to try and resolve this? I'd expect a quad core CPU machine to be able to keep up with anything......

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EX490 with 7TB storage

No takers then hey....

Might try re-build the server using a standard blue or black WD drive as the system drive and see if it's any different...

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EX490 with 7TB storage

Have you tried the HOme Server SMART Add-In to verify your drives don't have any issues? What was the cause of your WHS v1 system failing to boot? This to me is another clue that you may have a failing drive.

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Alex Kuretz
Remote Notification: Monitoring and alerting for your Home Server via email, Twitter, text message, RSS, push notifications, and on your Mac desktop
Have you tried our Add-Ins?

In the end I did a server rebuild and used a non green drive as the system drive and it's now working MUCH better with good transfer speeds and system responsiveness.

I did run quite a few scans on the green drive which showed no issues.

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EX490 with 7TB storage

It's been my experience that while Green drives make excellent data drives, they're slow as system drives. When the HDD in my desktop threw in the towel, I used a WDC Green 640 GB HDD I had in the same box as the new system disk. It always worked fine as a data disk where I stored ripped movies before transferring them to the EX490.

I was crushingly disappointed with how slooooooooow that box ran with that disk as the system drive. From power on to logon screen was in the ballpark of two minutes (on my laptop with an OCZ Octane SSD it's less than 30 seconds). Best Buy had a Seagate Barracuda 1TB 7200 RPM drive on sale for $90 a few weeks ago so I bought that and made it the new system disk, and installed Windows 8. The desktop's system disk speed is now back on par with what it was before the original disk died.

Lesson learned - don't use green disks as system disks. Leave that to the SSDs...or at least the 7200s.

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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

I find just not using them in servers period to be a much more satisfying experience. Be they from WD OR Seagate