Today I removed 2 live drives from my WHS2011 server both were Storage Pool Drives. Stablebit properly reported them as missing. I plugged one back in again live but chose to remove the other from the storage pool.

The removal process was smooth and quick. Actually I needed that drive for use in another server so I thought why not test out how these things work especially since its on a test server anyway.

So far so good. My impression on Stablebit so far is all positive and while I have only been running it for a short period of time I am impressed with its ease of use and how smooth it really is. I tell you honestly this has me looking forward to building my new server but I am also anxious to see the final Stablebit product released. I think it beats the hell out of WHS v1 version of DE.

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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

Been appreciating the feedback. When I tested Drive Bender it seemed way too complicated for what IMO should be an easy and straightforward process. Stablebit and Datacore are next on my list, but been loving the feedback Stablebit is getting

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Cheers,
Damian

DIY WHS - 12.5TB and growing, too many gadgets to list

Did you read the MediaSmartServer blog today?
Blog - http://www.adigitalhomeblog.com
"Like a midget at a urinal, stay on your toes!" - Lieutenant Frank Drebin

Right now all I can say about Stablebit is I wish DE in v1 was as friendly and once you grasp a few things on how it works well its a pure joy. Now as I have already mentioned when I was copying my data within the server itself the transfer rate was not very good. In all fairness the transfer rate may also have been impacted by the recent addition of Perfect Disk 12.

Over the next week I will be testing a series of different file transfers both uploads and downloads with and without PD12 running to see what impact if any it may have. Then I will replicate the same transfers to and from the non-pooled areas for comparison.

The other areas I need to test for performance impact is media streaming using Remote Potato and SubSonic. This test will be done by others who have been helping me test the performance since those programs were installed on WHS2011 and so far the feeback has been good. The difference now is that I have both Stablebit and PD12 installed. PD12 should help increase the performance as it keeps the drives optimized and I am not expecting Stablebit to have any impact because it appears to duplicate the data as its being transfered to the server or so it seems but does so much sooner than DE did thus its impact is sooner rather then spread out over time which as you know can cause other issues particularly with streaming.

I am really hoping erail chimes in and posts what he sees with the transfer rates. This is the only area which I can identify as being a negative but the rest is all positive for sure.

_________________
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

I'm actually seeing fast transfer rates than my EX470 V1 and my SuperWHS quad core on copying data but then EX485 WHS 2011 is running a 3.0 GHZ E5700 and 4gig memory. I know Stablebit still has the the debug tracing and no performance optimization is done yet. My approach has been to ignore performance at this time and concentrate on function. So far I have noticed no in-ordinate glitches in performance and it actually performs quite well. I expect when performance optimization is done, it will perform much faster than V1 especially copying to the WHS Shares.

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HP EX470, 4 GIG, 4200+ EE SFF, WHS V1, Production
HP EX485, 4 GIG, E5800, WHS 2011, Stablebit Drive Pool, Transfer Server, Backup Server
HP EX490, 4 GIG, Q9400S, WHS 2011, Stablebit Drive Pool, Mediaserver
HP EX485, 4 GIG, Q8200S, WHS 2011, ITUNES Server

Thanks erail appreciate the feedback!!! I just put in the newer 1856 uprgade to replace the 1836. WHS2011 never really got me all that excited until I ran a test of Remote Potato which would not run on my WHS v1 because of the Opteron Processors but ran very well on WHS2011 with great improvement over what SubSoninc and ORB could stream. Couple that with Stablebit and I have a winner on my hands.

Stablebit for me right now is better then WHS v1 DE and now I am feeling more confident that WHS2011 is the way to go.

_________________
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

The drives I have added to be pooled shows the accumulated size of all the drives. However, I have filled the first drive & can not add data to the remain 'pooled' drives. What is the correct way to add drives to be pooled?

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Lilbisqit

Just goto the Stablebit Drive Pool Tab, select Hard Drives Tab, then select the hard drive you want to add to the pool and to the right side you will see an option to ADD the Drive to the Pool. You can also Right Click on the drive you want to add to the Drive Pool and you will be given the option to Add it.

Its fairly simple and if you play with it you will also notice how forgiving it is.

_________________
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

As per the below screen shots I have already added the drives to the pool.

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Lilbisqit

Try copying the files to the C:\ServerPool\actual pool folder and not directly to the actual folder on a specific drive. While you can get away with doing that your drive will be flagged as unhealthy and you will have to have Stablebit Drive Pool repair and duplicate to correct the issue.

If I have misunderstood what appears your trying to do then let me know. You may also want to set the Storage Pool Folders as a SHARED so you can easily see them from the Network on the client. Just make certain the user names match and you will be good to go. There might be a better way to do it but its how I recall doing it. Also when M3 is released Stablebit will be more integrated with WHS2011 so it should be easier to work with as far as the Shares.

_________________
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

You are trying to copy to Videos which is not part of the pool. Videos is a WHS 2011 folder which won't be integrated into the Stablebit pool until M3 is released. It is probably on D: which is only 430 gig along with the other standard folders

Edit: No, I see it's on E:, but it still is a WHS 2011 standard folder and will not use the pool. It will only use the max size of what it has available in E:

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HP EX470, 4 GIG, 4200+ EE SFF, WHS V1, Production
HP EX485, 4 GIG, E5800, WHS 2011, Stablebit Drive Pool, Transfer Server, Backup Server
HP EX490, 4 GIG, Q9400S, WHS 2011, Stablebit Drive Pool, Mediaserver
HP EX485, 4 GIG, Q8200S, WHS 2011, ITUNES Server

I had moved the Videos folder from D to E due to limited space on that drive. I preferred that the 500GB drive be strictly an OS only drive, & windows carved out 430GB as D drive from it. I have since created a pool of six 2TB drives & is currently copying Videos into that pool instead of to the actual folder.. thanks for that tip Comp1962. System has been copying videos for the last 37 hours.
It looks like M3 may make pooling a whole lot easier for a lot of folks.

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Lilbisqit

I did noticed that data is being copied evenly across all 6 drives in the pool

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Lilbisqit

M3 build now avilable.

Further build of M3 now avilable.

M4 is due in August sometime.

I see the M3 and another update after the initial release. I did install the M3 and it appears ok but the sad thing is MS has my license expiring on my test server which was running an evaluation version of WHS2011. So I just got done re-installing WHS2011 only this go around I am chosing not to continue testing Stablebit until they release M4 or if someone reports that the file transfer speeds are no longer slow.

I will be using this server to test things for using on my new 2011 server which I am enjoying very much but wish to proceed with caution on it. So having a test server to beat up is a good thing. I have one for WHS v1 as well but there is not much to test these days on v1.

_________________
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