I got the VPN working and am sitting at work as we speak testing it out. Very nice! Of course there are now 3 logon accounts all for me and I am not sure how I like that but right now its not worth complaining about. Performing my first offsite backup which is way cool.

If this thing keeps impressing me more I am going to have to either build a new server for if the Storage Pool move works then I will be more than happy to convert the hardware for highlander over for WS2012E.

I moved some files from my desktop over to the test server and it 70mbps but it did not hold for long but did stay close. I need to get some other drives on this puppy to see exactly how Stablebit works in WS2012E because its not the same as what I see on WHS2011.

_________________
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 believe Stablebit was just added to WS2012E in beta, and appears it only has minimal functionality (right now you can only create a pool but nothing else).

I hope to spend more time this week looking at the file transfer issue and what could be the cause. That appears to be the last stumbling block I need to get past before I can really start moving forward. Doesn't seem to make any sense why I would get such poor transfer speeds unless it is a possible driver issue with the onboard LAN? I don't know if I just pick up a separate LAN Card to test as well

_________________
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

You are correct, stablebit is in beta for windows 7 and windows 2012 Essentials, but I can do anything the whs2011 version can do including creating multiple pools, add and remove drives and set duplication for volumes or individual folders. It seems to work as well as the WHS2011 version and I'm getting 70+MBs transfer rates.

_________________
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

Yeah, just found the pooling options (wasn't obvious at first with the UI). Right now I have two 3TB WD Red drives connected, a 3rd 3TB WD Red drive still in the newegg box, and a 4TB Seagate Drive (still in the newegg box as well). I plan on getting those installs hopefully later today. Need to still figure out the poor transfer speeds, think I will pick up an Intel LAN card separate as well to test, will just run me an extra $80

_________________
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

I bought INTEL CT NICs for like $40 at Microcenter last Dec. Price is still the same: http://www.microcenter.com/search/searc ... cro-Center

I think the next time I get a NIC I am going to get a duel NIC just to save expansion slots.

Damian did you verify the connection speed of your NIC to make sure it was running at 1000? On another note the desktop I built last Dec had a working gigabit NIC until I installed one of those eSATA cards that come with a port multiplier and it caused the motherboard NIC to run at a lower speed. I actually thought the NIC was failing until I removed that eSATA card. A while back I wanted to protect a NIC so I got the bright idea to use the UPS to protect the NIC and it took the speed down. Now to be fair the newer UPS's will support gigabit connections but not all do.

Stop looking at that baseball bat and figure the slow transfers I am certain its going to turn out to be something very simple.

_________________
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

Don't worry, I hit the baseball bat

How do I go about confirming the NIC is set to gigE? I went into the NIC properties and under the "Advanced" tab I don't see anything specific that stands out

_________________
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

Go to the servers desktop and next to the clock you should see the network icon just right click on it and then you will see ACCESS TYPE CONNECTIONS and to the left of that you will see the NIC and just left click on it and it will open up the Connection Status Screen where you will see the Speed.

That just tells you the connection speed. There is no setting I am aware of that sets a Gigabit NIC to run at 1.0 Gbps as the are other factors which can cause a NIC to drop in speed. I have already mentioned my experience with an eSATA Card, a UPS but also a bad cable can drop your speed. Its always one of the first things I look at in a new build.

You mentioned your using a Gigabyte Motherboard and in the BIOS you might find an option for the NIC to also confirm its speed which may help you to determine if the speed is different is it caused by a driver which would not be loaded when your in the BIOS. Idea here is if you see 1.0 Gbps in the BIOS and not when the server os has booted then you know you might be dealing with a conflict be a driver or other installed component. If the speed is the same in the BIOS as it is when the server OS is booted then what I would do is shut the server down, pull out all cards and then boot into the BIOS to see if the speed is different.

Of course if your NIC is running at 1.0 Gbps then it just rules out the NIC as the cause of the problem and something else is causing the issue.

One thing I noticed about WS2012E and it may be my hardware but it seems to take quite a long time when you run various setup wizards but this OS is wicked cool for example when I was setting up the VPN on the server and got it working I thought I was going to have to configure the client and the Server did it for me. Tested it out at work and performed backups and left the notebook on all night to see if it would perform a backup automatically or not and no go there but maybe its smart enough to know a backup recently occurred and chose not to. So the next couple nights I will see if the server will back it up automatically via a VPN Connection. I did see an odd alert on the server which was picking on the clients DNS so before I go back in tonight I will see if I can resolve that but it has to be done on the client end. This alert popped up after something called a BPA Scan but its a DNS issue on my client.

Well I have to crash or I will be sleep walking at work tonight. I really need to hire a 3rd shift supervisor so I can get back to working days.

_________________
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

Erail I can see the Pool but not the individual folders or find where you can add folders to the pool. I still have to get more drives in this server and add the drives to the pool. I do not see any integration in the Dashboard accept that it shows the Pool Drive but I do see Stablebit in the Start Screen but when I select it I only see the actual Pool but not the Folders in the pool or do I have to assume everything I put in the Drive Pool Drive is indeed part of the pool which is not the case with WHS2011.

While I understand its in beta and I would never use the beta in a production server because the risk is too high. I ran WHS2011 for quite sometime before the released version of Stablebit Drive Pool. You could say I ran WHS2011 as stock as possible but relied on my WHSv1 server to protect my data so I had it on both servers for a long time and when Drive Pool was released I ran with it and when I felt it was viable I downsized my WHS v1 server and moved the drives to my WHS2011 server.

Hard Drives I have and I can always purchase more but I do not want to muck around with my data since the majority of it is my ripped movie collection and while I could always rip the DVD's again I do not want to go through that marathon again.

_________________
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

Interesting, did t hat an the Intel NIC is showing at 100Mbps

So looks like that is the issue. I will dig through the BIOS to see if there was any settings changed, look at my cable, Sata card, etc...

_________________
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

comp1962 - you add folders at the dashboard under storage - it will come up with the pool as a place to add. The dashboard will show all the folders and where they are. All other controls are on the drive pool app. If you go to start menu, you will see drive pool as an app and just click there and everything will come up for the app.

_________________
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

OK, some further developments. I enabled the second LAN on my mobo, installed the driver, and set them up for team NIC. Everything is working now, connection is reading at 1Gbps. So now I am testing out file transfers are here are the results:

1GB mkv file transferred at approx 80-90MB/s
Approx 30GB Blu ray folder rip right now transferring at 60-90MB/s
Approx 32GB mkv transferring at 1-3MB/s

I am wondering if there is possibly something wrong with the file or the drive the file is on as I have a few hdds on my server with failing health. Tested another large mkv (over 30GB and same issue).

So overall things are looking much better, just gotta keep plugging along

_________________
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

Damian when you team your NICs if they are Gigabit they should show up as in your case 2 Gbps if you have 3 like I have they should show up as 3 Gbps. See the pic below:



Depending on how you set the team up using the NIC utilities or WS2012E http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download ... x?id=30160 if one NIC becomes unresponsive one of the other in the Team will take over so in your Team my guess is you have one NIC running at 1.0 Gbps a and the other 100 Mbps. If the one running 1.0Gbps fails then your NIC Speed would be 100 Mbps and you will be scratching your head why things are running slow be it next week or year.

If it were me I would disable the NIC running at 100 Mbps and continue working on it looking for a solution down the road and keep your fully functional NIC running which is common sense but if your like me that 100 Mbps NIC speed will drive you crazy but the good thing is you now have much better transfer speeds.

If both your NICs are INTEL they should also have some diagnostic options in their configuration where you can test things like the quality of the LAN Cable which is pretty cool.

_________________
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 can see the Pool and have moved the folders to the Pooled Drive but the only thing I see is the Actual Pool Drive and not what I am use to. Maybe when I add a 2nd drive to the pool I will see something different.

_________________
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

Sorry, my post wasn't clear originally. I swapped out the cable and my 100 went to 1.0Gbps just using the Intel NIC (so the cable was the culprit!). However, after that I tried transferring files and was getting the same abysmal transfer speeds, so that is when I decided to enable to dual LAN and set up the team NIC. My team now shows 2.0Gbps.

It appears the poor transfer speed I got originally (aside from using a bad cable) was I just out of bad luck chose a file that was on a failing drive (out of the thousands of files I could have chosen to test with lol)

Right now my transfer speeds are definitely blowing away what I was getting with WHSv1 so that is good news. I have added 4 3TB drives to my stablebit pool and copied over a few movies. Next up is to test playback from my media players to see if WS2012E can truly replace WHSv1 for me.

If all goes well I can finally start working on my writeup!

_________________
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

That's totally awesome. I don't think you have anything to worry about as far as playing your media with your devices. The more I play with my test server the more I want to move forward with it. Last night I turned on the notebook at work and as soon as I made the VPN connection the client backup started. I really wish it would backup XP Clients but I still have my other servers to back those up.

I think your on a good footing and unfortunately you ran into issue along the way which is always annoying but when its all said and done your going to have one hell of a server.

What are you going to do with your WHS v1 server?

_________________
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