I love my 6 year old EX495 running WHS V1 but the system disk is getting flakey. I think I have an idea what to do but hoped to run it past anyone who cares to advise me.
Currently the system disk is the original Seagate 1.5T (currently running at 41C) and there is a second Samsung 1.5T drive currently at 27C and of a green flavor if I recall correctly. Both 30% full since I have duplication set up (via using regedit to create a value Reliable and setting it to 1) I now think that 3 drives are better than two and plan to implement that.
The SMART data on the two drives is



So I think the System drive needs to be retired and not reused but the samsung disk can stay in the pool for now sinceI will have duplication.

I don't want to try cloning the disk. Also, I recently deleted the entire storage pool and removed some less critical machines due to various issues (not backing up, can't create image etc.) To my surprise it has done a few backups. If I lose them I don't care that much, they are all recent. Just trying to do it right for the thrill of it. I see that with a full slate of backups the 1.5T disks were about 60% full.

My plan
1. Buy two 2TB Western Digital red drives (1T might be enough but 2T is only $30 more @, A red and a green might be fine but that only saves $20 )
2. Install one now in drive bay 3 and let the system rebalance so that only the system itself is left on the failing drive.
3. Create a WHS recovery CD.
4. ? physically remove the two non-system storage drives?
5. Replace the old system drive with a brand new WD red drive.
6. Carefully follow directions to remove connector software from a laptop, connect it to the router with an ethernet cable. Use the restore CD. Do an amazing number of updates until it is back at the latest version Power Pack 3.
7. Use regedit to set Reliable to 1 for folder duplication
8. ?Put the two storage drives back in?
9. Power up and let the system get in balance
10. Restore the connector software on all the machines.

So QUESTIONS:
A. Does that all sound advisable, especially steps 4&8?
B. Should I back anything up to an external USB drive?
C. I mostly have free add-ins and have a license key for the one or two that aren't free. Do I just have to download all the msi files and reinstall them?
D. Anything else worth doing as long as I am mucking around?
E. The advice is to have the top bay empty with the flap up. One might think that drive 2 empty would help the system drive run a little cooler. No? I previously had 1&3 full 2&4 empty. I changed that but it did not seem to matter much either way.

Thanks!

A backup of data is always good, just in case something goes bad on the recovery.
But.
You could add one of the new reds and use drive balancer to flush all the data off the system drive.
Then assuming the system doesn't stop during all that drive activity. Then you could add another new red to the bottom bay and do the recovery (not reset) and once you get everything happy, then you could try to remove the last bad drive and see if it can make it through all that activity.

I just did this with my backup server, but only the system drive was bad.

If all else fails, as long as you don't do a reset, all the data will still be on the drives and you could access it by connecting the drives to a pc with a usb to sata setup.

I see you have the smart addin, that is great, chances are it told you the drives were acting up well in advance, so you should have good luck on moving all that data around.

Good LUck

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