Today I will be setting up my new server (once the brown truck gets here).

I have the EX475 with a 3rd hard drive (750gb) to add.

I see a lot of conversation about installing the largest drive in position #1 and since this is a virgin server, should I put the brand new 750 in position #1 or for the small amount of difference in size will it matter?

TIA

Steve

Well perhaps you'll trust what Microsoft has to say about Windows Home Server? From the Windows Home Server Getting Started Guide



If you look at thw worst case, two blank drives, the 750 GB drive offers a 50% increase in free space. If one is looking at real world, your primary hard drive will have the OS installed, so it's not going to be empty. By using the 750 GB drive you'll gain more than a 50% increase in free space.

Not all drives are created the same, how big is the cache on the new drive? Some are 16 MB and some are 32 MB, a bigger cache is better, what kind of read and write speeds does the new drive have? It is possible to simply buy size, or size and speed.

Thank you darkone.

I have been reading the WHS unleashed book for the past couple of days to make sure I know a lot more about how the server works and how to squeeze the optimum amount out of it. There's way more in that book than I'll need intially but it has lots of great info.

The new drive has only a 16mb cache. It's a WD SATA 300 with the Caviar SE16 designation and speed of 7200 RPM.

It's great to have as large a drive as possible as the system one, but keep this in mind:

1. The system automatically keeps as many files as possible OFF the system drive and onto the others. Even if duplication is off.
2. Unless you have hundreds of gigs transferring at the same time from multiple machines, 500GB is fine.

In my case, I may transfer 30GB at once. But I use an FTP client so it goes one at a time (which is much better to prevent file corruption in transit). After the file copies up, the system moves it to another drive. Right now, none of my 8GB movies are on the system drive.

Unless you have several tech savy people copying hundreds of gigs at once from multiple machines, the only real benefit is the added storage on the main drive.

I could be wrong but I believe all of your PC backups are kept on the first drive. I am certain, however, the PC backup files are not duplicated.

I don't use the MSS to backup my machines. My internal drives are way too big to backup over the network.

Can anyone else confirm this?

This is incorrect, PC backups are moved off the primary drive. I showed this here.

Necro, I don't understand what you mean that your internal drives are too big. They will backup during the maintenance window until they are complete. Then only incremental backups will occur. Also, since Drive Extender does block-level comparisons of all files, only one copy of redundant blocks are stored for the backup. This saves a lot of space. Let me know if I misunderstood your question.