Well its coming together, but I have had a set back, it appears the MOBO onboard graphics are not working, I get about 6 minutes and then I get the no signal screen, I have tried an XP and vista install disk, and now I have connected the monitor to my wife's laptop and the monitor (AOC, 60 USD LCD) is working fine. I had murders with the XCLIO 5 in 3 enclosure, I had to get the dremel out and cut off all of the tabs in the bay but its in and looks great, five drives in the bottom, 8 in the top, still waiting for my other components to arrive from the USA, but getting there.

Photos from the BB, will do some proper ones, once it is done, thanks for the inspiration guys, I have never done anything like this so I'm dead chuffed with myself, just get the mobo replaced tomorrow and back to practicing the install for when my OEM version arrives.

Here already

Cooler Master Storm case
4GB RAM
E7500 processor
GA-EG45M-D2SH MATX motherboard
700 watt 80 PSU
XCLIO 5 in 3
XCLIO 3 in 2

Bits to come:

Hitachi 2TB x 4
supermicro MV8 SAS/SATA
3ware cables
Intel Pro GT 1000mb NIC
WHS OEM

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Mac Pro Quad 2009, MBA REV B, DROBO, HP EX 485 6.4TB

Looks nice. I just bought a Storm Scout case to build a new PC and I was wondering how those XClio hot swap bays fit in the case. You're photos have helped me out being able to see how they fit. Thanks.

Let me know if you want anymore photos, the 3 in 2 slipped right in but the 5 in 3 involved grinding off 8 tabs, worth it though, very rewarding.

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Mac Pro Quad 2009, MBA REV B, DROBO, HP EX 485 6.4TB

Nice job. Can't wait till you get it up and running. Its always nice to figure out what you want then proceed to build it.

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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

OK, there was a problem with the MOBO, but the distributor, replaced it, flashed the BIOS with the latest, and gave me four more molex leads for my power supply, so a good deal really, MOBO is in and working, evaluation copy is installed and testing and copying are going on, I have managed to access the new server both from Parallels running on my mac and from my mac transferring at 27MB per second on a simple calculation (thoughts??), will, I have added a further 4 disks I had lying around, I will have to wait for the rest to ship, before I can get the cages working, so I will let in simmer away.

On a separate note WHS keeps asking for an activation key, I take it it is not going to be as simple as adding the one from my OEM WHS, that is enroute as I type?

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Mac Pro Quad 2009, MBA REV B, DROBO, HP EX 485 6.4TB

I like the snipe, looks good.

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Current DIY server DL380 G6 2xquad core 2.8ghz 32GB rdimm ram 512mb 2xHP 410 raid with 2x sas expanders (2 X norco RPC-4220) 48 slots stacked with room to grow.
30TB (Movie/File/Music)Win 2012 essentials 64bit Storage spaces
Ex490 E6400 4gb ram

I have nearly finished, I'm doing some bedding in tests and for the last two mornings I have awoken to ZERO disk space on C:, and a massive .log file, see attached, I believe this means disk I is not right, is that correct? I'm running CHKDSK to see if it throws anything up, I think I can identify which disk I is , by looking at disk management for activity, whilst running chkdsk.exe /f /r C:\fs\I . would you agree?

Once this is fixed I will finish off all of my cable sleeving and cold cathode lights!!!!!!

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Mac Pro Quad 2009, MBA REV B, DROBO, HP EX 485 6.4TB

That certainly looks like something abnormal is happening.
You may want to tap Yakuza or one of the MVP's to see if thats a DE artifact.
As DE is basically a soft raid I'm not sure how chkdisk see's it and reports it.
Just a gut feeling if your C: drive was truely that mangled I don't think you would be able to boot.
If you run the disk manager add-in and confirm you have just the OS on C: you might consider a recovery.

But again check with the brains, that looks odd to me.

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Current DIY server DL380 G6 2xquad core 2.8ghz 32GB rdimm ram 512mb 2xHP 410 raid with 2x sas expanders (2 X norco RPC-4220) 48 slots stacked with room to grow.
30TB (Movie/File/Music)Win 2012 essentials 64bit Storage spaces
Ex490 E6400 4gb ram

I had this exact same thing happen with a WD EACS 1 TB drive. I ran Chkdsk and it didn't stop. Through the process of elimination, I figured out what drive was throwing the errors because I could never view the errors in the log. I removed the drive from pool storage and left it in the MSS as an unmanaged drive. The log message growth stopped and it was filling up daily. The drive ran fine for over a year and when checked now shows no smart errors or problems at all. I moved the drive to the SuperwhsII and it added fine and took data very well, however when I rebooted SuperwhsII, it wouldn't reboot until I removed the drive and let it go missing. I shoved the drive back in after the machine booted and everything ran fine, it found the drive and worked correctly. I did this several times just to verify that is what happened and the same results were achieved. I removed it from the pool and tried to reboot and it still wouldn't work. So, it had a different operation than with the MSS because I could reboot with it unmanaged or managed - just would fill up the log. I have since RMAed the drive and the new drive is on the way. I really don't care if it works with a regular system, it was bought for WHS and doesn't work with WHS. There is something wrong with the drive but I can't figure out what it is. Ran WD diagnostics, etc and shows fine but doesn't work.

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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

What your seeing is chkdsk logging a load of error details into the log, to the point you probably wouldnt want to open the log and see what it did. I would delete the log and see what your manual chkdsk is throwing up on the screen as it goes.

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manual chkdsk ran for 2 plus hours stage 4 of 5 and was not completing, so I quit it and have now removed disk I, what was weird is that disk manager had it showing up as 0% used but still took 45 mins to remove, furthermore it then threw up a load of conflicts which then disappeared on removal. I have now deleted all of the chkdsk logs, and they will start agin in approximately 11 minutes, I will check in the morning whether this has done the trick, disk I is a samsung 1TB from a lacie neil poulton black brick that was running as an external on my EX485, I reformatted it and put it in, it has been louder than the rest, fingers crossed this is the culprit, want to get it loaded up with data and put the 485 to use purely as my MAC backup and private storage and let SS do the media serving.

Thanks as ever for the advice guys.

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Mac Pro Quad 2009, MBA REV B, DROBO, HP EX 485 6.4TB

I have awoken to a clean bill of health, it was definitely the samsung drive, the log files are all circa 23kb, no low space warnings, I am going to run some tests on it using an external enclosure this weekend, worse case I trash it, still got 10TB, working on the SS. Ahhh a weekend of cable sleeving.

PLEASE DO NOT FORGET VALENTINES DAY OR ALL WHS PRIVILEGES WILL BE REMOVED

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Mac Pro Quad 2009, MBA REV B, DROBO, HP EX 485 6.4TB

I need some help on my network speeds, I have been monitoring the copying of data to SS, and it fluctuates wildly from 0 up to 28000 it is never constant, can anyone point me in the right direction to troubleshoot this please, I have installed the latest drivers for my intel pci gigabit card, I have set jumbo frames up, but there might be some other settings associated with the Intel card I'm unaware of. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

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Mac Pro Quad 2009, MBA REV B, DROBO, HP EX 485 6.4TB

Have you tried without jumbo frames? Are you moving many small files or one big one? Is the server doing other activities?

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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
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The server is doing nothing but serve video to my TVIX, all the files are larger than 300mb, average is over 1GB, so jumbo frames appears to be the right setting, the intel card gives me the option of 9000 or 14,000 my mac allows 9000 only.

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Mac Pro Quad 2009, MBA REV B, DROBO, HP EX 485 6.4TB