Time to expanded. Any recommendation on what to buy that works fine with an EX495 with WHS11?

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- HP MSS EX495 - 4GB RAM
- WHS 2011
- 11 TB of Storage
- Clients running Win7 64 bit

Hi akWolf welcome to the forums

If your looking for a 5 bay enclosure keep your eyes open on Newegg puts them on sale for around $130 about once a month of late. The most common enclosure used here are the Sans Digital TR5m http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6816111166.

The TR5m has a couple of versions the one above uses an eSATA connection but there is a USB version and another that offers both USB and eSATA connections. The unit is actually made by CFI in Tiawan and can also be found under different names like Rosewill, CFI and there is a new one under the name Cavalry. These enclosure come in 4, 5 and 8 Bay configurations. If your looking at the 8 bay enclosures then you need to keep one thing in mind and that is for eSATA you need 2 eSATA connections to access all 8 bays but with USB you can access all 8 bays with only one connection. eSata connectins are faster and even if the newer enclosure is USB3 it will only run at USB2 speeds on your server. Whats interesting is that these units are sold with or without the RAID card so look for the models which do not come with the RAID card as most people never use this card and there is a substantial reduction in price. If your server has no eSATA connetion then you will need a RAID Card which supports JBOD for use in WHS and so you will have to determine if the RAID card supplied with some of the units is right for you or not.

If you run down the listing in the following link you will see other enclosures which are available to you.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductLi ... gesize=100

This will get you started so that you can expand your search to find the unit which best fits your budget and needs. Since your now in an expansion mode you may also want to take the time to review your growth and if you are happy with the current performance of your server. I mention this because far too often people end up with many external enclosures and drives then they look towards building a large enclosure server so they can put everything under the hood of one unit and at the same time boost their server perfomance. Sometimes you will find the total cost of expanding outside the box will often make for a very nice down payment towards a larger system so its worth thinking about. On the other hand if your growth needs are limited then just adding another 5 bays may be whats best for you.

I wish you luck in determining which unit is best for you. Please feel free to ask many questions before you buy so that you will have made a well informed purchase and not have buyers remorse later.

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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

I'm currently looking over a Netstor NR710C 5 Bay RAID enclosure and so far it's pretty cool. Have not had any experience with any others though.....

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EX490 with 7TB storage

OK, its only a 4-bay expansion....this enclosure is the "non-raid" version with eSATA interface or USB3.0 interface.

Running WHS 2011 (standard build) on HP EX490. Found that the eSATA port was no longer operating, so added the SI3531 driver to get the eSATA port running. Have connected this enclosure via eSATA cable with the disks individually addressible from the WHS. With a WD Caviar Blue and WD Caviar Green installed in slots 1 and 2 of the expansion bay respectively, I copied 25GB of data from the WD Green to the WD Blue in approximately 7 minutes. The copy was showing 49-56 MB/sec transfer rate.

I have the disks in the enclosure set up as being the server backup disks and all runs perfectly. The wakeup/sleep facility of the enclosure seems to work acceptably as well.

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HP-EX490 (unmodified) running WHS 2011: 6.15TB storage
External Enclosure PROBOX HF2-SU3S2: 1.5TB storage

Do you run the SMART addin and if so can it read the smart data from the drives in the external box?
I figured I would do the same at some point down the road ( use an external box for backups) but it would be nice to see the smart data on those drives as well.
Smart spoiled me, I have to know now what the drives are doing
Shout out how that setup works for ya. Also, if you try out the usb, let us know how that works compared to the esata.
Good luck and thx for the info....

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[X510 CPU/RAM/All 2 TB Red's] [X510 CPU/Sync'ed Backup/All 2 TB Hitachi's]
[X510 /2 in box]
[X710 LIAN LI DIY W2016E] Stablebit Drivepool [EX-503 LIAN LI 5-bay USB3 External]
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