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PostPosted: Wed Sep 28, 2011 10:06 pm 
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I am happily running WHS 2011 on my ex495 for two weeks now. So far so good.

I've always held off purchase for a sansdigital tower because i never needed the extra HDDs then, but now i'm finding myself probably in need of it.

My question is, would any of the SansDigital towers operate smoothly and without problems on a MSS with WHS 2011? No driver problems, conflicts, or anything? :encore:


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PostPosted: Mon Oct 03, 2011 5:05 pm 
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I have the EX-495 and the Sans Digital TR5M-B 5 Disk eSATA enclosure running WHS v1. I had some problems before with drives dropping offline under heavy loads, but have seemed to solve those with a "clean" server restore. It seems as if the problems were software related, nothing due to drivers etc.

I would think it should work well under WHS 2011. That's a path I am probably going to take in the future too.

I also run a Mediasonic HF2-SU2S2 4 Disk eSATA/USB enclosure connected via USB on the EX495. Also working great.

I am now using a software RAID system called FlexRAID to protect some of my large shares, instead of using Folder Duplication which is so wasteful of space. I will be able to pull out 6 2TB drives out of my pool when I am done. FlexRAID might also be a DE solution for WHS 2011. So far so good.

Here is a link if you're interested:

http://wiki.flexraid.com/2011/03/26/beg ... xraid-2-0/

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Lenovo TS-440| 8GB| |13 int HD's| 2xSans Digital TR5M-B (10 HD's) | WHS 2011 | |Stablebit Drivepool |Stablebit Scanner| |FlexRAID 2.0|


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PostPosted: Thu Nov 10, 2011 5:09 pm 
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Thank you for sharing FlexRaid with us. I am thinking of upgrading my EX490 to WHS2011 as well, but hesitate to do so because of the missing DE.

Have you encountered any problem using this application to achieve DE results for 2011?

Is that a free download? I supposed that it has be imported to the server as an add-in. Am I wrong.

Please advise. Many thanks,


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PostPosted: Sat Nov 12, 2011 2:56 pm 
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stevelee wrote:
Thank you for sharing FlexRaid with us. I am thinking of upgrading my EX490 to WHS2011 as well, but hesitate to do so because of the missing DE.

Have you encountered any problem using this application to achieve DE results for 2011?

Is that a free download? I supposed that it has be imported to the server as an add-in. Am I wrong.

Please advise. Many thanks,


I am still running WHS v1. I use duplication on some folders (photos,videos,users) along with snapshot raid (Flexraid) for my HUGE shares of Recorded TV and Movies. This works great as duplication for 6TB of shares is very inefficient. ( I removed 5 hard drives from my system and with the HD prices high now, I have plenty of spare drives!) FlexRAID is advancing quickly, with real-time raid, and also storage pooling, which will be great for WHS 2011 IMO.

FlexRAID is NOT an add-in. You install it from Remote Desktop on your server. It has a scheduler to update your parity automatically, or can be done manually for snapshot Raid. But manually requires logging in via RDP on the server. It also can send emails when successfully updated, etc.

The link in my previous post will tell much more about it. On that page is a link there to go to the support forums. I think you might have to register there, but you will find a ton more information and also links to download it.

I have been very happy with it so far, and think it will be my ticket to upgrade to WHS 2011 in the future. Especially when real-time parity raid gets out of beta here in a few weeks.

FlexRaid is similar to Unraid as far a having drives dedicated to parity, tolerating drive failures, etc. But it's a lot more flexible as it can be installed on different operating systems such as Windows and Linux. It does not touch your files at all, just reads the folders and computes parity to be able to restore missing folders/files (shares) if a drive fails. It's completely separate from NTFS.

Been good for me so far!! And it's free.

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Lenovo TS-440| 8GB| |13 int HD's| 2xSans Digital TR5M-B (10 HD's) | WHS 2011 | |Stablebit Drivepool |Stablebit Scanner| |FlexRAID 2.0|


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PostPosted: Fri Jan 06, 2012 10:47 pm 
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580guy, what size is your PPU?


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PostPosted: Fri Jan 06, 2012 10:55 pm 
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BTW, you have to choose either real-time RAID or storage pool: they cannot co-exist.

See FAQ entry: http://www.flexraid.com/2011/03/26/can- ... same-time/


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PostPosted: Sat Jan 07, 2012 12:55 am 
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onlineaddy wrote:
580guy, what size is your PPU?


Since all my other drives (DRU's) are 2TB I also have my parity drive the same size (2TB).

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Lenovo TS-440| 8GB| |13 int HD's| 2xSans Digital TR5M-B (10 HD's) | WHS 2011 | |Stablebit Drivepool |Stablebit Scanner| |FlexRAID 2.0|


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PostPosted: Sat Jan 07, 2012 1:00 am 
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onlineaddy wrote:
BTW, you have to choose either real-time RAID or storage pool: they cannot co-exist.

See FAQ entry: http://www.flexraid.com/2011/03/26/can- ... same-time/


Yes that is true. You must choose which to use. Real-time RAID is still beta at this point, but snapshot RAID is extremely stable, which is what I am using on my large media shares instead of folder duplication. I still use duplication on other shares such as photos and user folders and exclude these from FLEXRAID.

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Lenovo TS-440| 8GB| |13 int HD's| 2xSans Digital TR5M-B (10 HD's) | WHS 2011 | |Stablebit Drivepool |Stablebit Scanner| |FlexRAID 2.0|


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PostPosted: Sat Jan 18, 2014 10:34 am 
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I have WHS 2011 using stable bit as a drive extender and 2 TR5M enclosures. One of them is always going offline. Sometimes while streaming a movie and always when moving a lot of files like doing a big backup. It's very frustrating.


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PostPosted: Sun Jan 19, 2014 2:25 pm 
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That's a frustrating thing to figure out and to be honest the last time I test this out with my Highlander Server which is a custom built server I could not replicate a drive drop out both with WHS2011 and WS2012E. I have experienced the drop out issue in the past with WHSv1 which is why I opted to go with my Highlander Build back in 2011 to get everything self contained within one enclosure but this is not helping you.

Does the entire enclosure drop out or one drive or does one drive drop first and then the entire enclosure drops out. If you can isolate the issue to say a sensitive drive and remove it from your pool then you can see if the drop out issue continues. Also look at any software which polls the drives to see if the drop out issue occurs during the drive polling and as such changing the frequency of the drive polling may prove to be beneficial.

I for one would like to better understand the cause of this issue even though I no longer use Port Multipliers for server operation but do use them as Docking Stations.

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Migrated from WHS2011 to WS2012E: HIGHLANDER

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PostPosted: Mon Feb 03, 2014 3:56 pm 
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They all go out. It either happens on occasion watching a movie, or if i try to copy many large files to or from the machine (even on to a local USB drive) it will nearly always send the whole "tower" offline. I have 2 of them and it only happens with one of the towers. I sent a message to the company a few weeks ago but haven't heard a peep.


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PostPosted: Mon Feb 03, 2014 5:30 pm 
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Can you look at the event logs and see which drive in the enclosure dropped out first and also look for events that indicate time out issues pertaining to a particular drive and if you see one drive always showing up in the event log then remove it from the storage pool and see if that quiets things down a bit for you.

You could try moving the drives between the two enclosures provided they are setup as JBOD and not RAID then if the problem moves to the other enclosure then you will know to look for a drive and if the problem stays with the original enclosure then you will know the issue is with the enclosure and not the drives.

I know when I was experiencing this issue it really pushed me to building a new server, heck I build 2 at that time one to replace my ProLiant and still run WHSv1 and the other was for WHS2011 which now runs WS2012E at which point I retired my collection of Port Multipliers and only use them today as docking stations but that proved to be a costly upgrade not many are willing to make or could afford.

Last time I was testing a Port Multiplier out to see if I could figure out a possible cause for drop outs the damn thing would not drop a single drive and this could be controller related or the compliment of drives I was using in the enclosure.

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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


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PostPosted: Tue Feb 04, 2014 9:18 am 
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Will do, thanks for the great suggestions


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PostPosted: Thu Apr 03, 2014 10:51 am 
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Chrismiline, hey I had the same problem with some external towers and drivepool. I solved my issues by making each tower a separate pool. When I did that, all of the timeout problems cleared right up. Of course, this is not an ideal solution because you bought drivepool to put them altogether, however, I have not had any issues with having separate pools, you just lose all of the timeout problems


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