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?

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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HP EX495 | Q9300| 4GB | Sans Digital TR5M-B (Now Retired) |(2) Mediasonic Probox HF2-SU2S2 eSATA/USB2.0| WHS 2011 | |Stablebit Drivepool |FlexRAID 2.0| [9x2TB]

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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HP EX495 | Q9300| 4GB | Sans Digital TR5M-B (Now Retired) |(2) Mediasonic Probox HF2-SU2S2 eSATA/USB2.0| WHS 2011 | |Stablebit Drivepool |FlexRAID 2.0| [9x2TB]

580guy, what size is your PPU?

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/

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

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HP EX495 | Q9300| 4GB | Sans Digital TR5M-B (Now Retired) |(2) Mediasonic Probox HF2-SU2S2 eSATA/USB2.0| WHS 2011 | |Stablebit Drivepool |FlexRAID 2.0| [9x2TB]

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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HP EX495 | Q9300| 4GB | Sans Digital TR5M-B (Now Retired) |(2) Mediasonic Probox HF2-SU2S2 eSATA/USB2.0| WHS 2011 | |Stablebit Drivepool |FlexRAID 2.0| [9x2TB]