WHS hardware change and rebuild... random observations and comments

[imelda]

After noticing that some transfers from WHS down to client machines were excrutiangly slow, I discovered that the sole PATA drive I had in the system was causing all manner of issues with timeouts and filling the eventlog with errors.

I tried to do the drive remove from within the WHS console, but WHS couldn't recover everything off the drive, and warned that if the drive was forcibly removed then backups and some data may be lost.

I ended up shutting the machine down, pulling the bad drive out, and then sitting back and watching the result. Even though I had duplication turned on, the faulty drive meant there were some records on DE drive that were missing from the left over disks, but I felt safe thinking they should be still on the drive.

Plugging the drive into another machine it still wasn't 100% happy, but I was still able to recover all but 2 of the files, which I had on another machine anyway, so no real loss.

The forced removal of the hard drive really seemed to screw up the backup service, which really just confirmed that I needed to do a rebuild. I was initially hoping I could do a repair install after making some hardware changes, but decided it wasn't worth the risk.

(The following section needs to be started with an apology to the forum mod who did an excellent job of tidying up and recabling the innards of this box - he can swear at me if he reads this...)

I decided that this would be a good time to do a hardware change I had wanted to do for a while, and swapped the Intel 965OT board out for an old 975BX board. I went to this board due to the 8 on board SATA ports, and because I had a video card I wanted to use instead of the onboard on the OT. Due to the different screens/devices the server is potentially hooked up to I went to a passive 2400pro for the dual link DVI support I need now, and the HDMI support that will be needed in a month or so. Once I figured out exactly what I needed in a video card - those outputs, low power, passive - the 2400pro was the best option, even if it is overkill. I thought it would make sense to go back a generation or two, but I couldn't see any hardware that really suited me, and the price of the 2400pro can't be beat.

One of the things I had to do which I wasn't happy about was load the XP ATI drivers to get the resolutions I needed, but hopefully they won't cause too much of a problem. I'm a big fan of the standard vga driver on a server, so this felt very unnatural.

Some other things I discoverd... copying terrabytes of data takes a long time

Copying data off a drive that fails at certain points takes even longer.

Catching the error before hard drive disappears from view in explorer and the copy dialog means concentration is required

Storage balancing with the rebuild and a bunch of additional storage is also time consuming. The blue storage led on my case hasn't had a break in days.

The 975BX board has some strange behaviour noticeably in TS and WHS console. Some reg settings appear to fix it, but still a little bit of a concern.

Storage is cheap! I decided that this was a good chance to pull out the smaller drives and replace them with 500GB drives.

I need to find a use for the 250/300GB drives that are sitting in a box