WH Server and RAID Card - Fun!

[houseisland]

Went looking at the sales on Windows Home Server boxes this weekend for a lark, mostly looking at HP and Acer offerings.

Why would you build servers with hotswap hard drives that don't do any RAID level?

So I thought I would try building one at home. I cobbled together some old stuff (rock solid Intel chipset stuff in good working order) and I stuck an Sunix SATA 2100 card in it (2 channel, Intuous Chipset, Raid 0, 1, JBOD - has worked in XP, W2K3, Vista, and W7) and built a RAID 1 array.

Now the Vista-like setup wizard for Home Server will not accept the Server 2003 drivers, generating an error when they are loaded. It will accept either the XP or the Vista 32 drivers and proceed through the initial wizard. But then it will blue screen with these drivers after the first reboot, when the system goes into the more normal Server 2003 setup. At this point a reboot and a reloading of the drivers with the F6 wizard is need and the wizard auto-chooses the Server 2003 drivers. Then set up goes merrily on its way.

By the way, did I mention that I hate computers.




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It is my pure and virtuous heart that
gives me the strength of ten!

[MobilePCPhysician]

The HP homeservers do raid one. You need to add a second drive. I have a few small business customers that we have them set up in.

[houseisland]

The HP homeservers do raid one. You need to add a second drive.

My understanding, a possibly erroneous understanding, is that the HP boxes will only do RAID 1 on data volumes and that Acer boxes (at least the one available here) don't RAID anything.

I have a few small business customers that we have them set up in.

I also know of some people who are using them as backup to network folders for continuous backup solutions. I don't know how well they work in this role.

Well... I must say that I haven't had so much fun since the early NT 4 service packs. I had almost forgotten about the need for votive candles in a circle around the computer and the necessity of the bowls of chicken blood to be offered up to MS before applying any updates. Years ago they used say that if you played Led Zepplin backwards you got Satanic messages and that if you played the NT 4 CD backwards it was worse because it installed. I'm feeling a wave of nostalgia here. Wonder when SP6a for Home Server is coming out.




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It is my pure and virtuous heart that
gives me the strength of ten!

[MobilePCPhysician]

The software, Windows Home Server drive extender, provides the duplication of shared folders, across two or more drives, it is not specific to Acer or HP.

So either brand will do raid 1, but you must have a second drive installed first.

Edit: The HP "EX" model of Home Server can add a second hard drive, as can the Acer H340. Hp makes an LX model which does not do raid 1.

[houseisland]

The software, Windows Home Server drive extender, provides the duplication of shared folders, across two or more drives, it is not specific to Acer or HP.

So either brand will do raid 1, but you must have a second drive installed first.

Edit: The HP "EX" model of Home Server can add a second hard drive, as can the Acer H340. Hp makes an LX model which does not do raid 1.

Thanks. I haven't had a chance to dig into what the software will do, yet. I have just been struggling with getting it installed and patched. It is done now - major grief getting Power Pack 2 installed.

I tried installing the free AV offering from BitDefender that support Windows Home Server 2003, but it comes up with an error message saying that the OS is not supported; it then presents a list of supported OSs which includes WHS 2K3.

In a perverse way, I am actually enjoying this.




____________________________________________



It is my pure and virtuous heart that
gives me the strength of ten!

[houseisland]

Interesting. Troubleshooting things with the WH Server exposed a networking problem.

My principal toy PC doesn't connect to much of anything on my home "family" LAN. It pretty much deals with traffic to and from the gateway and out to the Internet. Traffic is fast and clean. Printer traffic is minimal and there seems to be no problem with it.

I have a test/dev LAN but it is largely in mothballs.

The WH Server introduced a reason to use the "family" LAN for host to host data traffic. Weirdly, data transfers were way slower than to and from the internet. Poking around, I discovered that every 60 seconds or so I was getting a spike of packet loss - up to 40% at the peak of the spike. But this was only with computer to computer data transfer. Traffic to and from the gateway was completely clean, although there was much less data being transfered here.

In the end it was my embedded nForce Gigabit NICs - no change with auto speed negotiation or with being locked down at 100 full duplex. No change if just one was plugged in or if two were plugged in bridged. No change if I took them out of the 16 port Linksys switch and plugged them into one of the router LAN ports.

I installed a cheap Realtek 10/100 NIC and now data transfer is just smoking.

Weird.



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It is my pure and virtuous heart that
gives me the strength of ten!

[houseisland]

Hmmm. A reload and things are much better.

The system did not like the Buffalo DDR 400 RAM. The RAM tests good in other systems but not in this one, at least not any more. The RAM formerly worked in this system with XP. But I replaced the old Liteon PS, and the voltages on the new Nikao PS are all a little on the hot side, stable but slightly hot. So I dragged some OCZ RAM out of an old Socket A box and life is good.

The problems were very subtle and sporadic to start with, problems installing things, etc., but became increasingly less subtle as the blue screens started happening.

Apart from the weirdness of the controller drivers, XP or Vista drivers for the installation start GUI and then W2K3 drivers for the OS installation, it was a very clean and easy installation.



____________________________________________



It is my pure and virtuous heart that
gives me the strength of ten!