Sometimes you may want to uninstall a drive that you have connected to your Windows Home Server. WHS makes this easy and this guide and video tutorial will take you through the necessary steps to remove a drive without losing data. I had a colleague ask me how to do this so I figured that I would update the guide for others seeking help.
Please note: If you are passing disks through to a Hyper-V virtual machine or a RAID controller, this guide only covers the WHS portion, not extracting the drive from the virtual machine or RAID array.
After completing the first DAS/ SAS Expander JBOD enclosure project I realized that there was a major area of improvement. Using less than 30% of a large 4U case’s volume for useful purposes seemed like the key area to improve upon. As I was completing that build I soon realized that I wanted a secondary server to be able to access some of the drives for EXSi or Hyper-V virtual machines. Further, NAS operating systems that run poorly in virtual machines, such as unRaid require dedicated server for testing. I could have built another server in another enclosure, but I decided that I could improve upon the original design and access drives that are housed in the Big WHS ecosystem through a simple cable swap. This eliminates the need to physically move drives from enclosure to enclosure. The following is a slightly (approximately $20) more expensive version of the original Build Your Own JBOD DAS Enclosure with a HP SAS Expander iteration.
The Big WHS was originally supposed to house approximately 30TB of storage when the plans were first detailed on an Excel spreadsheet BOM in December 2009. This was a big upgrade to my first DIY Windows Home Server box that had well under 20TB. About five months later, the storage capacity has crested 60TB, with further room to expand. The Big WHS now spans two 4U Norco cases (using a total of 8U of rackspace and another 4U chassis is in the works) has over 60TB of storage, and requires well over a dozen ports on the gigabit switch.
Things have been progressing on the Big WHS front. First off, my main PC is now is using the WHS Connector software and has back-ups scheduled on the new WHS. The old WHS is still assembled, but it is not powered on at this point, just in case something goes wrong with the current setup. I also decided to play around with some other popular NAS/SAN solutions while I was at it.
Here’s a quick screen shot of the Windows Server 2008 R2 hosting Hyper-V virtual machines with Windows Home Server, OpenFiler, and FreeNAS:
Windows Server 2008 R2 with WHS, FreeNAS, and Openfiler in Virtual Machines
Since there are some requests here are the servers side by-side. The New WHS is on burn-in duty while the old WHS has had 9.5TB removed thus far. I moved the cases to somewhere that is more comfortable for me to work from in anticipation of the “final” build this week. Also placing them next to each other made it really easy to segment the two servers on a dedicated switch for doing the file transfer.
Old WHS Being dismantled on the left, new WHS doing burn-in on right, IBM power supply in middle.
Just as an update. I installed the second Adaptec 31605 today, filling all 16 ports with 8x WD Greens, 6x Hitachi 2TB, and 2x Hitachi 1TB drives. There is an additional 1.5TB Seagate 7200.11 being used as an OS drive. That’s 27.5TiB raw capacity.
Here’s a view of all the drives currently in The Big WHS. Note, I may have killed yet another WD Green. A single SMART error so I’m making quadruple sure that something isn’t wrong.
First off, this is not a typical WHS build, and it was not meant to be. For the majority of users, a HP MediaSmart (by far the WHS to get if you do not DIY the build) is the way to go. For my purposes, I have seen a consistent, but increasing 500-600GB/mo of extra disk usage. Just for the record, unlike the opinion of certain Seagate executives, it is not for material of questionable moral value. Alas, I needed a solution that would allow me to have one box that could be upgraded and used for up to 24 months. As mentioned in Part 1, this project is an upgrade project and therefore I had some parts, and had a good idea of what I was doing before embarking on the project.
For Small Business Servers and home servers, one thing becomes apparent, the need to use raid with large data sets. Raid 1 and software mirroring technologies like Windows Drive Extender are too cost ineffective for large storage arrays. For example, if one has 1 TB of storage need and uses one of these mirroring redundancy option, they need 1TB extra storage for a complete backup. Likewise, if an administrator uses four 1TB drives for data storage, then another four 1TB drives would be needed for redundancy. Raid 5 offers a user with both more performance than Raid 1 and lower “lost” capacity due to redundancy storage. Instead of effective storage capacity of n/2 for Raid 1, Raid 5 allows for n-1 of storage capacity.
Recently I received a question regarding how much memory (RAM) is supported in Windows Home Server.
The answer is fairly straightforward. Microsoft built WHS upon the Windows Server 2003 32-bit kernal. Practically speaking, this means that WHS does not have support for RAM amounts greater than 4 gigabytes (GB) thanks to Physical Address Extension (PAE). Read the full story
