ServeTheHome – Intel Xeon AMD Opteron RAID Controller Reviews

It has been a long time since I have posted about The Big WHS. At the last update in May 2010, the machine occupied 8U using two 4U enclosures, and was topping 60TB of raw storage capacity. Since then there have been quite a few developments that I thought I would write about. Read the full story

Internal hard drives usually carry a manufacturer’s warranty, commonly three years. Personally, I believe that after three years, one wants to replace drives due to the fact that failures start to occur at a greater rate after three years. One other way to source internal drives for the average consumer is to purchase an external drive and to liberate it from the OEM external enclosure. Generally this means voiding any warranty provided for the drives by the manufacturer.  The question is, can purchasing external drives and voiding warranties be less expensive than purchasing internal drives with warranties.

One interesting data point before this article continues, major OEMs (HP, Dell, Apple, and etc.) and storage firms (EMC and NetApp) purchase drives without warranties and receive discounted pricing. Read the full story

This weekend I woke up one morning and decided that I wanted to know if retail packaged drives had a lower DOA rate than OEM drives from Newegg. In all fairness, I think I was just trying to put off a 5am Saturday morning gym trip for a few hours. I ended up filtering Newegg’s hard drive category by internal drives of 1TB, 1.5TB, and 2TB in capacity. I then went through each result and recorded the quantity of reviews for each of Newegg’s awesome egg-scale along with a few other parameters. It turns out that Newegg did not have as much information on retail packaged hard drives as I had wanted, but I found some interesting results nonetheless. Anyone can do this survey, but hopefully this saves some time. For the most up-to-date information see Newegg.

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Windows Home Server v1 (WHS) was limited to using 2TB Master Boot Record (MBR) partitions in its storage pool, but the public preview of Windows Home Server V2 codename VAIL is not. This guide will show one how to use GPT Raid volumes passed through Windows Server 2008 R2 running Hyper-V into WHS V2 Codename VAIL. (That sounded way more complex than it actually is).

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In previous articles we have shown how to set up a basic Hyper-V virtual machine that works with FreeBSD and FreeNAS as well as how to configure the Hyper-V VM and boot FreeNAS in it. The next step of course is to install FreeNAS to a vhd, so it no longer needs to run off of the LiveCD. This is primarily important so you can configure FreeNAS and save that configuration through reboots. Also, as FreeNAS seems to only work with drives attached to the IDE controllers, installing FreeNAS to a vhd allows one to free up one IDE channel for another drive (by removing the default DVD drive).

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