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A quick note, AdminiMe 2012 for the original Windows Home Server (Windows Server 2003 based kernel) has been released. I have covered AdminiMe a few times (also here for an upgrade), and it is an add-on I use in my Windows Home Server. Here is an excerpt of the changes: Read the full story

The Eye-Fi Pro X2 is a cool product that I will be featuring a bit more on ServeTheHome.com. For those that are not familiar with the product, it allows one to transfer images and video from a SecureDigital card enabled camera to a PC, Android, or iOS device via WiFi. While the Eye-Fi Pro X2 model I have been using recently has 8GB of memory onboard, it also can transmit images and video directly from the camera/ memory card to the target PC. As someone that uses SSDs in my primary PC, I wanted to make sure that this data is not being written to the expensive NAND, and instead would save itself on my Windows Home Server 2011 machine with its cheap storage, backup and redundancy features that I do not have on my main workstation. Of course, I made a quick guide so other users can do this too. Read the full story

Microsoft’s Windows Home Server Vail platform has had a rough development cycle. First cheered for the public beta with a slew of new media features such as on-the-fly transcoding, the euphoria did not last. This fall, Microsoft announced that the popular and updated Drive Extender V2 technology would no longer be a part of the Vail platform.  Drive Extender V2 provided both enhanced data security alongside the ability to pool drives using a technology not all too dissimilar to RAID 10 (ed. this is a bit of a stretch, but it does stripe and mirror.) Today we have Windows Home Server 2011 and Small Business Server 2011 Essentials release candidates which is the next evolution of the Windows Home Server and Small Business Server platform, bringing the more stable 64-bit Windows Server 2008 R2 platform to the consumer and very small business market.

A lot has been discussed in the community about having to use RAID for storage. As someone who has been using RAID with WHS for more than two years, this is not an issue at all if you understand how disk technologies work. That is precisely why using RAID and GPT with Windows Home Server v2 was covered in April 2010 at ServeTheHome.com.

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Recently I decided I wanted to reach documents and media stored on my WHS and NexentaStor-ZFS based NASes from my Apple iPad. I have flown about 100,000 miles this year so I am oftentimes far from my NAS. While WHS would provide a solution through its sleek web interface for downloading documents to the iPad, I looked at a few different solutions, and finally have find something that works very well. Read the full story

As many people have seen, the Windows Home Server team stated that Microsoft is abandoning Drive Extender V2 in Vail. Many are crying foul and have even started to petition Microsoft to bring the new Drive Extender back which currently has approximately 1,500 signers. While most other sites are crying foul, as Drive Extender in Vail added some RAID 10 features with check summing, I have been of the position that Windows Home Server V1 and Vail are better off without using Drive Extender V2. Read the full story

All hard  drives will eventually fail. Some earlier than others. As some readers may remember, The Big WHS lost three of eight new Western Digital Green 1.5TB drives earlier this year within a three month span, leading me to procure more and more Hitachi 2TB 7200rpm drives. Recently, I experienced my first Hitachi drive failure when a six month old drive started dropping from the Areca controller and started seeing rising error counts. One of the advantages of Windows Home Server is that pulling WHS drives and recovering data is a very simple task. I used my latest drive failure experience to take some screen shots for a guide on recovering data off of a WHS disk. Read the full story

This video tutorial will show you how to install the Windows Home Server Connector Software without using the CD/DVD. As netbooks, usually without optical drives, flood the market, this is often the easiest way to install the connector software. For those using a motherboard such as the Supermicro X8SIL-F  or Supermicro X8ST3-F, with remote ISO image mounting at the motherboard level through IPMI 2.0.Also, for those that have lost the disk, this is much easier than searching Microsoft’s site for the download as the connector software already sits on your network!

Again, please thank my colleague new to WHS for reminding me about this video.

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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.

The video:

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My main server, the Big WHS now houses over 60TB of storage, runs multiple VM’s, and has over 10 Gigabit NICs. At the heart of this server, is a Supermicro X8ST3-F. It was not the first motherboard I tried in the server, as I originally tried using an ASUS P6T7 WS Supercomputer in the Big WHS, but it has been running solidly since its first installation. Aside from its stability, it also comes with many PCIe slots, an onboard LSI 1068e based 8 port SATA/ SAS controller, dual Intel Gigabit NICs, onboard video, and IPMI 2.0 with KVM over IP.

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As a quick update to the previous AdminiMe 2010 review, ASoft released an update to its popular AdminiMe 2010 Add-in.

It appears as though ASoft does take feedback very seriously as a bug/ quirky feature noted in the initial AdminiMe review, where drives were not displayed in completely sequential order if more than 10 drives are present has been corrected.

AdminiMe Storage Tab displaying disks out of order in old version

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