2 replies to this topic

[Jon Brown]

Hello - I've been happily using WHS v1 since it was released and am happy with it - it works and seems stable and fast. My server is home made, and has 12Tb of storage on 6 2Tb drives with a 320Gb system drive.

Recently I decided that the huge mountain of DVDs and Blu Rays was just too big and unsightly and so have started to rip them to the server, but we have such a vast collection that 12Tb will soon fill up and I'll need a server with bigger capacity.

Now, I'm not a techy person and the thought of buying and building yet another incarnation of my WHS fills me with dread, so I want to increase the capacity of the server and the backups I make of the shares. To achieve this, I thought about buying a pair of these: http://linitx.com/product/12437 and filling them with more 2Tb drives.

I have a copy of WHS2011 on the shelf and realise that by rebuilding my current server that would allow me to use 3Tb drives, so I'm quite tempted to do that as I am sure I read somewhere that WHS v1 has a limit on storage capacity but I can't find details of that now (or did I just imagine it?).

So, are external eSATA enclosures like the one I linked to any good? Or are they a data bottleneck? I currently get speeds of around 30-33Mb so can stream 1080p video via ethernet to screens around the house, but obviously I don't want to splash out on lots of new hardware to increase capacity then find it just doesn't perform well. Has anyone else had experience of using external eSATA enclosures with WHS v1?

Sorry for the long rambling post, but I tried to cover all the salient points in my opening post so as to help people who might offer answers.

Thanks in advance for your advice,

JB

[Dave Marchant (WGS)]

I am using an external 4-bay eSATA enclosure with my HP N40L Microserver running WHS V1 and am very happy with it. I use it mainly for backups of the shares, but I have used the disks as main pool drives in the past with no speed issues. My streaming demands are fairly light though. All I can say is that it is a much better solution than USB drives.

The one issue I did have was with a cheap grade eSATA cable that came with the controller I used - it wasn't reliable enough and WHS didn't like it when the drives disappeared from time to time.

[Jon Brown]

Dave - thanks for your quick and helpful reply. I'll bear in mind the issue with the cables if I do go ahead with this - I've had some cable problems within the server itself over the past few years, so your comment was a handy reminder for which I'm grateful.

Cheers,

JB