[Ookpic]

Ok, first of all thanks for having this forum! I've done much browsing especially of late.

Here's my situation. I bought WHS OEM probably around the time it was first released. I did have the 3 pack 180 day evaluation version before decided to purchase. Shame on them for not allowing to upgrade to licensed version. Oh, well long in the past.

When I built my server, I built it with the speediest "spare" computer I had.

Pentium D Dual Core in an ASRock Mobo.
2 Gb of ram
SYS Drive

• 80 Gb PATA

POOL Drives

• 400 Gb PATA
  
• 1.5 Tb SATA
  
• 1.5 Tb SATA

I recently built a new desktop for myself which frees up another box for a server upgrade. The new unit has the E4600 Pentium Core 2 Duo CPU @ 2.4GHz sitting in an ASUS P5K Mobo with 4Gb of Ram. I would also like to remove the PATA drives and install a new 320Gb SYS drive and add another 1.5Tb Pool Drive.

Honestly I'm scared ****less to attempt this because I pretty much have my WHS exactly the way I want it but for 2 things. The processor isn't fast enough for on the fly transcoding for video streaming and I'm out of drive space.

Here's what I figure the best plan of attack should be since upgrading the motherboard and cpu using existing installation doesn't seem to be an option. I tried cloning the Sys drive and installing it in the new box but just got the BSOD. I also tried this method. No luck! I even tried all six hal files with and without ACPI enabled in the Bios. So PLEASE correct me if I'm wrong here.

• Clone existing SYS Drive leave remaining unallocated extra space be and replace existing SYS drive in Original machine. I have Acronis 2010.
  
• Use Paragon to open up the remaining space on the new SYS drive once it is installed and running.
  
• Install new Pool drive, duplicate all folders and wait until it is finished.
  
• Since I have probably have one of the original version of WHS install disk, I will download the XFiles 1.5.5 edition. I hope the XFiles has the Reinstall option.
  
• I will also download the XFiles Restore Client.
  
• Reinstall WHS using the Reinstall option.
  
• Redo all user accounts, client backup database's are ok to be deleted. Nothing critical will be lost. However I may install the add-in to preserve them depending on available drive space after the pool drive upgrade.

Questions....

Should I leave the pool drives disconnected during reinstall and connect them once the OS is installed? I'm really scared to loose and data.

Sorry for the long post! Thanks in advance for any help!

[Ookpic]

Stage 1 is failing miserably! My current rig only has 2 SATA ports on it so in order to "upgrade" to all SATA drives I went out and bought a PCI SATA card. Plugged it in and booted up with my cloned Sys Drive plugged into one of the onboard SATA ports. Booted up just fine, detected a new RAID interface and asked for drivers. I dropped in the little mini disk that came with the new SATA card but wait! NO 2003 Server driver!!! Damnit! LOL Ok, google VIA 6421a server 2003 drivers and come up with this link. Now it's time to leave for work ARGH!

[wardog (WGS)]

Why didn't you look on the VIA website?

http://www.via.com.t...ort/drivers.jsp

You'll find Server 2003 drivers there. Simply select through steps #'s 1 through 4 and read the "OS Supported' list.

[Ookpic]

wardog (WGS), on 09 March 2010 - 12:25 AM, said:

Why didn't you look on the VIA website?

http://www.via.com.t...ort/drivers.jsp

You'll find Server 2003 drivers there. Simply select through steps #'s 1 through 4 and read the "OS Supported' list.

That is the first thing I did. I couldn't find the driver for my card. The VIA website is currently down but I did go there. When I found the drivers from my link above it seemed to be the answer and they did come from the VIA site. Anyway, yesterday I installed these new drivers and voila, card detected and appeared to be working. I plugged in both of my drives and again no boot. Locked up half way through booting. I try swapping cables and ports on the new card and found that if I only used one of the ports it seemed to boot properly. Seems I just got lucky enough to get a bad card.

So today, I took it back and picked up a different one and everything looks good so far. I'm about to finally start getting ready for the new box by installing another drive so I can enable folder duplication on all items. Once this is done, I'll move on to setting up in the new box.

Question: Is it gonna effect system performance terribly if I use a PATA drive for my sys drive?? I'm asking because the new motherboard has 1 PATA ports (I'm thinking SYS drive as Master and DVD drive as Slave) and 4 SATA ports.

Option 1 - I use a spare 320Gb PATA drive as the SYS drive and leave all 4 SATA ports open for pool drives. I currently have 3 1.5Tb drives going into the new server which would leave 1 SATA port open for furture expansion.

OR

Option 2 - Use all 4 SATA ports now and just buy a PCIE SATA card if/when I want to add another pool drive.

Right now I'm leaning toward Option 2. I will be using up all SATA ports but this motherboard supports SATA 3.0 so there is a significant bus bandwidth improvement over the PATA drives.

Opinions welcome!

[Ookpic]

Just installed a third temporary SATA Pool drive so I can eliminate a 400Gb PATA Pool drive. Says it may take several hours so I'll leave it running while I head off to work.

[Drashna Jaelre (WGS)]

To answer the above question, IDE is slower than sata, if only for the fact that the drives are, lack the amount of caching the sata ones have.

As for controller cards, look up Sil3124 cards, I believe it was. Newegg has a nice rosewill 4 port card, for about $45.

[Ookpic]

Thanks for the tip on the cards. For anyone else curious on these, Here is a Link.

The only problem with this card I can see is that it may be incredibly slow. Of course I'm not a computer engineer but from the little bit of searching I've done, PCI max bus bandwidth is the same as IDE 133 Mbytes/s and NOT bi-directional. So hooking 4 drives up to one PCI card, to me, would force all 4 drives to share that PCI's slot which would mean transferring files between 2 of these drives would take 2 or 3 times longer than if they each had their own lane.

So here's my thinking.

The new mobo has 4 SATA 3.0 ports and 1 eSata 3.0 port. Option 1 is definitely out. Although having a slow(er) sys drive may not matter much, the remainder of the sys drive is the primary pool drive and it needs to be fast. So, I'll use my existing drives that are all SATA 2.0 and when I upgrade, I'll go with SATA 3.0. If the need arises for more drives, I'll either pickup a PCIe 1x SATA card or look into a different mobo.

Here's some interesting info I found.

Bandwidth
PCI Express in all it's flavors: 1x, 2x, 4x, 8x, 16x and 32x all have much greater bandwidth than basic PCI.

Common Buses and their Max Bandwidth
PCI...........................132 MB/s
AGP 8x.....................2,100 MB/s
PCI Express 1x..........250 [500]* MB/s
PCI Express 2x..........500 [1000]* MB/s
PCI Express 4x..........1000 [2000]* MB/s
PCI Express 8x..........2000 [4000]* MB/s
PCI Express 16x........4000 [8000]* MB/s
PCI Express 32x........8000 [16000]* MB/s
IDE (ATA100).............100 MB/s
IDE (ATA133).............133 MB/s
SATA........................150 MB/s
SATA II......................300MB/s
SATA III.....................600MB/s
Gigabit Ethernet.........125 MB/s
IEEE1394B [Firewire]..100 MB/s

* Note - Since PCI Express is a serial based technology, data can be sent over the bus in two directions at once. Normal PCI is Parallel, and as such all data goes in one direction around the loop. Each 1x lane in PCI Express can transmit in both directions at once. In the table the first number is the bandwidth in one direction and the second number is the combined bandwidth in both directions. Also please note that in PCI Express bandwidth is not shared the same way as in PCI, so there is less congestion on the bus.

[wardog (WGS)]

Ookpic, on 11 March 2010 - 02:30 AM, said:

............. PCI max bus bandwidth is the same as IDE 133 Mbytes/s and NOT bi-directional. So hooking 4 drives up to one PCI card, to me, would force all 4 drives to share that PCI's slot which would mean transferring files between 2 of these drives would take 2 or 3 times longer than if they each had their own lane.

Ahh, but as I know it transfers amongst/betweenst the HD's connected to the card would be direct and thus use no bus. Afterall, they do have a robust controller aboard. As a beside, I personally wouldn't let what you describe as being the sole deciding factor here, as just how many times with WHS would you be expect(ed)(ing) to perform drive to drive transfers.

The Marvell based Rosewill RC-218(CA link) is good for internal drives. But IMO don't get it for use with e-Sata, as it's Marvell based.

E-Sata and E-Sata port multiplier functions IMHO are best left to Silicon Image controllers. JMicron and the remainder are left sitting in the dirt when it comes to the superiority of SiL chips performance and mastery of E-Sata..

[wardog (WGS)]

And if you consider yourself an early adopter there's the RocketRAID 640 PCI-Express 2.0 x4 SATA 6.0Gb/s Controller Card for $179.99CAD ;)

But check their website that it supports the JBOD spec for individual disc and not concatenation

[J1mbo]

The issue with PATA is purley (IMO) the age of the drive you'd be connecting to it. I'd always suggest using a new disk, preferably "bench tested" for a couple of weeks, for a system disk.

HTH

[Ookpic]

wardog (WGS), on 11 March 2010 - 11:11 AM, said:

And if you consider yourself an early adopter there's the RocketRAID 640 PCI-Express 2.0 x4 SATA 6.0Gb/s Controller Card for $179.99CAD ;)

But check their website that it supports the JBOD spec for individual disc and not concatenation

This would be great if my mobo had any pcie 4x slots. No such luck. I have 1-16x slot and 4-1x slots.

[wardog (WGS)]

Ookpic, on 11 March 2010 - 03:22 PM, said:

This would be great if my mobo had any pcie 4x slots. No such luck. I have 1-16x slot and 4-1x slots.

As it's a server any ol' PCI vid card will free up that x16 slot for that x4 card. They're(PCI-e x16 x8 x4 x1) most often backward compatible.

[Drashna Jaelre (WGS)]

Then the next best option would be an "army" of Sil3132 cards, which are PCI express 1x, 2 internal sata ports. Reasonably priced.
http://www.newegg.ca...N82E16816132008

Unfortunately, the more ports you want, the much more expensive it gets. Drastically more expensive.

[wardog (WGS)]

Drashna (WGS), on 11 March 2010 - 03:33 PM, said:

http://www.newegg.ca...N82E16816132008

I can vouch for the Syba version of that card. I now have three here and as a bonus they're ATAPI compatible meaning you can hang sata CD/DVD/BD drives on 'em.

Rosewill RC-223 is same also. Natch that. That is the e-Sata cards I have here too.

Quote

Unfortunately, the more ports you want, the much more expensive it gets. Drastically more expensive.

Boy ain't that the truth.

[fasthair]

Drashna (WGS), on 11 March 2010 - 03:33 PM, said:

Then the next best option would be an "army" of Sil3132 cards, which are PCI express 1x, 2 internal sata ports. Reasonably priced.
http://www.newegg.ca...N82E16816132008

Unfortunately, the more ports you want, the much more expensive it gets. Drastically more expensive.

The bonus is this card is on sale today! I have this card and it works well. The only complaint I have is it causes the boot time to increase a bunch, it seems like a full minute during POST as it scans for drives before it hands off to the OS so it continues to boot. I don’t know if this is because of the RAID function and the fact there are no drives in RAID or what.

I’ve been doing some reading on this card the past few days and it seems this might be able to be fixed by flashing the BIOS of the card to a Non-RAID type of controller. I’ve also read that this chip set has port multiplying capabilities but I’m not sure since I've read conflicting information on this. Can anyone validate any of these claims?

I should mention that I use this card in my Windows 7 x64 Pro desktop.

fasthair

[Ookpic]

Thanks for all the suggestions! Great to have options. I'm definitely going with all SATA. I'll leave the PATA port for the DVD drive. If I'm in a pinch with the drives with 4 ports, I just noticed that I have an eSATA port on the back that could be routed to an internal drive if I really have to. I think this should do me for now and if I need more high speed SATA ports, I'll look into it at the time. I love the idea of just using a simple PCI vid card and freeing up that 16x slot! Maybe by the time I need more drive space, That card will be cheaper! LOL.

Ok, on to the task of migrating to the new box and motherboard.

[wardog (WGS)]

fasthair, on 11 March 2010 - 04:25 PM, said:

I’ve also read that this chip set has port multiplying capabilities but I’m not sure since I've read conflicting information on this. Can anyone validate any of these claims?

I can not say with certainty that the card being flashed RAID that this noticable delay occurs. What I can say with certainty is that the first thing I do is flash them to Base(non-raid) and I do not experience any boot delays of noticeable/mentionable length.

Yes. The Sil3132 does support port multipliers with(that employ) FIS-based switching. Link verbage - "SiI3132 also supports all Serial ATA II features, including 3.0 Gbps SATA II transfer speeds, Native Command Queuing, port multipliers with FIS-based switching, ......".

The key to compatibility and ultimately its usability for the end-user is to have FIS-based switching devices on both ends of the E-Sata cable.

HERE is a page that explains the difference(s) between FIS-based and Command-based switching and how this switching is differentiated/accomplished. The take away: The two are NOT compatible.

[Ookpic]

Update

Well, Migration to the new mobo went smooth like silk! I think possibly I was dreading a more tedious endeavor. I used the x-files version and install couldn't have been any easier. As a matter of fact, I think drive juggling before hand was the most time consuming part. I am currently using a 1TB WD Cavier Black SATA II drive for the SYS drive, 1-1.5TB WD Caviar Green and twin 1.5TB Seagate barracuda 7200.11. I had to juggle drives and get the pool drives as I wanted them on the old server first. Then once it was the way I wanted it, just dropped them in the new box and did a OS reinstall. Took very little time. Now I'm cleaning up all my sub 1Tb drives and formatting them. Maybe make portables out of them? Who knows.

Thanks for all the suggestions and help!