Bit of storage...

I got a HP microserver on cashback for effectively £110 a while back but never got round to setting it up yet. Finally ordered 4x3TB hard disks for it, primarily to backup the master copy of files on my main desktop. That is currently mirrored internally, which I can then split to free up space there. It has 4 drive bays so to not waste space on OS install I was going to use FreeNAS or similar on USB stick.

Also ordered Windows home server too, but that’ll go on what was my desktop two generations ago which I’ll resurrect. That can hold my older <=1TB hard disks to ease transfer of archived data back to a live system.

Made me wonder if I should put the 4x3TB disks in the windows system and the small disks in the microserver instead… too many choices! All the hard disk tools I’m familiar with (for monitoring and checking) are windows based.

As you say you have various options and I’m not sure how best to use them. Nice to have the options available to you at least. Be interested to hear how you resolved this as I would like to set up a PC as a central server at some stage to store my films and other media on, networked to my laptop that I’m currently using as a media centre under my telly, attached to a 2TB Seagate brick drive. Be nice to have all the files in a central location and mirrored for safety in case of failure.

Long story short, I’ve now decided to stick WHS on the microserver with 4x3TB disks. I tried FreeNAS but couldn’t be arsed to figure it out. Plus the box ideally needs a ram upgrade to get the most out of ZFS.

The old desktop can still be used to move files off older smaller disks.

WHS is a good price on the offer I posted recently, so makes sense. You can never have too much RAM though either :slight_smile:

Was that the ebuyer one? Been around for a while… will see how I like it before deciding if I’ll also upgrade my old XP box that was going to get it.

The basic install is finally done, and the first windows update is now taking forever. 100 updates totally 600MB just finished for reboot. 24 updates failed for some reason I’ll look into later (usually if it both patches an old version of software while also installing a newer version making the former obsolete).

Ram for the microserver is more complicated. It comes with ECC, and to get more is rather expensive. You can use non-ECC too, but can’t mix so would be a replacement and thus not much cheaper if at all!

Oh this is fun. There is “connector” software you run on the client to erm… connect it to the server. When I updated the server, I got a notification on my desktop saying the desktop needs to reboot to update the connection! The notifications are periodic and nagging. All I want is a simple no fuss bulk file share. How hard can it be? Maybe I should have just bodged XP onto it…

Almost set up now. Found one more hitch for fun. I installed on a 3TB disk. It seems a MBR volume can’t support above 2TB of total use, which it has to use as a boot volume. So I lost 1TB already. The other 3 disks I can set up as GPT so get full capacity. I’m tiered of tinkering with it now so will leave it. Started moving my backups onto it now… could take some time.

At least most of the work is done now. Just the boring bit of data transfer. Once done, just incremental additions and the jobs a good’un

1TB USB2 hard disk copy started last night… still indicating 2h35m to go… this might take a while! I suppose I could parallel up and read straight to server too as I have 3 more of those drives!


This might take a while…

ouch!