Greetings community,
I have a HP DataVault X311 (should be similar to X310) which has been running WHS v1 for a couple of years. Lately I have noticed some strange behavior which typically occurs after a few days of uptime: I would hear constant, very intensive disk use (to the point of it being unbearable), and when attempting to remote to the server to investigate the cause, RDP will be extremely slow. Simple tasks such as opening task manager or process explorer, or even opening windows explorer would take minutes. This makes investigation extremely difficult. Even shutting down the server is a procedure that can take 10-15 minutes (during which the disk never stops reading/writing/swapping/thrashing/whatever it's doing).
When I do manage to access the server and launch task manager, I notice no cpu intensive processes during this time. I have attempted to discover if any process has excessive disk IO using task manager, process explorer and/or process monitor (during the rare occasion when the system is responsive enough to launch those apps). Nothing seems to stand out according to my findings. csrss.exe has a lot of "other i/o" but I assume this is due to the RDP session (which is the only way to monitor the server as it is headless). Also, demigrator.exe is not running at this time.
The server has the following disk configuration:
Slot 1: 1TB Seagate
Slot 2: 1TB Seagate
Slot 3: 2TB WD Red (WD20EFRX)
Slot 4: Empty
I have also ruled out the search indexer, as the service is disabled.
I haven't been able to determine which disk is causing the issue, or if it's a combination of all three. I only recently read about "advanced format" drives, 4k/512b sectors and the WD "align" utility (which I haven't used). Could it somehow be related to that? I didn't have this problem before the WD Red drive was installed and added to the pool.
Any help is greatly appreciated.
Johnny
