Hi people,
I've been reading some of the guides here for quite some time and never really posted.... so first off, thank you! especially the posting on how to add HDs that are greater than 2 TB to the whs v1 pool... that was GREAT!
Recently, it is time once again for me to upgrade the storage capacity of my WHS v1, after some hardware upgrades, I am seeing some really strange behavior that I need some confirmation/suggestions on... let me give some details on my setup...
Acer easyStore H340, WHS v1.
Internal Bays are full, 1, 1.5, 2, and 3 TBs filled the internal bays... and I am running low on spaces again.. so this time, I've decided to buy a 4TB drive, a quad external bay that is USB 3.0 and eSATA compatible, and a USB 3.0 PCIx 1 card.
One of the goals for me is to migrate all the data off my current drives so I can remove the drives from the system and perform a HD integrity test in a different computer... especially when the home Server is at least 7 years old now.... It is most likely lady luck her self that have saved me from any HD failure so far.... but that is a risk I want to mitigate.
So, I filled the 4 TB drive as much data as possible with moving the data from my DE shares, while I am doing that, I've made the folder on the 4TB drive shared on my internal network... using standard Windows 2003 file sharing technique....
This is where the issues started happening... I was streaming a high bitrate video from the 4TB space to my laptop, after 20 mins or so, the share was no longer reachable. The other shares created by WHS are still active and I can still access files from those...
I logged onto the WHS via RDP and attempted to access the HD via My Computer, explorer let me in but it is completely blank!
The funny thing is, when I rebooted the server, the share came back with all the data reachable.
In one of my test, I've streamed 2 hours of lower bit-rate videos and the system was running fine, so I am narrowing it down to high drive demands requests that seems to be causing the problem.
To make things even more interesting, after spending hours trying to research / troubleshoot the problem, as I have read that MediaSonic's external enclosure tends to put the drives to sleep, I was working under the assumption that what I am experiencing is similar, but Vantec doesn't seem to have any firmware available for my quad bay... yet.. after a few more attempts, I got annoyed and moved the USB connector to the on board USB 2.0 port... so far, I've re-stream 3 hours of videos and aside from terrible transfer speeds it seems fine.
I am thinking if the culprit is the fact that I didn't attach a power adapter to the USB 3.0 card.... which resulted in a possible sudden lost of power on high demand extended use. Or would it be simply because WHS v1 doesn't play nice with USB 3.0?
Are my assumptions correct? Any suggestions?
Sorry for the long winded posting...