I recently upgraded from a 2 drive Dell T105 to a 4 drive T110 using Windows Home Server v1. However, after running many issues trying to use AHCI (gave up and stuck with SATA mode) and dealing with lower performance due to "alignment issues" with Advanced Format, I finally decided to upgrade to WHS 2011.
I hope these post will help someone who is building a WHS 2011 server with a Dell PowerEdge T110.
Anyway, my first attempt after installing after changing the SATA to "RAID mode" and creating a 6T array with 4 drives failed because when using BIOS/MBR/Basic Disk, you apparently can't use more than 2T of a 6T array as a boot volume. So, although everything installed perfectly, I couldn't extend the D drive to use the remaining 4TB in the array. It remained "unallocated" and couldn't be used. I contemplated putting a boot SATA drive into the server but then I would need to either remove the DVD drive or add a SATA controller card.
So, I did some research and it turns out that the T110 supports UEFI or EFI which in turn supports GDT instead of MBR. GDT does not have a limitation of 2T on the boot volume.
So, after enabling UEFI in the BIOS, I reinstalled WHS 2011 and voila, WHS 2011 created C: as 60GB, D: as 2T, E: as 2T and F: as 2T. For some reason it put all my shares on E: so I then had to move all of the shares from E: to D:.
Then, I went into disk management and deleted E: and F: and then extended D: to the full 6T. Done!!!
Now, I have a fully RAIDED system using a single array maxing out the 4 drives supported by a Dell PowerEdge T110 that cost only $329 + $67 for memory upgrade to 4GB. The 2TB drive are from Amazon for $79 each.
FYI: During the install, you'll have to load drivers from a USB memory drive that contains the RAID drivers from Dell. You can download the ZIP file from the support area and extract it to your USB memory drive. It is only around a 400KB download. Lastly, the only drivers I installed afterwards were the Broadcom Network drivers and the Intel Chipset.
I hope these post will help someone who is building a WHS 2011 server with a Dell PowerEdge T110.
Anyway, my first attempt after installing after changing the SATA to "RAID mode" and creating a 6T array with 4 drives failed because when using BIOS/MBR/Basic Disk, you apparently can't use more than 2T of a 6T array as a boot volume. So, although everything installed perfectly, I couldn't extend the D drive to use the remaining 4TB in the array. It remained "unallocated" and couldn't be used. I contemplated putting a boot SATA drive into the server but then I would need to either remove the DVD drive or add a SATA controller card.
So, I did some research and it turns out that the T110 supports UEFI or EFI which in turn supports GDT instead of MBR. GDT does not have a limitation of 2T on the boot volume.
So, after enabling UEFI in the BIOS, I reinstalled WHS 2011 and voila, WHS 2011 created C: as 60GB, D: as 2T, E: as 2T and F: as 2T. For some reason it put all my shares on E: so I then had to move all of the shares from E: to D:.
Then, I went into disk management and deleted E: and F: and then extended D: to the full 6T. Done!!!
Now, I have a fully RAIDED system using a single array maxing out the 4 drives supported by a Dell PowerEdge T110 that cost only $329 + $67 for memory upgrade to 4GB. The 2TB drive are from Amazon for $79 each.
FYI: During the install, you'll have to load drivers from a USB memory drive that contains the RAID drivers from Dell. You can download the ZIP file from the support area and extract it to your USB memory drive. It is only around a 400KB download. Lastly, the only drivers I installed afterwards were the Broadcom Network drivers and the Intel Chipset.