Good day to all.
I have a several-year-old Acer H340 WHS v1 box that I've been really happy with. However, it has recently started giving me problems.
The box originally came with a single WD 1TB EADS drive in the bottom bay, partitioned as a 20GB OS partition, the rest of the drive was the data (D) partition. I immediately added 3- WD 2TB EARS drives (all with the jumper installed for partition alignment) - 2 of those drives were added to the storage pool and the last drive (the top-most drive in the bay) was left as a 'copy' drive if I ever needed one.
Most of the data on the box was fairly small files - several thousands of MP3 files, more thousands of pictures, a whole whack of downloaded TV shows. I also started the process of ripping all my DVD movies but that has been a slow process.
A few weeks ago, the drive enclosure warning light (red LED) came on. I logged into the box via LogMeIn and saw that the "Network Health" icon was red. The warning was that one of my storage pool drives was becoming too full.
I ignored the warning for a while, but I began to worry when I was no longer able to copy the ISO files ripped from some of my DVD movies into the WHS box. The Server Storage tab in the Windows Home Server Console said that I had more than 1.5TB of free space available in the box (this is with 3 drives in the storage pool). But the warning message said that WHS needed more drive space.
I then told WHS to add the 4th drive (2TB) into the storage pool and waited for demigrator to work its magic. But - a couple of weeks went by and the light stayed on. The Server Storage tab in the WHS Console now said that I had almost 3.5TB of available space - but the Network Health status was still critical.
Because WHS v1 has no way of showing how the pool drives are doing, I went looking for and found a tool called "Disk Management". Upon installing the tool, I saw that the system drive was full - about 600MB of free space out of 931GB. The remaining drives were nowhere near full: drive 2 was at about 75% full, drive 3 was at about 50% full and drive 4 was essentially empty.
I then found another tool called "Drive Balancer". I downloaded and ran it - to no avail. The tool exited after exhibiting a failure "Unhandled Exception". Further searching found a manual script that was supposed to accomplish much the same thing but it, too, didn't do anything.
So I started moving data off of the WHS box onto some external USB drives and to one of the other computers on the network. Luckily, between two USB drives and two drives in the other computer, I have enough space to hold all of the data that is stored on the WHS box.
As I was moving the data off, I kept track of which pool drive the data was coming from. I finally found what I think is the culprit folders: two folders containing my ripped DVD ISO files. The two folders add up to about 900GB.
I started clearing one of those folders off the WHS box and tried to run the Drive Balancer tool when the system drive showed 200GB free. The tool now runs - I'm guessing that the "Unhandled Exception" was caused by the system drive not having any available space.
However, the Drive Balancer tool doesn't appear to be helping. I tell the tool to leave drive D out of the pool and to clean drive D off. The tool runs for a few minutes, then declares drive D to be cleaned off. But it doesn't happen.
I understand that the tool is simply fooling demigrator into moving data from one drive to another. In other words, Drive Balancer isn't actually responsible for moving the data. All it does is persuade demigrator into moving the data for us.
And its not working.
So: I am beginning to think that I have a problem with demigrator. My questions are:
1) Is there a flie size limit for the files that demigrator is moving? In other words, are my ISO files too large? Most of the recent ISO files are between 4 to 8GB in size, the earlier DVD rips were much more lossy and the files are significantly smaller (all less than 4.7GB).
If there *is* a file size limit, are there any registry keys that can help?
2) Is there something else that I should be looking at?
Many thanks!
dwayne
I have a several-year-old Acer H340 WHS v1 box that I've been really happy with. However, it has recently started giving me problems.
The box originally came with a single WD 1TB EADS drive in the bottom bay, partitioned as a 20GB OS partition, the rest of the drive was the data (D) partition. I immediately added 3- WD 2TB EARS drives (all with the jumper installed for partition alignment) - 2 of those drives were added to the storage pool and the last drive (the top-most drive in the bay) was left as a 'copy' drive if I ever needed one.
Most of the data on the box was fairly small files - several thousands of MP3 files, more thousands of pictures, a whole whack of downloaded TV shows. I also started the process of ripping all my DVD movies but that has been a slow process.
A few weeks ago, the drive enclosure warning light (red LED) came on. I logged into the box via LogMeIn and saw that the "Network Health" icon was red. The warning was that one of my storage pool drives was becoming too full.
I ignored the warning for a while, but I began to worry when I was no longer able to copy the ISO files ripped from some of my DVD movies into the WHS box. The Server Storage tab in the Windows Home Server Console said that I had more than 1.5TB of free space available in the box (this is with 3 drives in the storage pool). But the warning message said that WHS needed more drive space.
I then told WHS to add the 4th drive (2TB) into the storage pool and waited for demigrator to work its magic. But - a couple of weeks went by and the light stayed on. The Server Storage tab in the WHS Console now said that I had almost 3.5TB of available space - but the Network Health status was still critical.
Because WHS v1 has no way of showing how the pool drives are doing, I went looking for and found a tool called "Disk Management". Upon installing the tool, I saw that the system drive was full - about 600MB of free space out of 931GB. The remaining drives were nowhere near full: drive 2 was at about 75% full, drive 3 was at about 50% full and drive 4 was essentially empty.
I then found another tool called "Drive Balancer". I downloaded and ran it - to no avail. The tool exited after exhibiting a failure "Unhandled Exception". Further searching found a manual script that was supposed to accomplish much the same thing but it, too, didn't do anything.
So I started moving data off of the WHS box onto some external USB drives and to one of the other computers on the network. Luckily, between two USB drives and two drives in the other computer, I have enough space to hold all of the data that is stored on the WHS box.
As I was moving the data off, I kept track of which pool drive the data was coming from. I finally found what I think is the culprit folders: two folders containing my ripped DVD ISO files. The two folders add up to about 900GB.
I started clearing one of those folders off the WHS box and tried to run the Drive Balancer tool when the system drive showed 200GB free. The tool now runs - I'm guessing that the "Unhandled Exception" was caused by the system drive not having any available space.
However, the Drive Balancer tool doesn't appear to be helping. I tell the tool to leave drive D out of the pool and to clean drive D off. The tool runs for a few minutes, then declares drive D to be cleaned off. But it doesn't happen.
I understand that the tool is simply fooling demigrator into moving data from one drive to another. In other words, Drive Balancer isn't actually responsible for moving the data. All it does is persuade demigrator into moving the data for us.
And its not working.
So: I am beginning to think that I have a problem with demigrator. My questions are:
1) Is there a flie size limit for the files that demigrator is moving? In other words, are my ISO files too large? Most of the recent ISO files are between 4 to 8GB in size, the earlier DVD rips were much more lossy and the files are significantly smaller (all less than 4.7GB).
If there *is* a file size limit, are there any registry keys that can help?
2) Is there something else that I should be looking at?
Many thanks!
dwayne