Home Server issue

[BlueByte]

I have Home Server on a atom board with 2x 2TB drives in it... it has been working well... Did a server swap at work and ended up with 8 500GB hard drives that we used to use for backups. I threw 6 of them into my home server and have ended up with an odd issue. I don't trust home servers unraid storage wizard they have built in fully so I did a raid 5 giving me 2.5TB unformatted. right away regretted making one large array as windows home server only uses 2.2TBish, still better then two groups of RAID 5 for space.

Home server after about an hour of running just kacks... unresponsive, wont respond to pings, completely hangs. all the drives are good, has anyone else run into issues with home server not fully taking or even crashing with a large array?

hardware that is freshly installed
Drives are all 500GB seagate 7200.11(firmware fixed)
RocketRaid 2680LF raid controller

Home server is;
atom 510 intel oem board
2GB of ram
2 2TB WD green drives
600 watt OCz power supply

currently I am running the system with the drives with power but not hooked up... just to make sure they are not overloading the 5V rail. after that I will prob break the arrays up into 2 x 3 drive raid 5's to see if home server can handle that. just a odd thing to have happen on all good hardware.

[DCCV44.2223]

Not sure if you added the RAID array to the WHS storage pool. I haven't checked on this issue recently (you may want to ask in the MSFT WHS support forum) but your best bet would be have the array shared and managed outside of WHS's storage pool.

Or you may want to give the WHS 2011 RC a try.

[KaptCrunch]

whats was the OS on old HDD's ? or the layer fat32/NTFS or lilo

[Rison]

WHS + raid = badness happens. It was certainly not designed to play nice with raid setups.. I learned this also, and ended up pulling my raid card and just buying a bunch of 2TB WD green drives for my WHS.
If you're looking for just a file server that can utilize raid properly, look at FreeNAS or Openfiler.

[BlueByte]

Seems to be working ok today with 5 x 500GB drives in raid 5. So any single "Drive" over 2TB might be an issue for it... might learn my lesson about RAID + WHS still who knows... I am using it to duplicate important folders for now, worst case I will only use some redundancy if it all goes bad. If this works well down the line I will just pull the 500GB drives and start populating the controller with 2TB drives.

Is there a set release date yet for WHS 2011?? I am to lazy to be a beta tester for MS with my own personal data....

[Rison]

The problem with WHS and raid not working.. is that however WHS access the drives, it will randomly cause the RAID to drop a drive. I can't explain it, and a few others have reported it.. which is the reason I stopped using my RAID card.. it had nothing to do with volume size.
The RAID/drives work fine in win2k3 and various distributions of linux.. it was just WHS

[DCCV44.2223]

Originally Posted by BlueByte

Is there a set release date yet for WHS 2011??

No official announcement but usually they ship within 3-6 months of RC which came out Feb 3.

If you're going with RAID anyways and not needing Drive Extender then its certainly worth a look, from what I've seen it's certainly faster than v1 with backups and network throughput.