56 replies to this topic

[jmhenry5150]

Power down, pull the second drive out and reboot. This will be the ultimate test.

Sounds like a good test - but wouldn't an even better test would be to power down and pull drive #1 - then reboot?

I guess both should work and have no issues...

What should happen if a drive fails and the machine is up? Should the OS keep going?

[ikon]

Yes, it should, and that's why it's actually the better test. The whole point of hot-swap drive replacement is that it doesn't require the system to be shut down, so it's suitable for 24x7 servers.

[jmwills]

I didn't think these were hot swappable??? Pull either drive....really wouldn't matter.

[jmhenry5150]

No I don't think so either - don't really care as long as they keep humming if something goes wrong.

[ikon]

Too bad they're not hot-swap. That doesn't necessarily mean you can't hot swap them; I've done it with other devices that weren't supposed to work, but they did. The one thing that I can't find is whether or not the unit has some way to indicate if a drive is failing or has failed. That's kinda important.

[jmhenry5150]

I can't find ANY info out there on this device - no reviews...NOTHIN'!

[jmwills]

If it is the Silver Colored device, I have one in the WHS in Korea...will post a pic of the Disk Mgt Console later. Mine has twin WB Blue 250 gig 2.5" drives and has been running solidly for over a year now.

[ikon]

If it is the Silver Colored device, I have one in the WHS in Korea...will post a pic of the Disk Mgt Console later. Mine has twin WB Blue 250 gig 2.5" drives and has been running solidly for over a year now.

But if a drive failed, how would you know about it, and how would you know which drive?

[jmwills]

Windows will throw a warning at you....don't worry. The drives have serial #'s so that's what I do by and I usually label the drives to correspond to what the GUI shows.

[ikon]

How does Windows know about the 2 drives if it's being RAIDed in hardware? I would think Windows would only see 1 drive, unless the unit comes with software that allows Windows to be aware of the array.

[jmwills]

Windows can see it....when I get home I'll post a pic of mine

[jmhenry5150]

If it is the Silver Colored device, I have one in the WHS in Korea...will post a pic of the Disk Mgt Console later. Mine has twin WB Blue 250 gig 2.5" drives and has been running solidly for over a year now.

Ha!

I have the EXACT same drives

How does Windows know about the 2 drives if it's being RAIDed in hardware? I would think Windows would only see 1 drive, unless the unit comes with software that allows Windows to be aware of the array.

I looked in Disk Management and all I saw was 1, 250 GB drive

Edited by jmhenry5150, 03 August 2012 - 12:17 PM.

[ikon]

I looked in Disk Management and all I saw was 1, 250 GB drive

Yeah. This is exactly what I would expect to see. The redundancy is there; Windows just doesn't know about it, which is fine if the unit itself let's you know what its status is.

[jmwills]

Mine shows two drives:

http://homeserversho.../image/130-whs/

[ikon]

Mine shows two drives:

http://homeserversho.../image/130-whs/

I think that is showing as 1 drive, with 2 partitions. I think that's just the normal partitioning you get with a WHS install, althought I'm not sure what the 39GB unallocated is.

[jmhenry5150]

Ok weekend update guys.

I pulled 1 of the drives and tried to boot - no good: "no bootable device found"

I then tried to put it back in and pull the other drive - still "no bootable device found"

hmmmm....I then put them both back in and booted OK.

I'm thinking that there is a switch on the back to turn the RAID off - which I didn't mess with.it though. Maybe if I switched it off it would boot? Will have to experiment further.

I got the card installed, dropped in my 3, 3TB drives and created the array - took 7 hours using the foreground option.

6 TB of usable space...

I have decided to go ahead and expand with 1 more 3 TB drive as I need 9 TB to get started...plus this will be a good test to expand and see if all my data will remain intact (as it should)...

I'm getting close to data copy time!

[pcdoc]

What RAID level are you using? RAID 5? I know this has been brought up, bu whey use your raid card for the boot drives?

[jmwills]

I thought he was using the Icy Dock adapter. If not, just mirror the two drives for the OS using the MOBO RAID options.

[jmhenry5150]

Previously I posted this:

I headed out to Microcenter and bought one of these (same thing as the Icy Dock):

http://www.newegg.co...N82E16817990020

Set it to RAID 1 and off I went with a reinstall...prob didn't need to reinstall but oh well...

Now I have a true RAID 1 mirrored OS drive...

Edited by jmhenry5150, 06 August 2012 - 06:55 AM.

[ikon]

Yeah, not an IcyDock, a KingWin, but very similar idea. The KingWin looks really cool though cause it looks just like a normal 3.5" HDD.

jmhenry5150, I suspect you got it exactly right; turn off RAID and it likely will boot.