LegoTechMan

Hey guys, not sure if this is the appropriate place for this question or not but here it goes anyways...

I don't use Homegroups, but I just recently ran across a situation where I want to share a printer between 2 PC's. I figured the quickest way to do it would be to use the Homegroup.

Problem is that I cannot create or join a homegroup. I upgraded my Win 7 PC to Win 8 and when I did that, my user account changed from the one I had been using to my Microsoft account. The previous Homegroup that I had experimented with is still set up and tied to the old user account that no longer exists. No other PC's are connected to it and when I go into Homegroups the only option that I get is asking me to join...but I don't know the password!!! And have no way to get it!!

I have done some searches online and have not had any luck coming up with a solution. I basically need to remove the existing Homegroup "definition" from my PC so that I can start over and create a new one.

Anyone have any ideas?

Thanks,
John

Hello,

I am specing out a 2011 box and would just like some input. I have gone through posts of other peoples builds so there is nothing real special here.

• CPU - Core i3 2100
• MB - Gigabyte GA-Z68AP-D3
• RAID - Highpoint RocketRAID 2680
• System HDD - OCZ Agility 3 60GB (need to find the post on how to install 2011 on less than 160GB)
• Case - Antec Three Hundred Two
• RAM - 4GB, but undecided on brand
• PSU - Either Corsiar TX650 or CX500.
• Storage HDD - 3x WD Caviar Red 2TB

From what I have read so far about the WD Red drives, they seem pretty decent so I am going to give them a shot.

I haven't seen the Antec case favored too much, but my v1 is in an Antec Three Hundred and I do like it and the price is good.

This is my first RAID setup so I have a few questions. Looking at the 2680 I realize that it is only 3Gb/s, but I don't know if I should really care. I saw a recomendation for the 2720 that seems identical except it supports 6Gb/s. However it is 50% more expensive so I don't know if it is really worth it. I am already pushing my budget with this build.

Also, I can't quite tell from the description, but can I set up 2 seperate arrays with the 2680 or do all 8 drives need to be in one array? What I would like to do is to use the WD Red drives (in RAID 5) as my storage for photos, personal videos, etc. I don't want to just mirror a 2 TB drive becuase that won't be big enough. I am already at about 1.5TB of data and I take a LOT of pictures so I need room to grow.

Then I would like to use the second array for my DVD's, Blu-Rays and music. I have 9TB of storage in my v1 box (and only about 500GB free) so once I start moving data to the 2011 box, I will free up drives to move over...hopefully enough at a time to create another RAID 5 array.

Can I do this with with just the 2680 or do I need to buy 2 "smaller" RAID cards that maybe don't support 8 drives, but are a little less expensive?

One last question about RAID, I need addition cables to connect my SATA drives, correct? Can someone point me to the correct ones please!

Power supplies...the TX650 looks like a very nice PSU, but do I need that much power or will the CX500 be okay. I know the CX500 isn't quite as efficient, but that doesn't concern me too much.

I am not going to mirror the OS drive right now, because I just don't have the budget for it. I thought about just getting another SSD and using the RAID on the MB to mirror it, but I know that is not a recommended way to do it.

The total price comes to about $950 with $50 in rebates, which is about my budget. If I could get away from buying 3 WD Red drives I might, but I really want to put them in RAID 5 so I don't really see a choice...

Thanks for any input!
John

Hey guys,

I have been experiencing some horrible performance issues with my WHS v1 box. It didn't used to be this bad...

It take about 2 minutes for the console to open up and most of the time it doesn't open the first time. I get an error that it can't connect. I try one or two more times and it finally connects, but takes a long time.

What is the worst though is my perfomance with Media Center. I use My Movies to watch movies and all of my movies are stored on my WHS. Most of the time when watching movies, they freeze and I have to exit out and restart (or resume sometimes) the movies. And Blu-Rays are not playing very well at all...actually they are mostly unwatchable.

I ran a few tests copying movie files to a few different PC on my network and the speeds were mostly horrible. I am assuming this is being caused by the WHS and not my network, but I am not 100% sure. Attached is a little chart I put together showing the file transfer speeds. My entire network is gigabit except for a couple of PC's that are connected to a 100MB switch, including MBX301 that is on the chart.

I tried copying a few movies files to 4 different PC's from my WHS01. I started copying the files and waited 10 sec then recorded the speed.

What I find very interesting is that some files copy much faster than others. What this tells me is that some of the drives in my pool are performing better than others. Has anyone experienced this? I have Home Server Smart installed and it is reporting my drives as mostly healthy. There are some bad sectors on a couple of them, but that is it.

I am about out of space on the WHS box, but I have been in that situation before and it has not affected performance. Plus, if I add a new drive, it is not like it will balance out the storage so I don't think that adding a new drive will help performance, even though I need to do it.

The specs of my server are as follows:
Pentium D processor (2.8GHz), 2GB RAM
1 Western digital 320GB system drive
2 Western digital 1TB drive
4 Seagate 2TB drives

I have 9.39TB of total storage and 495GB free.

Does anyone have any suggestions to what my performance issues could be or how I can figure out exactly what the problem is???

My WHS is almost 2 years old and I would like to replace it, but I am not sure with what yet. WHS 2011 is cheap, but since WHS is dead now, not sure if I will go that route or not. And I need to find out more about Win 8 or Server 2012. So for now, I need to try to fix my v1 box.

Thanks!
John