Out Of My Mind – MadMike

Thoughts, Facts and Interesting Finds by Michael

Todays post is continuing from the previous post – HP MicroServer – Software (Part 1).

Why I Love Drive Extender

If you have ever had a RAID setup and had one hard drive failure you know that all should be fine in the world once you replace the faulty drive.   On replacing the offending drive your RAID should automatically start rebuilding and you should be up and running as usual in no time…

If however you have 2 drives fail (or start failing) you might want to start breaking out in a cold sweat if you don’t have backups…you see if you place any of the drives into another machine and try and read them on their own you will not be able to…seriously – you need to start restoring backups…

Drive Extender on the other hand is NTFS formatted, so if you remove the offending drive you will be able to read files from it (if the drive is still in a condition to do so) so you have some sort of recovery…

How it started…

This picture is why you want to have Drive Extender… My WHS Server that I built up from parts originally consisted of 6x Seagate 500Gb hard drives. Two of the drives failed (around the same time as when Seagate had that Hard Drive Firmware scandal). I replaced them with 1Tb Samsung hard drives.  I updated the firmware of the remaining 4x 500Gb Seagates (yup my luck they were from that batch) and things were good for a while.

Last year November when I returned from vacation the main WHS Hard Drive started failing.  I took my Agestar Hard Drive Cloner and then cloned the main hard drive to one of the replacement 500Gb that I got back from Seagate…only to discover that the replacement drive was also starting to pack-up…yup!

That is why I HATE SEAGATE!

Although these drives were reporting as failing it was “readable” to an extent, but unable to boot or use in the old server.

The Restore…

After setting up the Windows Home Server OS on the HP MicroServer  I wanted to restore the files from the old WHS server.

Here you can see the total space available on the server with the 1x 2TB Samsung (Main OS drive) and 3x 1Tb Samsung drives installed in the machine and configured as part of the storage volume.  I included the Windows Explorer view so you can see what it looks like if you browse via My Computers (remember it only shows the 2Tb volume as drive D: but all the space is available)

So I took the failing Seagate 500Gb drive and placed it into an external hard drive enclosure that had an eSATA port on it.  Connected it to the eSATA port on the back of the HP MicroServer and let WHS detect the drive.  Now to ensure there was no confusion I renamed the volume for easy identification – SYS500 (H:) and DATA500 (E:) here you can see it under Device Manager and Windows Explorer:

Now as you can see the drive is readable under Windows Explorer, and the files that were on the share can be accessed by browsing to the E:\DE\Shares folder:

WHS to spread the risk of loosing files should a HDD fail, it copies files across all the volumes in the storage volume.  Now say you have a share \\SERVER\Music with folders A-Z, then some of the files and folders will be on the one drive, others on the second drive, and other on the third drive etc.  As you can see on my failed drive, folders G, J, M, N, P of my Music share was on the drive.  A, C, G, M and Q was on drive number 2  (yes some of the files from G was also on the second drive) that is why you need a tool that will only copy across the missing files back to your new share.

Time to start copying what I can from the drive.

I headed over to the Microsoft website and downloaded Microsoft SyncToy 2.1 – this has an awesome feature called Contribute that would do the task perfectly!  BTW I use this app for some of my staff to backup to their external drives…  I installed the app on the server and ran it from the Start Menu.

The first thing you want to do is Create A New Folder Pair, and then in the LEFT side select the main share name from the offending hard drive. In my case it was E:\DE\SHARES\MUSIC Folder

Then you need to select the WHS NETWORK share on the RIGHT side. Remember you want to select Entire Network, Microsoft Windows Network, Workgroup, ServerName, Share (in my case Music).

Once done click Next and then you can choose what type of sync you want to perform.  Select CONTRIBUTE and then click Next:

Call it something that is easy to remember and click Finish:

Tada!  Job is setup now time to run it:

You can either click PREVIEW (which will show you what will be copied across and what not) or you can click RUN and it will copy without showing you first what it is going to do.

I left it running on the failing drive and 4 hours later it was done copying.  Doing the same process on the other “currently working” Seagate drives from the old server took about 2 hour per drive.

And that folks is how I rebuilt my server and restored my data from the old drives… And NO I will NEVER purchase another Seagate drive as long as I live!

About 3 or 4 years ago I wanted to setup a PC that I could use to backup my data.

My collection of photographs and home videos were slowly but surely growing, and I wanted a machine that I could keep them safe on, even if a hard drive crashed and that would be accessible from anywhere in the house.

I looked at RAID and played around with a Linux distribution called FreeNAS.  At that stage FreeNAS was still very new to the scene – I think it was like version 2 or 3 theb…I see it has progressed to version 8 today…  Unfortunately the hardware I tested the software on was slow (Asus A7V133 motherboard with a low spec AMD CPU) and when I tested worse case scenarios (pull out a drive and see if you can still access the data) it took a long time to recover from the failure…

I started looking around at other software options and somewhere along the line I saw a write up about a Microsoft product called Windows Home Server.  I might hear some of you say “a Windows Home Server? What is that?”  Well let me explain…

Windows Home Server (version 1)

Yes I know it is dangerous trusting a version 1 product of Microsoft 🙂 , but in actual fact the software is based on Windows Small Business Server 2003.  When installing the one part of the setup actually displays Windows Small Business Server 2003 in the corner!

Windows Home Server (WHS) is designed to be run on a machine, with minimum maintenance and easy enough for a non-IT certified person to operate.  It REALLY is easy to use. Want to create a User, click Users and New. Want to create a new Share, click Shared Folders, New, give it a name and say who should have permission. Easy!  To drive the point home Microsoft even had a book titled: “Mommy, why is there a server in the house?” 🙂 as part of the marketing campaign in the USA.

WHS also afters a backup solution for 10x Microsoft Windows machines, which will allow you to restore a machine to the last backup without issue.  You can stream from the machine your music, photos or movies.  You can also use it as a file server.

But back to the main reason why I chose WHS…RAID.

RAID vs Disk Extender

RAID for those of you who may not know, is a way of setting up a hard drive to provide either speed or redundancy in case of a hard drive failure.  Have a look here if you want to learn about the different RAID levels.   Now I was looking at RAID 5 but the only drawback is that you are basically stuck with the size of the RAID volume (max of 2.1Tb per drive letter) as well as the smallest size of your drives in the RAID set….let me explain…

If I bought 3x 500Gb Hard Drives, set them up in RAID 5 I would have 1000Gb usable space and the other 500Gb would be available for redundancy.

Now say now I could get 1000Gb drives on special and I wanted to upgrade my RAID 5 to  3x 1000Gb drives (so that I could then have 2000Gb of usable space).  I would first have to backup the current 1000Gb of data in the 3x 500Gb volume.  Then I would have to “break” the RAID volume and create a new RAID volume with the 3x 1000Gb drives.  I would then finally have to restore the backup and only then be able to carry on.

Although Windows Home Server is compatible with RAID it uses a Microsoft technology called Drive Extender.   What the server does is it places drives into a Storage Pool.  You can add and remove drives into and out of this pool.  You can an any size to the pool, greater, smaller – any size. You are not limited in size of the storage pool (so no maximum 2.1Tb drive limit) and you can define which files you want made redundant in case of a drive failure.  Let me repeat that last bit – you can decide which files you want “protected” should a drive fail – unlike RAID where everything is made redundant.  Those files in the folders that you want redundant, are then copied across to other drives in the system, thereby spreading your risk.

Another thing that I really liked about Drive Extender was that say now you have a “worse-case scenario” hard disk failure in your server, you can still access your data…whats left of it…

For example you have a RAID 5 volume consisting of 4x Hard drives.  If one drive fails you are safe.  If you two drives fail at the same time – you are screwed and I hope you had backups…You cannot just slap in 2x drives and hope your data is back.  If you try read anything on the 2x working drives – good luck – that ain’t gonna happen…

Drive Extender is different. Say you have 4x Hard drives in your Windows Home Server and 2x drives failed.  You can either send those drives in to a data recovery agency, or you can take out the 2x working drives and read the data on them still.   In the next post I will explain this a little more in depth…and remind everyone again why I have grown to dislike Seagate.

Ultimately Drive Extender won this round over RAID for me…

OK where can I get it?

If you want some fun, walk into an Incredible Connection or PC store and ask if they sell Windows Home Server…the reaction will be like you have walked in and spoken Klingon to them.  Another reaction is that they “make” like they know what you talking about and then try and bullshit their way out of it…sad but true…

The only way to get it, is to either import it (Ebay, Amazon) or contact a large vendor like Axis or Workgroup and ask if they will sell it to you.  This is really a pity as Microsoft South Africa had an awesome product that they could have moved to SME’s but missed the opportunity.  I ended getting it from DataCentrix who sold it to me for R999,99 ex VAT.  Not bad considering it was less than the cost of Windows 7 Ultimate edition and it came with 10 CAL’s….

If you want to “try before you buy” then I suggest you hurry and head over to http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/winfamily/windowshomeserver/eval.mspx where you can download a 30 day fully functioning version to play around with.

Why not Linux?

Well at the stage that I purchased it I want not running Linux on my home desktop PC, I was running Windows XP.  Also although there is a “WHS Linux Alternative” called Amahi, it was not at the stage of development where I was comfortable to trust all my family photos with it, also it did not have an alternate to Drive Extender at that stage.

For those of you interested in Drive Extender for Linux, check out Greyhole.net for an alternative (I have not personally tried it yet) – YMMV.

OK so why did you tell me this whole story?

You see when I lost drives in my original home server I still had the WHS license available to use.  I had paid for it, knew how to use it, so I decided to load Windows Home Server on the HP Microserver.

The next bit is a tip for EXISTING WHS owners who find themselves in the same position as myself.  If you own a legit license for WHS and you are in the same situation as me that you need to reinstall the  server, I highly suggest you look at downloading the “X:\Files” Windows Home Server DVD from Breaking Home Server. What this dude has done is take a WHS Setup DVD, slipstreamed PowerPack 3 (this is what the Service Packs are called in WHS) as well as a whole bunch of add-ins that are scripted to install easily.  He also provides the ability to increase the size of C drive when setting the server up – by default Microsoft sets the size to 20Gb (I prefer at least 80Gb).  It still asks you for your licence etc, so this is not warez in case you are wondering…but merely an awesome tool to setup your server fast with minimal effort.

In the next post I will explain why I love Drive Extender…