Changing Horses

[HuMan321]

I have an existing working setup of Sage on a P4 3GHz XP Pro machine. It works well, but cannot run ComSkip, etc. without taxing the system. I have 3extenders, HDHR and HDPVR for Dish 222k.
I am going to buy new hardware and software to run WHS. Since my install will be new with an existing wiz.bin and properties file I am looking for setup/swapover advice.

Here is a basic list of hardware/software I am considering:

Arctic Silver 5 Thermal Compound
1Microsoft Windows Home Server 32 Bit 1 Pack (Power pack 1)
1GIGABYTE GA-EP45-UD3P ATX Intel Motherboard
1Western Digital Caviar Black 1TB 3.5" SATA 3.0Gb/s Internal Hard Drives
1G.SKILL 4GB (2 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 1066 (PC2 8500) Dual
1Intel Core 2 Quad Q9550 2.83GHz LGA 775 95W Quad-Core Processor
1Antec TruePower New TP-750 Blue 750W Continuous Power Power Supply
Antec Nine Hundred Black Computer Case With Side Panel Window

My plan was to install WHS on the 1TB drive (is that a mistake?) (How should I format the WHS drive 4kb or 64kb?)

I have 2 IDE drives that are the recording drives on the existing system (500, 300GB) My case and motherboard could allow me to use the 500 along with a DVD/CD for the 2 IDE channels.

I also have a 1.5TB internal and a 1TB external on another networked PC with holds movies, etc that I moved from the IDE drives as they filled up. These drives are linked to the Sage and show up in the guide. They are also formated at 64k.

I have an empty 1.5TB internal and another 1TB external that are formatted to 64k which are empty at the moment.

I am looking for advice on how to best utilize the 4 existing drives into my new WHS setup while hopefully keeping the existing links to Sage.

In total there would be 5 drives at the start. New WD to run WHS OS and 4 existing (two with movies, shows, etc.) and two without.

If I make the system headless how is the best way to configure it? (Log me in?)

Any suggestions on hardware or WHS setup are appreciated. My wife has a lot of setup (season pass, etc.) on the existing system that I would like to know if it can be preserved. Any links to walk throughs or step by step hand holding would be very helpful as I know absolutely nothing about WHS and with a new install opportunity I would like to do this the most efficient way.

My hopes are that the new system will allow growth for storage and also enough horsepower to run Comskip, MovieWall and any existing or future resource using items that may come along.

I am not locked into anything at this point except the desire to upgrade.

Thanks In Advance!!!

[gplasky]

Here's how I would do it based on what you have and not spending any more money. This is not the only way.
Use your new 1 TB drive for the system drive. WHS will automatically create 2 partitions and format in 4K blocks. The 20GB partition will be your OS drive. The second partition (approx. 450GB) will be a D: drive and labeled as DATA. Tombstones, backup database will be stored on here.
At the time of installation also install the empty 1.5TB drive you already own. Use this as you first drive in the pool. Now do the install and follow the tutorial so that when you bring that drive into the pool format for 64K blocks.
I don't know what size case you're getting but you could take that 1TB external you own and take it out of the external case. You may be able to use that internally in your new PC. Again, add it to the pool and format it with 64K blocks per the tutorial.
Your existing drives can stay as is. But now you can actually copy the movies from that other networked PC onto the WHS server's pooled drives. You can leave the drives where they are and configured as they are in Sage and you could continue to use them as is.
Or copy all the movies off them and relocate the drives to the new box. Add them to the pool. The advantage is Sage will access them your data locally from the WHS server as opposed to over the network from the other PC.

Various different ways to mix and match what you have. I would recommend the goal to be centralizing everything on your WHS server.

Gerry

[HuMan321]

Hi Gerry,

I was hoping you would respond as I see a lot of good info from you.

Would my second partition of my new 1TB drive be limited to 450GB? What happens to the extra 500+GB?

The external drives are Seagate FreeAgent 1TB drives. I am not sure they will come out of the case, but will look them over closely. If not, I was hoping I could plug them in externally to the new server and they would become part of the pool? If they can't become part of the pool I would then point the import component of Sage at them?

The case I am considering getting is an Antec 900 which will hold 6 3.5 internal drives and has 10 USB ports. My goal also would be to put everything I can on the new server including all my MPEG2 movies. (My two drives 1.5TB & 1TB that are loaded each have a folder of non Sage MPEG2 movies and a folder of H.264 Sage recordings that were moved from the Sage recording IDE drives)

All of my existing drives are already formatted to 64K, would I need to go through this process again when I brought them over to WHS?

It sounds like after reading your post I will not be able to bring my 64K formatted loaded up drives (1.5TB int and 1TB external) directly into WHS, but must copy them over to empty drives I have previously placed in the pool? Then I could erase them and add them to the pool?
I was hoping to skip the copying over step if possible.

Thanks

[gplasky]

Originally Posted by HuMan321

Hi Gerry,

I was hoping you would respond as I see a lot of good info from you.

Would my second partition of my new 1TB drive be limited to 450GB? What happens to the extra 500+GB?

Sorry-my math sucks. I meant around 850GB (you'l lose some to formatting)

Originally Posted by HuMan321

The external drives are Seagate FreeAgent 1TB drives. I am not sure they will come out of the case, but will look them over closely. If not, I was hoping I could plug them in externally to the new server and they would become part of the pool? If they can't become part of the pool I would then point the import component of Sage at them?

Most of your external drives are just internal drives with a SATA to USB or IDE to USB interface board. Check it out. If not then Yes-you can use it externally and make it part of the pool. You just need to be careful that it is always on and available when the server is on or you'll get errors.

Originally Posted by HuMan321

The case I am considering getting is an Antec 900 which will hold 6 3.5 internal drives and has 10 USB ports. My goal also would be to put everything I can on the new server including all my MPEG2 movies. (My two drives 1.5TB & 1TB that are loaded each have a folder of non Sage MPEG2 movies and a folder of H.264 Sage recordings that were moved from the Sage recording IDE drives)

All of my existing drives are already formatted to 64K, would I need to go through this process again when I brought them over to WHS?

Unfortunately yes. Anytime you add a drive to WHS pool it will format it automatically.

Originally Posted by HuMan321

It sounds like after reading your post I will not be able to bring my 64K formatted loaded up drives (1.5TB int and 1TB external) directly into WHS, but must copy them over to empty drives I have previously placed in the pool? Then I could erase them and add them to the pool?
I was hoping to skip the copying over step if possible.

Same rule applies from above. That's why you'll move all the media off the drives first, then install it in your new case, add it to the pool and then format for 64K blocks. Actually another option is to install the new drives but don't add them to the pool yet. They should get a drive letter. Then just copy from that drive to the pool. When it is finishedd add the empty drive to the pool and format for 64k blocks.

Gerry

[briands]

Originally Posted by gplasky

....


Same rule applies from above. That's why you'll move all the media off the drives first, then install it in your new case, add it to the pool and then format for 64K blocks. Actually another option is to install the new drives but don't add them to the pool yet. They should get a drive letter. Then just copy from that drive to the pool. When it is finishedd add the empty drive to the pool and format for 64k blocks.

Gerry

Will this drive letter be the same as previously assigned by XP for instance?

[gplasky]

Originally Posted by briands

Will this drive letter be the same as previously assigned by XP for instance?

Not neccesarily. It will be based on the drive and devices you have on your WHS server. You should be able to figure it out based on brand, drive size or free space left on the drive. (Or just by exploring any new drive letter that shows up.)

Gerry

[SWKerr]

I love my WHS. This is more of a question about the boot drive. I think if I had it to do over again I would use a 128GB SSD for the OS. They are near the point where they are cheap enough for me to consider. They only weak point to the WHS is you can't mirror the boot drive so you have a single point of failure with ir there. You will not loose any data but you will be down for awhile and will have a complicated restore. The SSD would all but eliminate that risk.

The 64GB SSD drives are priced right for me but I have always heard you need 80GB for the install although I don't know why since the system only uses 20GB. My server now has a 300GB boot disk with 2x1TB and 2x1.5TB. WHS doesn't even seem use the 280GB left from the boot drive.

Looking for comments on this!

*******************************

The rest of you proposed specs:

Antec Nine Hundred - The Three Hundred costs half this and has the same number of bays. It is not as pretty but will probably be in a closet somewhere so do you really care.

Core 2 Quad Q9550: I always make this point. A quad core chip is probably overkill for a WHS. Unless you plan to run Placeshifter on HD-PVR files or want you Comskip scans available immediately after the recording is done, you just won't need the extra horsepower. Get a dual core and spend the extra $100 on another $1TB drive. You can get a AMD Phenom II X3 710 for $99.

4GB RAM: 2GB is plenty

GA-EP45-UD3P: I like GIGABYTE motherboards! You are missing a video card. Even running headless you will need something temporarily at least to set it up. I use a cheap AMD 780G board with 6 SATA ports. I added a $30 SATA card later when I needed it for a total of 10.

Antec TruePower New TP-750: Overkill. I have 8 drives and a DVD in mine with a 400W PSU and the Kill a Watt meter does not show I use even half that at boot up and even less during normal use.

A WHS is a utility to put in your closet no sense adding stuff you won't use. Spend the extra cash on your desktop machine or extra disk space.

[davephan]

Originally Posted by gplasky

Here's how I would do it based on what you have and not spending any more money. This is not the only way.
Use your new 1 TB drive for the system drive. WHS will automatically create 2 partitions and format in 4K blocks. The 20GB partition will be your OS drive. The second partition (approx. 450GB) will be a D: drive and labeled as DATA. Tombstones, backup database will be stored on here. Gerry

I am also thinking of moving to WHS. Wouldn't it be better to keep the operating system on a separate physical drive? I was thinking of installing WHS on one drive (IDE or Sata) or two drives in RAID 1 (Sata), and the video drives in the pool. The OS drive(s) would be about 160 - 250 gigs. The boot drive would be backed up by periodic disk images. Maybe RAID would not be necessary for WHS. In HuMan321's situation, he would have to spend more money to physically separate the OS from the video drives, but that seems like a better design to me.

Dave

[SWKerr]

Originally Posted by davephan

I am also thinking of moving to WHS. Wouldn't it be better to keep the operating system on a separate physical drive? I was thinking of installing WHS on one drive (IDE or Sata) or two drives in RAID 1 (Sata), and the video drives in the pool. The OS drive(s) would be about 160 - 250 gigs. The boot drive would be backed up by periodic disk images. Maybe RAID would not be necessary for WHS. In HuMan321's situation, he would have to spend more money to physically separate the OS from the video drives, but that seems like a better design to me.

Dave

I tired to setup the OS on a SATA Raid 1 I setup from the bios utility but WHS does not support it. It would not once I got into the setup program. For some reason that is not an option in WHS.

[gplasky]

Originally Posted by davephan

I am also thinking of moving to WHS. Wouldn't it be better to keep the operating system on a separate physical drive? I was thinking of installing WHS on one drive (IDE or Sata) or two drives in RAID 1 (Sata), and the video drives in the pool. The OS drive(s) would be about 160 - 250 gigs. The boot drive would be backed up by periodic disk images. Maybe RAID would not be necessary for WHS. In HuMan321's situation, he would have to spend more money to physically separate the OS from the video drives, but that seems like a better design to me.

Dave

WHS doesn't recommend or support the use of a hardware RAID. The first drive in your WHS (drive 0) is your system drive. WHS automatically partitions it into 2 partitions. A 20GB C: drive and the balance left is your D: drive (DATA partition) Anything else added after that is either a pooled drive or not-in-the-pool, seperate drive. The Pool is part of the DATA volume but is seperate from the D: drive. Drives in the pool have no drive letters.

Gerry

[briands]

I am planning to use my old XFX Syncraid card to mirror the OS drive. I can use the other 3 ports as JBOD for the pool.

This card has its own BIOS and is invisible to the OS... don't know if there are others like this available or not.

[HuMan321]

Originally Posted by gplasky

Anything else added after that is either a pooled drive or not-in-the-pool, seperate drive. The Pool is part of the DATA volume but is seperate from the D: drive. Drives in the pool have no drive letters.

Gerry

Will Sage recordings utilize the "D" drive in addition to the rest of the pool?
How does the backip portion of WHS work? Do you need enough size wherever the backups are stored as the data you are protecting?
Say you have 750GB of music and 300Gb of jpeg's, could these be backed up to a WHS system running Sage? If so, would you need to allocate this full space for the backup?

[HuMan321]

Originally Posted by SWKerr

Looking for comments on this!

*******************************

The rest of you proposed specs:

Antec Nine Hundred - The Three Hundred costs half this and has the same number of bays. It is not as pretty but will probably be in a closet somewhere so do you really care.

Core 2 Quad Q9550: I always make this point. A quad core chip is probably overkill for a WHS. Unless you plan to run Placeshifter on HD-PVR files or want you Comskip scans available immediately after the recording is done, you just won't need the extra horsepower. Get a dual core and spend the extra $100 on another $1TB drive. You can get a AMD Phenom II X3 710 for $99.

4GB RAM: 2GB is plenty

GA-EP45-UD3P: I like GIGABYTE motherboards! You are missing a video card. Even running headless you will need something temporarily at least to set it up. I use a cheap AMD 780G board with 6 SATA ports. I added a $30 SATA card later when I needed it for a total of 10.

Antec TruePower New TP-750: Overkill. I have 8 drives and a DVD in mine with a 400W PSU and the Kill a Watt meter does not show I use even half that at boot up and even less during normal use.

A WHS is a utility to put in your closet no sense adding stuff you won't use. Spend the extra cash on your desktop machine or extra disk space.

Thank you for the insight.
I am looking at the 900 mostly because of size and cooling. The server will not be in a closet, but upstairs where it gets very warm in the summer months. I want cooling fans across the drives because I intend to eventually fill it up.

Power supply is probably big, but it was listed as a deeply discounted bundle at NewEgg.

Quad processor again is probably overkill. My intention is to have capacity for future in that you never know what type of add-ons may come down the road. Also, while I am not using placeshifter now, I may in the future???

Will Java run on it's own core? On my existing P4 with 3.5GB RAM I set javaheap to 1024. My system still creeps up to this in a couple of days and I need to restart Sage to clear it. Once it creeps up it won't let loose and I start to see sluggishness on the system. My wife likes to use the search functions and messes around in the menus alot which causes the creep.

[gplasky]

Originally Posted by HuMan321

Will Sage recordings utilize the "D" drive in addition to the rest of the pool?
How does the backip portion of WHS work? Do you need enough size wherever the backups are stored as the data you are protecting?
Say you have 750GB of music and 300Gb of jpeg's, could these be backed up to a WHS system running Sage? If so, would you need to allocate this full space for the backup?

The D drive is mostly used for tombstones, backup database and if space ever got too low in the pool it would begin using the d drive.
WHS will backup unique files to the backup database. Say you have 3 PC systems for backing up. Any files that are identical across the 3 pcs are only backed up once. So if there are 3 xyz.xxx files on all 3 PCs just 1 copy of that file is backed up.
Now the question is this: If you have 750 GB of music and 300 GB of jpegs wouldn't you store it on your WHS and if you didn't want to lose it set those folders to be duplicated?
But if you have 750GB of music on Computer A on WHS backs it up it will compress it to the WHS backup database so it won't quite take up 750GB of space. You can also set folders to be excluded for backup if you don't want WHS to handle it. The nice thing is you could do a bare metal restore with the WHS restore CD and the backups on the WHS to any of your PCs.

Gerry

[davephan]

Originally Posted by gplasky

WHS doesn't recommend or support the use of a hardware RAID. The first drive in your WHS (drive 0) is your system drive. WHS automatically partitions it into 2 partitions. A 20GB C: drive and the balance left is your D: drive (DATA partition) Anything else added after that is either a pooled drive or not-in-the-pool, seperate drive. The Pool is part of the DATA volume but is seperate from the D: drive. Drives in the pool have no drive letters.

Gerry

Gerry,

Is there a way to setup the C drive larger than 20 gigs, since 20 gigs is a bit tiny by today's standards. I install the OS and all the programs on the C drive. Then I can take a disk image to back up the C drive. With WHS, I think I would take periodic disk images of C & D.

I like to store the video files on separate physical drives from the physical drive containing the OS, and have the "pool" dedicated to storing video files.

Dave

[gplasky]

Search the forums here or at WHS. S_M_E had a technique for it but it was pretty involved. I have about 10 GB free after installing WHS and SageTV and some apps and plugins. You need a server-level imaging program for the c drive image which means mucho money. D drive images aren't going to work because of the tombstones and may actually cause issues.

As much as a PITA it might seem to be to reinstall I've replaced an OS drive and got it up and ruinning in about an hour.

Gerry