First Light

Let’s face it: once you start having a home server, you start putting data on it, simply because it is so conveniant. In my case, that means to bring a lot of data from various external disks plus those things archived on DVD back “online” – which usually starts eating up the storage space on your server quite quickly. From the intial 2 Terrabyte (2TB! 2048 GB! 2.097.152 MB! 2.147.483.648 KB!) a little bit over 50% was gone. Plus: there is data that I wish to duplicate but have not done yet, simply because it would be eating up space even more…
Time

Time for a pitstop at the local computer dealer of my trust 🙂 – invest 5 minutes and 80€ to walk out with another WD 1TB Green Power harddisk… to try the following:

1. Server is in standby, new disk is mounted in its (plastic) tray – looks pretty un-solid but seems to do the job. No screws, no nothing…
2. Put the tray back into the home server and start it up. Two disks come on with blue LEDs on, the new one is pink.
3. Fire up the Home Server Console and check the server storage page: the new disk is listes as “non-assigned storage disk”.
4. Select the new disk and click Add – a wizard pops up… only two options: Add to storage space or Add as backup drive. We already had that one with the external USB Backup Device – this time, its gonna be Add to Storage Space.
5. Confirm that – “You sure you want to format that disk?” – Yeah, man! And let the formatting begin… 30 seconds later: Server now got 3TB of storage space…

That was easy… almost too easy to be true 😉 – where are those times where a server administrator had that magical or almost sacred aura?

To tell the truth: I knew, my NAS was slow… but that slow? To copy roughly 28.000 Files from my digital image library to my regular PC took just about 12 hours. The average transfer speed finally came out to be 1.5MB per second. Now I am sending them over to the Windows Home Server – at a speed of around 18-20 MB/s – already showing that the decision to move away from the NAS has been a good one. The current forecase to copy the data is about 1h – that’s more than 10 times faster than the connection to the NAS.

After having operated the Windows Home Server for about a week, the client PC pointed me to a potential problem this morning (via the Home Server Management Console): it turned out this believe that one of the files could not be duplicated properly and assumed an error. Checking the remote console, two services did not start up properly, including the Volume Shadow Copy service… no wonder, the system had issues keeping data in sync. So I decided to first try the old rule of “If it does not work, reboot it…”

After the reboot, I checked the services and event log – all seemed fine. So one has to remember: a Windows Server is still Windows 🙂 – although I have to admit that it properly reported the issue (the LED on the WHS showed a red status as well, pointing the user to stop and take a look).

Just for a comment: the server was quite busy on the CPU after the reboot – I would assume it now started checking its data directories for any outstanding synchronization or errors…

Well, I have had my current NAS (Network Attached Storage) for quite some time and it did serve my requirements I had when I initially bought it:

1. Data Security: my data was previously stored on “server” drives with the server merely being an old PC with Windows and network shares enabled. The NAS did two things in terms of security: it detached the data from a given PC and it added RAID 1 as a security option in case something went horribly wrong with it.
2. Availability: my network consists of several different PCs (some one the same hardware but with exchangeable boot disks, some as different physical PCs) and data had to be available in a centralized location.

However, the NAS I got (a Western Digital WorldBook 1TB) did not live up to my expectations – mainly for two reasons:

1. The Performance: horrible, although that seems to be mostly the problem of that particular series of NASs. Even attached to a 1GBit Network, I rarely exceeded 5MB/s in data transfern (and now pullig off large amounts of files gives me about 1.4MB/s) – pretty darn slow if you ask me…
2. The Management Interface: the NAS has a small built-in Linux with a web console but it does not really make the management of the NAS as comfortable as it could be…to tell the truth: I rarely manage the NAS at all…

So for some time now, I had been looking for an alternative – knowing what I know now, the requirements slightly changed:

1. It must be “normal user compatible” – easy to use, either always running or easily to be switched on and with absolutely ZERO administrative needs (e.g. login, etc.) – after all, people just want to access their data, not manage a server…
2. It must be easy to administer, preferably through a console but open to direct access where required.
3. Must take up little space and operate with little noise and power consumption.
4. Must grant data transfer speeds that are acceptable – after all, a 1GBit Network should get your in the area of about 15MB/s…
5. Must be open and extendable – new users, new network shares, probably stuff like media streaming, etc.

So I came across the Acer Aspire EasyStore H340 (amazon has it offered if anyone wants to take a look). Things I liked:

1. the price – I got mine with 2x 1TB Disks at the price of 379€‚ not cheap but given that the disks are around 80€‚¬ each, the box itself is just 200€‚ which I think is fair.
2. the power consumption: based on Intel’s Atom Processor, I knew it was fit to do what I needed it to do (after all, I have an Atom in my Netbook and it is fit enough for simple processing tasks)
3. the space: a small box with place for four hot-pluggable SATA drives (so I got two slots free) in relative neat design (black with blue LEDs)
4. the Operating System: it rung Windows Home Server (WHS) which I think (after having looked at it in a VMWare Installation first) is giving me what I need.
5. the Security: well, the WHS/Acer combo does NOT give you any RAID Level disk mirroring or striping but it can duplicate folders and keep selected data on separate physical disks. That plus the fact that it allows backups to external USB Disks to keep them in separate places doese serve my security needs.
6. the Openness: being basically a Windows 2003 Server OS, the WHS is capable of running just any software really needed – plus, of course, that software specifically developed for WHS: thinks like Lights Out, etc. seem to be pretty nice addons, as far as I can tell after the short time.

I have currently set up and initially configured the WHS Box. I also removed McAffee (which was pretty outdated and disliked by me anyway). Much to my surprise, I did not had any of the issues other people had removing it – mine just went quietly and was replaced by another, more trusted product (and by the way: one that consumes much less CPU resources than the stupid McAfee did!)

So now I am busy transferring data – and you can guess that – given the speed of the old NAS – my progress is rather slow 🙁 – I disputed ripping one of the old disks out and directly attach it but I do not want to tamper with the NAS integrity before I know that all data has been safely transferred…