By Philip Churchill on June 16th, 2009
Caddie Overload?
Enthusiast Brian Frost has assembled his own Windows Home Server using the Atom powered D945 mini ITX motherboard.
Brian completed his installation with 7 drive caddies.
You can read the details here.
Share this WHS Article with Others:
I’d be very curious to know how this works out. I have had numerous problems with external storage and WHS for a long time now. It has never been 100% rock solid. I started out using WHS in beta.
I went with individual external enclosures for a while. I don’t know if it’s the heat, the enclosures, the drives or what… but I occasionally would have a drive fail.
I got tired of the clutter (much like you have in the pic), so I went with an Icydock 4bay extender. It has 4 trays, 1 power supply, and the output is USB. Perfect. I thought anyway.
I’m already having nightmares. I’ve gone through dumping all backups twice now. Drives keep disappearing and/or not showing up at all. I power the bay off/on, reboot, scan for new drives. It’s hit or miss.
I’m running this on a low end MSI desktop from newegg. External enclosure is from Newegg as well. It’s really quite annoying.
Interesting concept. I like the Atom board/chip. Pretty inexpensive really. I’ve not understood the choice of USB drives as data transfer is slower and I too have read a lot about issues with setting up an array of USB drives on WHS.
May look into a small form factor set up, but fully contained in one box. 😉
Slow transfer is not really a problem. Well, if you are just using WHS for storage, then who cares, right? It’s not like I have any disc IO intensive things going on… I’m just storing a crap load of music, pics and videos.
Anyway, I love the Atom board/chip concept too. So tiny, cheap, and performs great. It’s a real pain though that I can’t get external storage working in a reliable fashion.
The MS dream of having a hodgepodge of varied drives, all strung together and working as one failed miserably for me.
I am considering ditching the Icydock enclosure and going with some other type of individual bays (maybe these caddies). I guess I’ll post here if/when I make a decision in case anyone is interested.
I finally got something that works great. It is the Rosewill R2-JBOD 3.5″ USB 2.0 DUAL-BAY External Enclosure from newegg.com (http://bit.ly/10CTG5). Price was $50 US and it worked flawlessly. Granted, I’m giving up my 4 bay hotswap tray Icydock enclosure for this 2 bay model, but that is irrelevant when you consider one works and one doesn’t!!
The Icydock enclosure felt cheap right out of the box. Trays were flimsy, and I hated that stupid polished white Mac look. I should have never bought it.. .ugh. Now I’m stuck with a USB paperweight.
Anyway, the Roswill model I bought has JBOD, which allows both drives to be seen independently (which is what you want with WHS so that WHS can manage the redundancy). This thing was a bargain if you ask me. It is very solid and well fit together so there is no rattle noises or electronic humming.