If you’re in the UK then it’s the final day to pick up a HP ProLiant Microserver and claim £100 cash back bring the price down to around £130-£140
Its a great little machine (as I have one) and with a RAM upgrade makes an ideal home for WHS2011.
You can find a retailer here whilst more details on the cash back offer can be found here.
Thanks to James Tenniswood for the reminder.
Kyle Smith works in the Windows Server division at Microsoft and gives his experience in shipping the RTM version of WHS2011 yesterday.
Every time I release a piece of software, I like to reflect on where I can see a piece of myself in that release.
You can find Kyle’s post here.
Samsung is to release a new series of its Spinpoint hard drive which manages 1TB per platter.
Currently, companies can only produce 3TB 3.5-inch hard drives, with each platter being 750MB. Now that Samsung has found a way to build 1TB platters for hard drives, the company is poised to release a 4TB Spinpont EcoGreen series hard drive with 4 1TB platters spinning at 5400 RPM with a 32MB cache and 6Gbps SATA compatibility.
Samsung has stated that this breakthrough would also allow for 10TB drives with some more modification, though this wouldn’t happen for a while yet and off course the arrival of 4TB drives would lower the prices of the currently available 3TB drives.
From German newspaper Heise Online.
Have a question or problem?
I can’t guarantee an answer, but I’ll try. Click “ask a question” above!
Michael Asks:
I have outgrown my drives again. What is the best way to move the OS and data from one drive to another? I do have a second machine where I could install WHS and migrate the data if that would be an easier solution. What is the best way to migrate the data to a different machine. I plan on installing a 2T drive for my main drive.
I am making a presumption that you are only replacing the WHS system drive, at least that is what I gather from your email. There is no need to move any data from the server in order to replace the system drive, the simplest way would be to follow Alex Kuretz very detailed post over at mediasmartserver.net you can find it here.
I have blogged about this before back in October and it still seems to be happening a lot, of course hard drives will fail, that is a given, they are after all a mechanical device which inevitably fails.
Brian Asks:
I had a PC with two drives. The system drive (C:) was fine, but the auxiliary drive (K:) started making noises. I knew it was going to die, and sure enough it did. At that point, WHS backup showed that it was no longer backing up K: (obviously).
So I bought a new drive to replace the failed drive. I found a backup that contained a good copy of K: and did a restore. I will say the former drive was 500MB and the new one was 750MB, but it performed the restore flawlessly. By the morning it was done.
So I assigned the same drive letter (K:) and gave it the same volume letter. The problem? All my nightly backups are still refusing to backup the K: drive. They say ”The volume is missing” then a long set of numbers and letters. What can I do?
Don’t panic this is a very simple solution and unfortunately something that happened to me. The reason why this is happening is because the drive you have removed would have been issued an ID by Windows. Once you change that drive Windows issues the new drive a different ID. When Windows Home Server comes to do its backup it has previously registered the old ID to its backup routine, so it says “The volume is missing”.
The easiest solution is to just re-run the backup wizard for that machine, which essentially resets the backup, to do this go to the WHS console >> Computers & Backup >> right click the machine in question >> click configure backup and then run through the backup wizard.
If you find that you have the old drive and the new drive being found by the WHS backup wizard, you will just need to tick the new one this will then allow your backups to go through without issue.
Anonymous Asks:
Just wondering if there’s any information available if for the new WHS an upgrade from a RC/RTM-version to the final version will be possible or if a re-installation will be required.
At the moment as far I am aware there will be no way of upgrading from the RC to the RTM release, if this changes in the future then it will certainly be on MSwhs.com.
I know I haven’t been able to answer everyone’s questions, so those that haven’t been answered why not post them in the forum.
Have a question or problem?
I can’t guarantee an answer, but I’ll try. Click “ask a question” above!
Written by
Matthew Glover
www.matthewglover.co.uk
The Microsoft Windows Home Server Blog has just announced that WHS2011, the second version of Windows Home Server has just been released.
The engineering team has signed off the release version as of 10AM Pacific time today which means we will all be getting our hands on a copy soon – But how soon? Here’s the details:
And for those of you who want to know the differences between V1 of WHS and WHS 2011, Microsoft have a 2 page datasheet detailing those changes which you can download from here:
So as you can see, more details will be available in April with an online hosted experience evaluation being available and new hardware hitting the stands from May. The next few months are going to be pretty exciting for Windows Home Server enthusiasts and new users alike.
ars technica has an in depth 3 page review of the Drobo FS
Writer Lee Hutchinson explains how he ended up with the Drobo, after coming from Windows Home Server and takes a look at the BeyondRAID technology and how it compares to RAID1, RAID5 and RAID 6.
Its an interesting read which you can find here.
PowerController MCE is a plugin for Windows Media Center for controlling your ByeBye Standby and Z-Wave Home Automation modules which also comes with a Windows Home Server add-in.
A guide at The Digital Lifestyle shows you how to install and configure the WHS add-in and how to setup the Media Center client. You can then control your home automation modules via a Android phone app or from the web UI which is great for iPad/iPhone or iTouch users.
You can find the guide here.
The OS Quest blog has a head to head on two online backup add-ins for WHS2011. Both Cloudberry Online Backup for Windows Home Server and KeepVault are taken a look at for for their price, backup destination and the add-ins additional features.
And the authors pick in all 3 categories is? You will just have to click here to find out.
The add-in “Home Server Smart” are seeking beta testers to beta test their latest release:
Please test out this build and let me know how it works out for you. If you are still finding problems, please post bugs at https://www.dojonorthsoftware.net/bugtraq or update existing bugs there.
If you are interested, more details including the beta build is available from here.
Version 1.1.2.1 of Drive Bender has been released.
This update provides numerous fixes and additions to the Windows Home Server add-in:
You can grab the download from here.
