Public Service Announcement: WHS gives a false sense of security for Sage purposes

[exdirtfarmer]

Originally Posted by btrcp2000

snip

Looks like its back to XP, with a separate whs box.

I still stand by the subject line of my thread, supported raid or not. If this came dopwn to a "bad batch" of WD drives that couldn't withstand a little power fluctuation like the other ten drives

Sorry to hear about your bad experience with a bum batch of harddrives running WHS/SageTV. I am running a homebrew WHS box with no raid on the system drive and haven't lost a hard drive... yet. There are drawbacks to WHS as a sage application server, which you have evidenced. The challenge of rebuilding after after a system drive failure. At the very least its a long day rebuilding the server.

I am going to do the same as you in the future tho and move the Sage off to a seperate box and grab a small homeserver for the backups. Should be painless as my sagetv recording drives are not currently in the WHS pool.

I think you are on the right track, the baremetal workstation restores from WHS backups have saved my butt many times and have had 100 percent success rate on rebuilds. I would recommend that you do a test restore on your new system drive to verify all is cool before putting it fully in production.

I am scared of a system drive failure / rebuild with WHS, hopefully it lasts long enough for me to reconfigure things.

Keep your head up. I think your luck will change, it might be a good time to buy some lottery tickets.

[Grant]

I have found a RAID solution that works great on the WHS boot drives without any issues, tweaking, or drivers. I currently have WHS setup as RAID 1 mirrored drives using Addonics HPM XA Hardware Port Multiplier. It connects to the motherboard via SATA connector not a PCI/PCI express card. The OS doesn't need separate drivers during the install and the card can be configured for RAID 1 through jumpers. So one port on the motherboard to two or more SATA hard drives. It is seen as one drive by the OS. Since I have them in Hotswap bays I just removed one to see what happens. The OS keeps chugging along and doesn't even know or care about the Mirror. When you stick the drive or replacement in it automatically starts a RAID rebuild all while the OS is up even recording for SAGE TV. The card itself supports 5 drives in different RAID and JBOD configurations.

[ohpleaseno]

I used to run Sage on my WHS (even wrote an article on Homeservershow.com about how much I love it), but in the end, I was having serious reliability issues with Sage and instead went to a Win 7 solution with WHS backing up the Sage server nightly. My reliabiltiy for Sage has gone up dramatically and I'm much happier with this setup than with the WHS one I had before.

I also use a hardware RAID mirror for my OS drive in WHS with two WD Blue laptop drives in a Norco 4220. My WHS is rock steady and never goes down for anything.

[mmanville]

Originally Posted by ohpleaseno

I used to run Sage on my WHS (even wrote an article on Homeservershow.com about how much I love it), but in the end, I was having serious reliability issues with Sage and instead went to a Win 7 solution with WHS backing up the Sage server nightly. My reliability for Sage has gone up dramatically and I'm much happier with this setup than with the WHS one I had before.

Curious, did you ever document your issues online, and have you looked into the Vail beta to see if it might potentially resolve any issues you had?