Wouldn't it be nice if HP built an eSATA expansion for the MSS in an identical/matching enclosure...???

*** HINT ****

_________________
....JBick

EX475, 2 GB, LE-1640
PC1: Vista-->W7 Ultimate/32, (D-Drive RAID-5 Array)
PC2: Lenovo Laptop, Win XP Home SP3
2xLinksys WRT54G v1.1 and 2xNetGear GS105 Gbit switch

At this point I'm really curious to hear who has successfully connected and ran external eSATA drives (under any significant use/load) with the 470.

I also picked up the Athena enclosure and after poking at it a bit, was very happy to see it connect and show the new hard drives. But after some testing (copying a few hundred gigabytes of various sizes to the drive), it started throwing file system corruption warnings at me. I tried new drives and a new siig cable, but it didn't seem to help.

Frankly, I thought I had a lemon until tonight, when I plugged in my "trusty" Seagate FreeAgent Pro 750gb drive to the same eSATA port. Sure enough, after copying a few thousand mp3 files to it, I see event viewer is listing possible corruption issues again.

So either I'm incredibly unlucky with either drives or cables, or there is something not quite right about the port or the implementation of the 470 itself.

Any thoughts?

One other thing worth mentioning. I haven't been able to confirm yet, but I may only start to see the corruption errors when I am copying more than one thing to the server at the same time. (Tonight, I'm copying files in two sets from the D: (DATA) drive to my external drive from within RDC)

If I'm understanding correctly, you haven't added the drives to the WHS storage volume, only using them as separate drives?

Just a thought here, but have you by any chance updated your Marvell 88SE6111-NAA1 controller? The MSS ships with a,



and it can be updated to a,



I've notice that the more adventurous users seem to have less problems, and I am wondering if part of that might be do to updating this driver.

Actually that driver update causes problems in most reports I've seen, and I do not recommend users upgrade. In fact, I believe that driver is no longer available on Windows Update.

Really what problems? I have heard very few reports of user actually using the external SATA port. I don't think that driver was ever offered through the Windows update service....

I have loaded it and I have had zero problems, but then I'm not using that port either, but I seem to have less problems with my internal drives than many.

Usually bluescreens and constant reboot cycles are the symptoms I've heard. Where did you get the driver if not via windows update?

One needs to open a remote desktop connection to the MSS and open Device Manager, finds the Marvell controller and ask device manager to check for an update. At least when I did it, windows update was not finding it even if one did a custom update.

Not sure how a headless unit manages to blue screens, maybe it had one of those 8800GTX SLI cards and quad cores in it?

I guess I should have clarified, "surmized bluescreens" since the system would spontaneously reboot.

I think when you try to update via Device Manager it just checks windows update. Previously the driver would show up on WU under the optional Hardware section.

Wow! I did a remote connect to the WHS and did the upgrade with no problems. I am using the eSATA, but with an eSATA single 1TB external HD enclosure (Rosewill). Perhaps I should role back the upgrade?

I did a remote check of my drivers and my MSS shows:

10 Marvell 1.2.0.46 - date 6/14/07

Sis 01822/1182 RAID Control 5.1.1039.2110 - date 1/11/07

1.2.0.46 is the right one.

Yeah - actually to clarify regarding the hard drives... When I first added the external array and plugged in the drive, I immediately added it to the managed pool after seeing it available. Within a day, the WHS had started acting oddly and after a lot of troubleshooting through the console, I tracked it down to errors on the external drive.

Since that point, I haven't wanted to risk my data (I eventually had to manually remove the drive which wasn't pretty as I lost some things), so I have been using it simply as a non-pool drive share.