Hello all. I've been enjoying my MSS with my Mac machines and Apple TV and am expecting my memory and 1TB drive to show tomorrow (currently at 500GB). I've seen several posts in this forum advising moving your largest drive to the first (system) position and doing a Factory Reset. The question I have is why?

What are the benefits of having:
Bay 1 - 1TB + System
Bay 2 - 500GB

vs
Bay 1 - 500GB + System
Bay 2 - 1TB

...as it relates to Folder Duplication et al? Someone mentioned in another thread that the first bay drive gets filled first. How does that matter? In either case -- because of mismatched drive sizes -- the content is being loaded and duplicated to the other drive up to a maximum of 500GB.

I'm not familiar with WHS too much (obviously) but I was hoping someone could give a clear explanation as to why the recommended setup is, in fact, "recommended."

Thanks!

Files you transfer to the MSS go to the system drive first, which acts as a buffer and then moves out to the Drive Extender pool.

As you will see on the forum, there are loads of different opinions on this, but as far as I am concerned the facts are: -

1. 500GB should be fine as the primary drive, if you needed more, HP would give you more.
2. A "buffer" of >400gb seems ample to me, Drive Extender isnt slow.
3. Having 3 drives is more important than 2.

These are just my opinions, MS still recommend the largest drive (but how big was the drive they had in mind when they set that rule?)

There is a very long thread on this subject, and it makes good reading.....

http://www.mediasmartserver.net/forums/viewtopic.php?t=481&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=0

Ah, that's a good read.

In summary, if you're moving large files having a larger drive in Bay 1 may benefit you.

In a traditional 2 drive setup, there's likely no meaningful impact.

In a three (or more) drive setup with duplication on, that larger system drive may be "wasted" to an extent, as data is first moved off and duplicated to the other two drives.

Moving a larger drive as your system drive from the start would, potentially, make drive upgrades easier on you.

Thanks for the information!

so, what are you folks with EX475's doing?

Pulling out both 500gb and replacing them with bigger ones?

Everyone's just gotta tinker with their's, dont they?? LOL

Nope, just added 1TB drives.



Yep, now mines a mail server, web server, media server er and doesnt update anymore.....

I was thinking that since everything gets writen to the primary drive first, wouldn't having a faster drive (10,000 rpm 150gb rapter drive) as primary be better than a larger drive?

Yes, but I've not seen a speed problem, and I would probably consider 150gb to be too small (dont forget you lose the OS partition of 20GB as well).

More speed is nice, but since it's a buffer for incoming files, it's only as fast as the other drive. So getting a Raptor is pointless unless all of them are Raptors. Even then, only your seek time would improve not your throughput via ethernet.

The only real benefit is the added space you'll get. It's easier to swap bay 1 in the beginning rather than later when you add more drives. This is why people encourage you to go ahead and put a 1TB as the main drive in the beginning.

I've been pondering if I should replace my OS drive with the Seagate 1TB drive. I'm waiting for my unit to arrive and think I will swap to 1TB so all my drives will be 1TB.

Also, the Seagate 1TB has more onboard cache (32MB versus the 16MB from the factory drive). The factory drive is 7200.10 and the new 1TB drives are 7200.11 which reportedly has much improved performance.

Unless you want to play with your unit and practice the recovery of WHS, there is no real benefit. After Yakuza's response to one of my postings regarding data offloading, I did some research into this issue.

If you just have one 1TB and one 500GB drive, then you are actually better off having the 500GB as the primary drive. WHS will offload as much data off the primary drive as it can, and havng such a difference in size means that you will see data accumulate on the second drive anyways in the beginning (actually for a very long time, because that's the setup I have).

Even if you had more than one 1TB drive, the relo of the 500GM drive to bay 3 is still debatebale. However, I can see Yakuza's point when you are moving "extremely" (and I mean tens of gigabites at a time) large files however. With a smaller primary drive you might get disk full messages, if all drives are filled to a large capacity. But again unless you are a filmmaker or something, I don't see the need.

P.S. The difference in performance between the drives is there yes. But you won't notice it, since any SATA and even IDE drive outperforms the overwhelming majortiy of home network setups, which is everybody's bottleneck !

I've moved tens of gigabyte files at one time, and I simply don't see it. At this point I believe there is no reason to make the SYS drive the biggest. Now I can see a possibility if one is into backing up, and is moving a lot of files to the MSS to have a possible 10,000 rpm drive there. But this is NOT the typical use, and for most users a 1 TB drive makes much more sense as the pool drive. This will if one is only planning on a two drive system give the best long term performance I believe. Far better than a 2 drive system with the system drive being the 1 TB drive.

Thank you all for your input. After reading through the material I think I'll just leave my server as-is and install my 1TB drive in Bay 2, turning on Folder Duplication. This will put me at 500GB of effective storage, I presume, with the other 500GB essentially wasted?

Mostly this sets me up for an eventual 3 drive array, with two 1TB drives and the default system drive; I believe its plenty good enough.

I did some large xfers of content today (10GB) on my gigabit network and it took a paltry 5 minutes to move that around. I haven't whipped out my calculator yet but that's within my threshold of acceptable performance using the stock drive.

Memory also arrived today; looks like I'll be disassembling the MSS this evening!

I don't know how big your Home Network is but the Backup Database will be essentially moved in its entirety to the 1TB pool drive. Before I beamed up my system to a 4 drive system, I had the 500GB system drive, 1TB second drive configuration for about two months (and I still have them in the same bays. My third and 4th drive are 750GB drive since I could get two for the price of one). I have 3 computers backing up and my backup database is approx. 250GB. I also have folder duplication turned on (but not on evey folder). In the end I had the 500GB drive to be filled 40% or approx. 200GB and the 1TB drive approx. 55%. So your space is not wasted. However you may reach limits in a two drive configuartion like that sooner and you may not use all of the 1TB of space on your second HDD.

So having a 3 drive system, including 2 1TB pool and 1TB OS wouldn't hurt?

I suppose that depends on how "smart" WHS is.

If you have a 500GB drive and a 1TB drive with Folder Duplication on then the lowest common denominator becomes 500GB. That's the most that can be duplicated.

If you have additional content that is NOT Duplicated -- and if WHS is smart enough -- you put that in the "slack" area on the 1TB drive that won't (normally) be used.

I've decided not to sweat it at this time as fault-tolerant 500GB of storage is good enough for me at the moment and I only have File Duplication turned on for some of my content; my Time Machine backups for example are not duplicated. Hopefully WHS is slotting that content on my 1TB drive!