@Gardian! Thanks for a quick reply! I am running duplication. All of the data is media, so no permanent loss, just a big hassle to replace. Ironically I had the recovery media on the server. (Smart, huh?) But the replacement may come with disks. I was hoping I could upgrade to a 485 or 95 while I was at it. Mine says 'HSTNA-W001" It originally came with a 500 GB drive. Now I have 8 2 TB drives, or right now, paperweights...

One of those drives failed, and I was not able to remove it from the pool. I hadn't gotten around to fixing that yet. I was thinking of getting a RAID controller, and putting 6 or 8 3 or 4 TB drives in my system, and just running that as my network storage. I looked at a Proliant Rack server too. But I'd like to see if I still have any data.

It's funny how you measure your life in chunks. I want to say I got this pre-2004. I had some scares along the way- A power spike I thought fried it, failed system drive, a couple of other failed drives, not including the current one. I bought 4 3 TB drives to populate it, and found out the hard way it doesn't support them. (So I built another 12 TB server box, but that one is nowhere near as user friendly as this one. It needs to be restarted to wake it up on many occasions. Still, I have that much data backed up.)

Ok, sounds like your at least not at a life n death moment, that's good.
A couple of things I could say that might help.
1) Since you have some storage in your other server, you could get a usb to sata dock and attach it to the other home built server and pull 1 drive at a time out of the mediasmart and pull the data off of them.
2) if a drive goes bad in Windows home server, you can pull it out, reboot and then tell the server (in the console) that the drive is gone. Then the other drives will try to balance and since you had duplication on you should be ok.
3) Now, Moving to a new mediasmart ( I would, I love them and have spares) You should have a backup of that data anyway, so it would just take some time to start over again with a newer, maybe better microserver and then move the data you retrieved back from your other home made server.

I don't do recoveries, have not had good luck trying, so I do backups and resets and copy backs.

Hope this makes sense.

I have 2 servers x-510 one is my main server and the other is just a backup, I do not have any clients attached to it, I just use synctoy on the main server about once a month to copy all the data over to the backup.

That way if something bad happens, I could just switch over to the backup by installing the connector on all my clients and roll.

But, The best thing I like about WHS is the drives are readable and the data is recoverable outside the server.

Good Luck and shout back and let us know how it's going.

_________________
[X510 CPU/RAM/All 2 TB Red's] [X510 CPU/Sync'ed Backup/All 2 TB Hitachi's]
[X510 /2 in box]
[X710 LIAN LI DIY W2016E] Stablebit Drivepool [EX-503 LIAN LI 5-bay USB3 External]
Fear the Cloud

It seems to me, a couple of times I had serious failures were when I was copying large amounts of data. Once moving files to the other server and this time copying about 20 gb worth of movies from my laptop to the server. I copied some TV shows to watch, started the copy of the movies, and in the morning, all of my drive lights were red and it doesn't do anything. I removed the drives and it still boots up with the drive lights red. One time I inadvertently unplugged the server and messed it up. I've been lucky up to now!

Plus, now that all my machines are running Windows 8 and up, I can only check on it via remote desktop, so I don't monitor its health they way I used to. But 13 or more years is more than I could have hoped for out of it.

The problem I had removing the drives- the failed one says "File conflicts are preventing removal." I also have (had?) a drive that's going bad, -an external that I have to restart once in a while, and I wanted to remove and replace it, but it says it's looking for a file on the drive (some kind of system file .dml, dsm, something like that - I can't look at it now.) The file is not on the drive.I tried the dead drive trick and got the same errors. Well we'll see what happens. Worst case, I end up with a newer Mediasmart server and start from scratch.

Drive health, OS drive filling up and power supplies seem to be the most common problems.
I sleep my server every night and once or twice a month I get the (critical file errors) warning. I reboot and it goes away.
I will guess that while Microsoft "Fixed" DE it still has some failings in it.
By sleeping my server at night I get twice the life out of the drives which has been nice. I have not lost one drives yet (knock on wood) but it will happen soon enough.

As far as drives being bad, 5-10 years is pushing it on drives. After 5 years I would expect to start having drive problems. I keep 6-8 new drives in cases as backups.
Taking drives out of the server and placing them in a usb to sata dock and running disk check will sometimes clean them up, but sometimes they just need to be replaced.

I feel for people that have lots of data, I am a fan of re-setting and coping back but it is hard when you have a bunch of data.
Good Luck and enjoy!

_________________
[X510 CPU/RAM/All 2 TB Red's] [X510 CPU/Sync'ed Backup/All 2 TB Hitachi's]
[X510 /2 in box]
[X710 LIAN LI DIY W2016E] Stablebit Drivepool [EX-503 LIAN LI 5-bay USB3 External]
Fear the Cloud