New Hard Drive

The home server is running out of space in terms of memory, drive capacity and internal real estate. 

On the board I am running  off with 2 SATA ports and 2 IDE controllers.

Memory-wise I have 2.7 TB of space across 6 hard drives (2 SATA and 4 IDE)

In the box I am close to maxed out with four out of five 3.5 inch bays and two converted 5.25 inch bays.

My current project is to fix this.  I have just installed a 4 port PCI SATA card, a Thermaltake hot swappable drive bay and a 1.5 TB SATA hard drive.   In order to do this I removed one of the old 250 GB IDE hard drives and moved some others around.  I had room to keep all of the hard drives, but I wanted to be able to leave the hot-swap bay open.  By leaving it open someone can easily add another hard drive in my absence and I can do the rest of the work remotely.  Besides, with an extra 1.25 TB (1.5 TB - 250 GB) I should have more than enough space.

Things progressed well yesterday.  Removing the old HD from WHS went easily though it was time consuming; it also left all other HDs critically full. The physical install went fairly well.  The box is getting very full so it was hard to get my fingers into some places.  The problems started when it came time to get the SATA card's drivers installed.  For some reason WHS is having a hard time connecting to the internet for web-browsing (it seems to connect for remote access - most of the time) so it was difficult to automatically install any drivers.  I have also removed all optical drives.  So it was a matter of going to a couple of different sites to put drivers on a USB stick and then install them manually.  It worked - eventually.


At the end of the process I am left with a pile of of red drives and one massive empty drive.  So, now I am engaged in a strange process of removing hard drives from the storage pool starting with the smallest and then re-adding them.  This has the effect of forcing the system to re-balance the storage more appropriately across all of te drives.  Unfortunately it is time consuming and the server is basically down while it happens.

CMM