One of the more niggling user experience issues with Windows Home Server arises when you are using multiple drives of the exact same manufacturer, model and size. The Windows Home Server Console identifies drives in the Storage Tab by model name and number, as well as telling you which drive has the operating system installed. However, the user is unable to identify which actual, physical drive relates to what they see on screen.
Jerry McCollom has developed a new add-in for Windows Home Server, Drive Labeler, which allieviates this problem. Installing the add-in provides three improvements to Windows Home Server:
- Drives are correctly labeled as SATA rather than SCSI
- The drive bay location is appended to internal SATA drives
- External SATA drives are correctly shown as External rather than Internal
More Info: Download | Discussion and Support
May 15th, 2008 at 3:38 am
Give the man a prize!
Great little add-in, makes it so much easier to determine which of your 4 identical 500MB External WD My Book HDDs to return under warranty.
May 15th, 2008 at 9:21 am
This does not work for my DIY WHS… Even after rebooting the server, nothing happens. Is this only for the HP server?
My server is based around an Intel D845GRG board and I’m using dual 750 GB WD SATA RAID Edition 2 drives on an Adaptec 1420SA SATA RAID card - but the drives are NOT in a RAID array..
May 15th, 2008 at 3:28 pm
hmmm, must admit that I can’t seem to get this add-in to work either.
…perhaps I should have waited with my comment, till after the download was complete and installed - now I jinx’d it :-\
Is that add-in perhaps only written for the HP MediaSmart Server ?!?
May 15th, 2008 at 6:48 pm
Yes it’s only for HP Servers right now as he say if you check out Discussion and Support for more info
May 16th, 2008 at 4:07 am
“Yes it’s only for HP Servers right now as he say if you check out Discussion and Support for more info”
It runs just fine on my Dell 2650 Server. I wish I had this a few months ago when I weeded through the remainder of my smallish 18gb hard drives replacing them with 146gb units as I found good deals on E-bay.
It also labels my disks as SCSI which they are. I would call Drive Labeler a complete sucess! Thank you for all your efforts.
Mark Allen
Salt Lake City, Utah
May 23rd, 2008 at 8:56 pm
Works as designed on the HP Media Server. Really needed the add in. Rodney