We Got Served

Spring is here in the UK, the sun is shining and green stuff has started to sprout all over the place in a burst of new activity. Now seems the right time to spring into action myself and add some extra storage to my WHS. I have been keeping a wary eye on my server storage for some time and it’s got to the stage where I need to do something about it. 

All you old home server hands won’t think that adding an extra hard drive to a PC is a big deal. Windows Home Server is introducing a lot of non-techy people to having a server in their home and this appears to be a good opportunity to walk through not only adding a drive to the WHS but assembling an external hard drive from separate components. 

OK you can go and buy an off the shelf external USB hard drive and just plug it in, but where’s the fun in that? This way you get to hunt for a bargain and decide on the spec yourself. 

Before you let your fingers do the wandering on the web a little bit of forethought and planning are needed. We have a bit of a chicken and egg situation here, as the type of external drive case will depend on the type of drive you are buying and how you will connect it to your server. 

Lets look at the external hard drive connection to the WHS first. If you have bought an HP MediaSmart Server then around the back you have a choice of USB 2.0 and eSATA, (external Serial ATA) whereas lucky owners of the Fujitsu Siemens Scaleo have an extravagant two eSATA pots, So check your machine out and see what you’ve got. 

At this stage I was really trying not to have to go into the difference between a USB2.0, SATA and SATA II (Or SATA 2) or that eSATA is a specification of SATA for external drives with a different connector and cable of 2 meters length as opposed to SATA with a cable length of 1meter. The main point is that eSATA II is faster than other types of external connections. See this article http://compreviews.about.com/od/storage/a/eSATA.htm and Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_ATA

 Heres a handy list that shows the different speeds of various connections:

• SB 1.1 – 15 Mbps
• FireWire (1394a) – 400 Mbps
• USB 2.0 – 480 Mbps
• FireWire 800 (1394b) – 800 Mpbs
• SATA 1.5 – 1.5 Gbps
• SATA 3.0 – 3.0 Gbps (also know as SATA II or SATA2)

It makes sense to go for the fastest connection you have or can afford. If you have an eSATA then this will trump the USB for speed, so get an external hard drive with eSATA connection. In this case your choice of hard drive is going to be eSATA as well, this will keep the throttle wide open for data transfer. 

If you just have USB2.0, as I do, then the sensible choice is an external box with a choice of eSATA and USB connection with an eSATA hard drive installed in it.

Now the purist server techs out there will say “but you are attaching it via USB 2.0 which only gives you 480Mbs rather than 3.0Gbps via eSATA2” However it is a trade off between what you have, what you want and what you feel comfortable doing to your server. I am going to leave upgrading to eSATA cards and port multipliers for another time! 

The hard drive enclosure I found is a Sumvision 3.5″ USB2.0 eSATA Hard Drive Enclosure which can take up to 1TB SATA Hard Drives for £11.05. The case has an external eSATA port on the back and although at the moment I am connecting via USB it gives me an option to upgrade it to a direct eSATA connection in the future, and it’s black which will match my WHS! I also ordered a Samsung eSATA 750GB drive for £75. 

OK so I have got all my kit to together and I look out of the window at a glorious sunny day, seems a shame not to get some rays, and just to show that us home server owners are able to negotiate the big wide world in RL so I am going to take the kit outside into the sunshine to do the hard drive assembly. 

First up, let’s take a look at the external hard drive kit:

 Included in this kit are, from top to bottom: 

 So now slip the hard drive inside the plastic frame and use the supplied screws to attach it into place.

My advice at this stage is to not tighten the screws too tightly as this does mean you can slide the hard drive all the way down the frame to give you room to manoeuvre the cables into place at the other end, then tighten them fully. Now plug the red eSATA cable back into it’s connection on the circuit board. As you can see from this photo I threaded the power cables UNDER the eSATA cable as this makes it easier to slide inside the box.

Now gently slide the whole thing into the external case:

Things are a little tight when it comes to the eSATA cable as it’s a bit inflexible. Gently push it over to one side as you continue to slide the case over the circuit board… gently does it…….almost there. 

Now secure the ends with the four screws you carefully put to one side. Again don’t let a screw get inside the fan opening!! 

Right, so we are good to go. Now all we need is a home server. As my home server doesn’t get out much and it’s such a fantastically sunny day  I’ve networked my Rhubarb patch and plugged the WHS in.  Ready to go!

Attach the stand, plug the USB cable into the WHS and the hard drive case, plug in the power and and flick the power switch on the back of the hard drive case. The LED on the front of this model goes through a couple of colour changes as it powers up and identifies the drive before turning green. 

Now we need to add the hard drive to the WHS so I just need to head inside and start up the WHS connector. As you can see the Samsung drive is appearing within the server storage area of the console: 

 Right click the drive and select Add:

 The WHS Add a Hard Drive wizard starts. Click on Next to proceed: 

As this is a new drive we are not too worried by the dire warning that all our files will be deleted. Click on Finish to format the drive.:

 And wait a moment while its formatted:

And then added to the hard drive pool:

Fantastic! New hard drive successfully added:

1.36TB should last me for another 6 months or so!

So there you have it - a nice job for a sunny day, now I’ve just got to go and check my WHS for greenfly…and snails…and spiders…..mmm maybe its better off under the desk!