This is the Windows Home Server (Hazmat) sitting next to my 24U Rack which houses the Netgear 24 Port Gigabit Switch, ReadyNAS 1100, UPS, Access Point, and soon to be rack mount server. Sitting next to the big Lian Li case is the eSata attached Storage Tower, which takes up only two eSata ports on the PCI-X card, which has two more eSata ports for later expansion if I wanted to add another Storage Tower.

I have been dumping more and more data into my second WHS Server, Hazmat, for a while now. I had about 7.5 TB of space available without duplication, and after a couple of months I have reach 94% of the capacity and I didn’t want any of the files being stored on the OS drive, and I haven’t even switched on duplication for the files which makes the total space needed about 15 TB. I took snap shots of the WHS Console, and by clicking on the smaller images you get the larger images to see all the details.

Luckily I ordered a couple of 2 TB drives to bump up the amount of space by about 6 TB, so to about 14 TBs which would be the equivalent of 12.9 TB of logical data. The setup I have is pretty simple, I have one backplane in the Lian Li case which I plan increasing once I cannibalize the old WHS server which has two extra backplanes fill with 1 TB drives, which adds up to another 10TB worth of space. Instead of plugging in more backplanes I decided to take advantage of the PCI-X slot in the mother board, so I plugged in an eSata controller to integrate the 8-HDD Raid Tower which housed all the other disks. You can even tell the ones that are mounted by the Disk Management screen on the Console where the drive temperatures that can’t be read, and say “n/a”.

After inserting the three 2TB drives, I heard a horrible whining sound and that really annoyed me. That meant that one or more of the drives were damaged. I was crossing my fingers, when I loaded up the console two were showing up, so luckily only one was dead. So I knew I would have to check the Amazon on their return policy see how to get another one asap, I won’t lie I do love the large amount of space. At this point I had to mount the disks to the WHS farm so that my folder space would increase overall. It took about 30 seconds for each drive to be mounted.

So at this point I have 11.14 TBs for usage, and I’m already dumping more data into the server. And now they have to balance the data amongst all the drives. I want to soon dismantle the other servers so I can double the capacity and switch on duplication.