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Adding external hard drives but not into pool RRS feed

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    I've recently setup an HP WHS. I have a LOT of older data that I currently have on Maxtor One Touch III Mirrored external hard drives. I have two questions.

    1) Can I add an external hard drive to WHS but have it NOT be part of the main storage pool? How do I configure for that? Currently, I see only two options: add to the pool or configure for backup. I'd like to have the internal WHS drives be the 'main' storage, but have the external drives available as a separate resource but accessible and attached to the WHS.

    2) The external drives I have are Firewire 800, but HP's WHS does not have a Firewire port. Since the server does have a eSATA port, can I plug in an external eSATA drive that also has Firewire 800 ports (such as the SinpleTech DuoPro drive) and plug my external Firewire drives into the eSATA drive and have everything accessible to the WHS?

    Thanks for the help.
    Friday, May 15, 2009 6:16 PM

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    1) Windows Home Server doesn't support the use of drives that aren't part of server storage in some fashion (server backup drives, storage pool, and system drive). So anything you would do with a drive that's not part of the storage pool would have to be done by hand, outside of the Windows Home Server console interface. Assuming you're reasonably careful, it's not hard to do. You connect to your server using a remote desktop conneciton and manage the drive from the desktop.

    2) As far as I know, that won't work.  Firewire can be daisy-chained, but not generally off of an eSATA drive. To find out for sure (I have no doubt that a drive manufacturer could find a way to make this work if they wanted, I just don't think there's any demand for it as a feature), you would have to check with the manufacturer of the eSATA drive you want to use as the start of the chain, though, to find out for certain.
    I'm not on the WHS team, I just post a lot. :)
    Friday, May 15, 2009 6:28 PM
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    1) Windows Home Server doesn't support the use of drives that aren't part of server storage in some fashion (server backup drives, storage pool, and system drive). So anything you would do with a drive that's not part of the storage pool would have to be done by hand, outside of the Windows Home Server console interface. Assuming you're reasonably careful, it's not hard to do. You connect to your server using a remote desktop conneciton and manage the drive from the desktop.

    2) As far as I know, that won't work.  Firewire can be daisy-chained, but not generally off of an eSATA drive. To find out for sure (I have no doubt that a drive manufacturer could find a way to make this work if they wanted, I just don't think there's any demand for it as a feature), you would have to check with the manufacturer of the eSATA drive you want to use as the start of the chain, though, to find out for certain.
    I'm not on the WHS team, I just post a lot. :)
    Friday, May 15, 2009 6:28 PM
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    Thanks for the quick reply. I have a few external Firewire drives that I wanted to keep using, but am not sure I wanted to slow the server down by adding them unless I could separate them from the main store. Remoting in is probably not the best solution for my needs so I'm probably just out of luck. I didn't think I could have a 'separate' store connected to WHS but thought I would ask in case I could use all my RAID 1 drives with WHS. I already have the eSATA drive so I'll probably try #2 above, just to confirm whether it's an option or not.

    Thanks again for the fast response!
    Friday, May 15, 2009 7:08 PM