OK so I built my whs out of spare parts, and I made the mistake of installing the OS onto a small 80GB drive. I also have a 120GB drive installed for data and another 640GB drive being shipped. After reading up it appears that it is best to install the system drive on a large hard drive as opposed to the small 80GB that I used. So my question is, what is the best way to move system partition and primary data partition over to the 640GB drive? Obviously, I'm a little worried about losing my data. I would like to have the 640GB as my primary drive along with the 120GB. I would then remove the 80GB completely. I have Acronis imaging software, but I'm not sure it will play nice with whs. My other thought would be to take out both current drives and reinstall the OS on the 640GB, then pull the data off the other drives before formatting, but I'm not sure that I wouldn't corrupt the data. Thanks for any help.

 

Specs: P4 3.0Ghz

           2GB DDR2

           80GB primary

           120GB secondary

I don't know that's even possible, I'd like to hear myself!

Are you using AHCI?  And do you have WHS Power Pack 1 installed?

I eventually got rid of my WHS system, I found it too limiting, but I thought you could do this by using the Restore CD.  If you don't know where it I think it is available on your network via \\<WHS>\Software\Home PC Restore CD\

What makes you say it is better to be the system partition on a larger disk?  Hardware specifications aside, a hard drive’s size has very little to do with its performance, unless the drive is almost full.  For optimum performance NTFS requires a between a minimal of 10-15% of the hard drive to be free space.

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.:: Vista Ultimate x64 :: Antec Fusion :: Corsair HX520w :: ASUS P5E-VM :: Core2 Duo E8400 3.0Ghz :: 4GB RAM :: 128GB SSD System\Apps :: 1TB\5TB Data :: LG GGC-H20L BD/HD DVD :: HDHomeRun x2 ::.

If you google "home server system disk size". You'll see what I mean about the system disk being too small. It has nothing to do with NTFS. It is due to what's being called the "landing zone" I guess that when you are transferring a file to whs it initially lands on your system drive and is then moved to a storage partition. If your system drive is too small or almost full the transfer can take forever. Apparently when uploading Windows only sees the system drive and ignores the fact that you have a couple hundred free gigs on another drive. Stupid huh? Anyhow I agree about whs being limited, but I have modified mine quite abit so as to use asp.net apps and different css formatting on the remote site, so people can watch movies and play music directly from the remote site without having to download. There is an add-in called webguide that is supposed to do the same thing, but it sucks so I had to do it myself. I was running server 2003 and then 2008 previously to whs and I found that whs did just what I wanted without all the hassle of a full blown server installation.

Interesting.  Thanks for the info.

What finally made me ditch WHS completely was that I received 10 free Samsung 32GB SSDs.  In the system I was using for WHS I wanted to use the SSD for System ONLY and my 3ware SATA RAID for Data but this wasn't possible.

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.:: Vista Ultimate x64 :: Antec Fusion :: Corsair HX520w :: ASUS P5E-VM :: Core2 Duo E8400 3.0Ghz :: 4GB RAM :: 128GB SSD System\Apps :: 1TB\5TB Data :: LG GGC-H20L BD/HD DVD :: HDHomeRun x2 ::.

Wow 10 free SSDs! How'd you pull that off? Sign me up!

mikinho:

Interesting.  Thanks for the info.

What finally made me ditch WHS completely was that I received 10 free Samsung 32GB SSDs.  In the system I was using for WHS I wanted to use the SSD for System ONLY and my 3ware SATA RAID for Data but this wasn't possible.

If you use one of your SSDs as the system drive it will not be used for data unless you fill up all the other drives. WHS will only store data on your system drive if you only have 1 drive or have 2 drives and duplication enabled or fill up your non system drives. Microsoft also "Highly recomends" against using any form of raid in their WHS documentation. If you had installed the WHS add-in "Disc Management" you would have seen it in practice.

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VMC Ultimate x86
Asus P5N7A-VM GeForce 9300/nForce 730i
Intel Core2 Duo E7200 2.53 GHz
4GB DDR2 800 RAM

Windows Home Server
Dell PowerEge SC440 server
Intel Pentium dual-core E2160 1.8GHz
512MB DDR2 ECC RAM

You are very correct.  However, here's some more info and what I think is going on for some of these guys.  We'll say you have a system drive and two other drives all in one pool.  If you copy to \\whserver\ashare like that WHS will not copy anything to the system drive.  It will immediately copy the item to one of the other drives and leave a stub on the system drive. If you install the DuplicationInfo addin you'll see that.  The reason you want a big system drive is that over time if you have thousands and thousands of files in your pool even the little stubs will start taking up space.  A faster system drive also helps you work with these little files faster as well.  I'm planning on building one with at least a 500GB one for the system drive and a 250GB drive for various installed programs and other high disk access apps.