I've decided to jump in and upgrade my existing MCE2005 to Vista Ultimate and build a WHS to store all my important media. I would like to get a rack mounted case to match my Media Center but I need help/advice on which direction I need to go.

After doing research on WHS I have found out that you should not install your drives in a RAID format due to the back up technology that WHS uses. However, I haven't figured out how many drives you can install in WHS. In perfect situation I would like to have the following.

Either a 2U or 3U rack mounted case with the ability to have hot swapable drives from the front or back. I don't want to take out the computer from the rack everytime I need to upgrade the storage or add an additional hard drive. Currently I have 4 - 500 gb SATA hard drives which has maxed out my current motherboard on my MCE machine. If I build a WHS I want the ability to add 5, 6, or even 7 additional hard drives but I don't know if this is possible... 

Any ideas or advice?

Thanks in advance for your help.

-Jake

You can pretty much have as many hard drives as you want.  I've got one system drive and then 4 other drives added to my pool.  3 are IDE and 2 SATA.  I've even added two more USB drives to the pool to goof around and it works just fine.  Wouldn't recommend it but it works just fine.

Beware the "file conflict" problems that WHS has been having since the PP1 install which results in lost data.  Google it and you'll see a few forums discussing it.  It pisses me off.

I currently have 6 drives in my WHS box (2 IDE & 4 SATA) and I could easily add more if I added a SATA card for more ports.

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Velocity Micro Cinemagix Grand Theater, C2Q, 2GB, 2 TB, 3 DCT, 2 HDHomeRun
Homebuilt C2Q, 2 GB, 1.5 TB, HVR-1600, FireSTB
Dell E1705, T7600, 2GB, 250GB, HVR-950
WHS, WRT600N, DMA-2100, DMA-2200, XBox360

You should look at the Chenbro RM31212B rack enclosure.  I currently run my WHS with the bigger brother RM41416B.  I have a 500GB SataII system drive, and 11 various 500GB and 750GB SataII drives connected via Areca ARC-1260 running in JBOD.  You're right, you probably shouldn't run any sort of RAID array, as WHS has it's own redundancy built in (similar to RAID-1 mirror).  It keeps the mirrored file on another physical drive.  As far as hot swapping, I've always added and removed drives while the system is off just to be safe I guess.  Just in case you're wondering, I'm running an Intel 3000AHS mobo with a Xeon processor and 2GB RAM and also have a samsung DVD-ROM installed as well. 

 

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Intel E6600 & DG965WH - 3GB Corsair 6400 - Nvidia 7600GT 256MB PCIe with Foreceware 163.69 - Seagate 500GB HD - Vista Ultimate

i have 7 drives in my WHS, a mix of sata and ide, plus an optical drive, and it works great... only 1 problem- dont underestimate the need for a REALLY REALLY good power supply:P i had major problems before i got a decent p/s. i would say 4 or more total drives, no matter what kind, requires at least a 600w p/s. 

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If you think you can or you can't, you're right!

I'll ditto the hard drive comment, I'm running a 700W

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Intel E6600 & DG965WH - 3GB Corsair 6400 - Nvidia 7600GT 256MB PCIe with Foreceware 163.69 - Seagate 500GB HD - Vista Ultimate