StarTech or Vantec for SuperSpeed USB 3 Enclosures and Hubs?

Hands down our choice is for StarTech.

The above is a 2.5" drive enclosure with a Seagate Momentus 7200 RPM SATA drive installed. Mean throughput seems to be around 60MB/Second to 80MB/Second.

The 3.5" enclosure has a 2TB Seagate 7200 RPM SATA drive installed. Throughput seems to be about the same as the 2.5" drive.

The following link lists all of StarTech's single drive SuperSpeed enclosures:

• StarTech SuperSpeed USB3 2.5" and 3.5" Drive Enclosures

We also have a 2.5" SuperSpeed enclosure coming that can mount ISOs and present them to the connected device as an optical drive.

Both drives are connected to the above SuperSpeed USB 3 hub.

We are using the 3.5" drive to host VHDX files. We have Windows Server 2012 Essentials, Windows Server 2012 with Exchange 2013 RTM, Windows Server 2012 with SharePoint Foundation 2013, Windows Server 2012 with the Remote Desktop Services Role, Windows 8 Enterprise, and finally a Windows Server 2008 R2 OS set up with RRAS to NAT between the Internal and our own networks.

We've passed _a lot_ of data across these SuperSpeed devices without a hiccup.

The same could not be said for the Vantec SuperSpeed USB 3 hub and enclosures. They would cut out causing everything to come to a standstill. We went so far as to try a D-Link SuperSpeed USB 3 hub to see if it would work better but we ended up with connectivity issues.

In the end, we are quite happy with the StarTech products especially their stability with so much data flying around on the USB 3 bus.

Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists
Co-Author: SBS 2008 Blueprint Book

Chef de partie in the SMBKitchen
Find out more at
www.thirdtier.net/enterprise-solutions-for-small-business/

Windows Live Writer

Zalman ZM-VE300: How to Mount That ISO

The manual does not actually do a step-by-step on getting a mounted ISO to actually stay mounted.

So, we would mount an ISO in the Zalman, plug it into a machine to boot the ISO, and end up with no mounted ISO once the machine proceeded to boot.

One of the catches was that we were mounting the ISO with the Zalman connected to the machine to be built.

The other was that we missed a crucial step when pulling the Zalman from any of our shop systems.

The proper order of things:

1. Plug the Zalman into a shop system.
2. Use the Jog Wheel to mount the correct ISO.
3. Click and Safely Remove the Zalman.
• 
4. Wait until the Zzz shows in the Zalman’s display.

Once the unit has placed itself into Sleep Mode the ISO will be locked in place and the USB plug can be pulled.

The Zalman ZM-VE300 USB 3 external enclosure is one of the best external enclosures for system builders that we have found.

• Zalman ZM-VE300 Product Page

Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists
Co-Author: SBS 2008 Blueprint Book

*Our original iMac was stolen (previous blog post). We now have a new MacBook Pro courtesy of Vlad Mazek, owner of OWN.

Windows Live Writer

Product Review: Update on the Zalman ZM-VE300 USB 3 Drive Enclosure–This one is a sure win!

We did our initial review of the Zalman ZM-VE300 USB 3 enclosure here:

• MPECS Inc. Blog: Product Review: Zalman ZM-VE300 USB 3 2.5” Drive Enclosure with ISO Mount Capability A+

Now that we have had a chance to work with the unit we are really impressed with its ability to facilitate booting from “optical disk” via internally mounted ISO or to boot from the drive itself.

When the enclosure is in Dual Mode meaning both the mounted ISO and the hard drive storage are presented to the BIOS we are able to boot from either via Boot Menu.

What this means is that we can boot the Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 DVD so to speak and have the necessary RAID drivers on the USB hard drive.

Given that we have installed an 80GB Intel X25-M SSD in this enclosure we have enough room for all of the OS ISOs we require plus all of the current server, workstation, and desktop hardware drivers needed.

In the near future we will be slipstreaming the Renesas Electronics USB 3.0 controller driver into our desktop OS WIM files so that we can use the USB 3 interfaces on the desktops we build to speed things up even further.

This product is a clear win for us.

Even if we were building a lot of desktops or workstations, servers are our mainstay, having a number of these units around will make getting that OEM, Retail, or Volume License version of a Windows 7 OS, or even Windows XP Professional, installed in _very_ short order.

We will be ordering a few more of these enclosures along with some Intel 320 Series 80GB and 160GB SSDs to install in them to make the best possible combination.

Happy Friday everyone and thanks for reading! :)

Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists
Co-Author: SBS 2008 Blueprint Book

*Our original iMac was stolen (previous blog post). We now have a new MacBook Pro courtesy of Vlad Mazek, owner of OWN.

Product Review: Zalman ZM-VE300 USB 3 2.5” Drive Enclosure with ISO Mount Capability A+

As a system builder any tool that can make our life easier is very welcome.

Enter the Zalman ZM-VE300 2.5” Enclosure that we dropped an 80GB X25-M Intel SSD into:

The unit can run as an externally attached hard disk, an externally attached optical drive, or both.

As a test we copied a number of our key ISO files into the _ISO folder that we created on the newly formatted SSD. We then tried to thumb our way through the menu to mount an ISO to present to the OS that the enclosure was connected to with no joy.

• Zalman Support: Firmware Download Page for ZM-VE300

As of this writing the firmware available for download was R831.

Once we updated the firmware we were able to see the ISO files via the thumb wheel based menu.

While we keep the download names from Microsoft’s MVLS and TechNet sites the same so that there is no confusion once copied to the Zalman it is a good idea to rename them to make menu navigation easier to work through.

We set the ZM-VE300 in Optical Drive Mode only and mounted the Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 ISO. We then detached the drive from the workstation where we had copied the ISOs from.

Once we plugged the unit into the Intel Server System R1304BTLSHBN 1U we were going to test boot it on the ISO was no longer mounted.

So, we mounted the Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 ISO again and proceeded to boot the server. We hit F6 for Boot Menu, chose the Zalman, and were greeted with the Windows Server installation environment shortly thereafter.

We will continue to test the Zalman on other system builds that we do to see if we run into any issues especially on the desktop side of things, but for now this enclosure looks like a sure winner to replacing many of the USB flash drives that we have picked up over the last few years (OCZ ATV Turbo and now Kingston DTR500 series).

BTW, we also formatted the drive NTFS and set it to Active so that we can boot from the hard drive if there was need to.

Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists
Co-Author: SBS 2008 Blueprint Book

*Our original iMac was stolen (previous blog post). We now have a new MacBook Pro courtesy of Vlad Mazek, owner of OWN.

Kingston USB 3.0 Flash and SSD Drives

With the advent of USB 3.0 on most motherboards that are either in the market or just coming to market there is really no reason to be purchasing USB 2.0 beyond perhaps the cost to purpose ratio.

While chatting with one of our long term local suppliers about a pair of DTU30/64GB USB 3.0 drives that were supposed to show up late last week they indicated that they were accidentally sent the 32GB version instead.

We will be picking them up later today anyway and will run a few read and write tests to get a feel for their true USB 3.0 performance.

In our opinion, USB 3.0 puts to rest any alternative connector to USB 3.0’s hot swap capable quick connect ability with ultra high bandwidth. At 5Gbit/S the reality is that most peripherals could not come remotely close to saturating that bus.

Fresh OS Installs

For a small shop like ours, USB 3.0 gives us a reasonable alternative for delivering our fresh OS installs to new hardware versus a network based Windows Image system. Since we consistently deploy four or five different OS versions to new hardware we could have our needed OS images set in folders on the drive for quick access.

Those images would be kept up to date with current drivers as our only product line for servers, workstations, and desktops are Intel based.

The folder structure on the 32GB flash drive would look something like this:

• Drivers
• Hyper-V Server 2008 R2
• SBS2K11
• Service Packs and Updates
• Win2K8R2
• Win7Ent x64
• Win7Pro x64
• Win7Ult x64

As needed, we would bump the needed OS to root, change the flash drive’s name, and use it for the OS load. Once completed we would bump the OS files back to its respective folder.

Server Backups

The one benefit we will be seeing in our SMB space when USB 3.0 become ubiquitous will be the improvement in backup speeds. With that increase in write speed comes the ability to run a spot backup or an incremental backup in a fraction of the time it currently takes for a USB 2.0 based destination device.

Thus, we will be able to run a backup just prior to rotating a drive out or run an incremental just before taking a server offline for service and not have to wait as long for the backup to be completed.

Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists
Co-Author: SBS 2008 Blueprint Book

*Our original iMac was stolen (previous blog post). We now have a new MacBook Pro courtesy of Vlad Mazek, owner of OWN.

Windows Live Writer

Vantec NexStar SuperSpeed USB 3.0 Hard Drive Dock Do Not Lock Up Intel Server Boards

We have been testing a number of different options to move forward with when it comes to hooking up a hard disk to an SBS 2008, SBS v7, or Windows Server 2008 box for backups.

We are finding that the new NexStar SuperSpeed USB 3.0 Hard Drive Docks (NST-D300S3) are not locking up our Intel server configurations on a warm boot.

Note that because we are handling the bare hard disk a little precaution is required to protect the sensitive electronics on the drive.

We make sure to touch ground before swapping out a hard disk. We also make sure that we _do not_ touch the drive’s electronics.

We store any hard disks in the backup rotation in a standard 3.5” plastic hard disk clamshell to protect them. All drives are appropriately labeled using a labeling device so that we can keep track of the drives.

Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists
Co-Author: SBS 2008 Blueprint Book

*Our original iMac was stolen (previous blog post). We now have a new MacBook Pro courtesy of Vlad Mazek, owner of OWN.

Windows Live Writer

LaCie d2 Quadra 1 TB PC to Mac Fail

We performed a data recovery operation on an older PC that was successful. We were eventually able to create a ShadowProtect image of the original drive.

The customer brought in a LaCie d2 Quadra 1 TB USB hard disk for us to copy the recovered data onto. Once they dropped off the USB drive we set up a partition on it and copied the data over to the drive.

Our customer decided to purchase an iMac to replace the ageing PC that we had here in the shop.

Once we had the data copied onto the LaCie drive we got it back to them.

This was about a week ago.

Since then we have been in almost constant contact as the LaCie absolutely refused to show the partition we created on their iMac. When the drive was plugged into the iMac the LaCie Setup Assistant would pop up and ask them to format the LaCie drive.

We had them bring the d2 Quadra back to the shop and sure enough when we plugged the drive into any of our Windows machines the partition with the recovered data would show up.

So, we plugged the LaCie drive into our own MacBook Pro and up popped the LaCie Setup Assistant. We tried to close that, find the partition in Finder, and to see if the Mac’s disk management utility would see it which all failed.

There seems to be some sort of firmware/software intercept built into the LaCie drive that hides any existing partitions on the drive from any Mac based system even though those partitions show up just fine on a Windows machine.

We burned about half an hour trying to see if there were any other options to gain access to the partitions without having to run that Setup Assistant utility which would probably flatten the drive. There were none that we could see.

So, now we are copying the customer’s recovered data to one of our 2.5” USB drives formatted FAT32 and will loan it to them so that they can get their data onto the Mac.

The LaCie Setup Assistant needs to be tweaked to check for any existing partitions if plugged into a Mac for the first time and allow access to those partitions. We will not be recommending this product to anyone from now on.

Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists
Co-Author: SBS 2008 Blueprint Book

*Our original iMac was stolen (previous blog post). We now have a new MacBook Pro courtesy of Vlad Mazek, owner of OWN.

Windows Live Writer

USB 3.0 – Is It Worth It?

We are gearing up to do some testing here in the shop of some new USB 3.0 gear.

The components:

• Vantec 2-Port SuperSpeed USB 3.0 PCI-E Host Card
• A SATA power connector is needed to power this card.
• Vantec NexStar Hard Drive Dock SuperSpeed

We will use a standard 7200 RPM Seagate SATA drive to provide the baseline for performance. We will then use a Western Digital 150GB VelociRaptor and an Intel 80GB G2 code SSD drive to push the USB 3.0 bus to its limits.

We already know that USB 2.0 gives us a real world throughput of about 35MB/second.

We have seen eSATA give us around 60-70MB/second in our own real world testing and usage of the connection.

So, we look forward to seeing if USB 3.0 is all its cut out to be.

Once we have a good idea of what the speed advantages are, we will install the Vantec USB 3.0 PCI-E Host Card into one of our lab servers with an SBS 2008 OS installed. We will configure the SBS Backup to run once an hour. Hopefully we will be able to gain some insight as to whether the Vantec card will work with our servers.

Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists
Co-Author: SBS 2008 Blueprint Book

*Our original iMac was stolen (previous blog post). We now have a new MacBook Pro courtesy of Vlad Mazek, owner of OWN.

Windows Live Writer

Is eSATA Really Faster?

This says it is:

Those ISO files copied over really quick!

With our best USB flash or hard drives we are fortunate when we see a 30-35MB/Second write speed.

65MB/Second is almost double the USB flash drive write speed.

So, if the server supports eSATA and the ability to hot swap those eSATA drives, then use it.

Is it worth it to install a third party eSATA PCI or PCI-E card into existing hardware?

Probably not. They will require proprietary drivers that may or may not work with our server or workstation hardware. So, they are not worth the risk.

But for those situations where the laptop or workstation has a built-in eSATA port that is hot swap capable, then the small added expense of purchasing an external hard drive with the port in it is worth it.

Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists
Co-Author: SBS 2008 Blueprint Book

*Our original iMac was stolen (previous blog post). We now have a new MacBook Pro courtesy of Vlad Mazek, owner of OWN.

Windows Live Writer

Windows 7 – Enabling BitLocker To Go

Since we have started to install the second generation Intel SSDs in our laptops, there has been a need to look at additional storage.

Since we keep an ISO copy of the various software products we work with on the laptop, which is BitLocker enabled, it is preferable that any external storage device being used to store the content also be encrypted.

Enter in BitLocker To Go which is a new feature with Windows 7 Ultimate and Enterprise.

We have a 500GB 2.5” external USB/eSATA drive that we will use for portable storage with the laptop. The drive in the enclosure is brand new:

Once we have partitioned the drive with an NTFS partition, we jumped into the BitLocker management page:

We clicked on the Turn On BitLocker link for the attached 500GB drive:

In this case we enabled the need to use a password every time the drive is attached to the host as well as any other systems the drive may be connected to.

We saved the recovery key to a USB flash drive. From there, we upload all of our keys to Vlad’s off-site storage facilities that we subscribe to as well as resell.

It is important to note that any content on the BitLocker enabled external storage will be read only when connected to any other machine but the original host.

After clicking next, there will be a final warning:

Here we are ten minutes later after clicking the Start Encrypting button:

Even with the eSATA connection being used to hook the drive up to our Tecra S10, the process was going to take a while. We had started it just before finishing up for the evening, so the whole encryption process took somewhere in the neighbourhood of 3-4 hours for 500GB.

We can now keep anything we need to on the external drive with no real worries about losing it or having it stolen.

When it comes time to plug the drive in, take note that there will be a UAC prompt and then:

Note the option to “Automatically unlock on this computer from now on” is not checked.

Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists
Co-Author: SBS 2008 Blueprint Book

*Our original iMac was stolen (previous blog post). We now have a new MacBook Pro courtesy of Vlad Mazek, owner of OWN.

Windows Live Writer

Thermaltake Silver River Duo USB HDD Enclosure – Fail

A while back we had a bunch of problems with the Vantec NexStar3 enclosures we were using for backups on Intel server board based servers.

A warm boot would stall the server with a blinking cursor just before the BIOS information would show itself.

With the S5000PSLxxxR series and the S3200SH series boards Intel has put a BIOS setting to disable booting to USB so the point is now moot.

We have since gone back to the NexStar3 enclosures.

What we are finding now though is that the power blocks on the Thermaltake Silver River Duo enclosures are bad.

We have Vantecs that have been in operation for a number of years now and to date have not had one bad power block.

We have 6 bad power blocks waiting for their replacement from Thermaltake.

Most of the time when they fail, they do not outright stop the hard drive from spinning up. The status light comes on and the drive does indeed spin up. But, once the system needs to write data to the hard drive the enclosure’s status light will be in activity mode and the server will sometimes lock right up.

Since we sold a lot of these enclosures during the S3000AH and S5000PSLxxx product time period, we are anticipating more failures to come.

Previous posts on the subject:

• New Vantec NexStar 3 version does not like S3000AH Intel Boards
• Intel S3000AH - Vantec vs. Thermaltake USB HDD

Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists
Co-Author: SBS 2008 Blueprint Book

*All Mac on SBS posts will not be written on a Mac until we replace our now missing iMac! (previous blog post)

Windows Live Writer

SBS 2008 – Restore Failed – Element not found 0x80070490

We have been spending some serious time tearing into SBS 2008 by breaking all sorts of things to see what happens and to figure out how to fix them.

In some cases, we are successful in getting the fix in, and in others we are still on the short end of the learning curve.

The big confidence builder in all of this is the fact that the built-in SBS backup is phenomenal! The ability to restore various aspects of the server up to and including the server itself is simply the best out of the box backup system we have worked with on any Microsoft OS product.

We have restored the bench SBS 2008 box so many times from so many backups we made during our testing that the built-in SBS backup is a viable contender to stay on the box as the de facto backup solution for SBS 2008.

The one spot we have not tested yet is the built-in backup’s ability to restore to different hardware. Though, from what we can see, the ability is there as the restore process gives us the ability to install drivers prior to running the restore.

While working on one of the restores, we ended up receiving this error:

Windows Complete PC Restore

The Windows Complete PC Restore Operation failed.

Error details: Element not found. (0x80070490)

It did not take much to find the reason behind the error: WindowsNetworking.com: Performing a Recovery Using Complete PC Restore.

It seems that even though have the USB Boot Priority disabled in the BIOS, the boot order was set as follows:

USB HDD Set as Default

The recommended action in the WindowsNetworking article was to keep the USB HDD unplugged until it came time to scan the backup drive for the backup being used to restore the system.

Once we left the USB drive unplugged during the POST and subsequent SBS DVD boot, we were able to accomplish a successful restore.

Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists
Co-Author: SBS 2008 Blueprint Book

*All Mac on SBS posts will not be written on a Mac until we replace our now missing iMac!

Windows Live Writer

Intel S3000AH - Vantec vs. Thermaltake USB HDD

A while back we blogged about the changes Vantec made to their 3.5" USB hard drive enclosures: New Vantec NexStar 3 version does not like S3000AH Intel Boards.

Because the ability to remotely warm boot our servers is mission critical, we have been on the hunt for a replacement USB enclosure product.

We found the following Thermaltake products:

Thermaltake BlacX SE

The Thermaltake BlacX SE behaves a lot like a hot swap enclosure would in the system. Power down the unit, plug in the drive, power up the unit and we have access to the hard drive and its contents.

The second product is this 3.5" USB hard drive enclosure:

Thermaltake Silver River DUO Enclosure A2395

The feature that caught our eye on the Silver River Duo enclosure was the USB/eSATA switch:

Thermaltake Silver River DUO - Back

With the Vantec enclosures, there is no switch to disable the eSATA feature.

Occasionally, we collaborate with Kevin of Atkey Tech. On a support call into Intel about a couple of S5000PSLSATA server board issues he was experiencing, he also worked with them on the no warm boot issue with the Vantec NexStar USB enclosures connected to the same board.

Intel indicated that one needed to disable "Legacy USB Support" in the BIOS:

Legace USB Support - Enabled

In the above screen shot, it is shown enabled, because we made sure to check where the setting was at before testing the Thermaltake enclosures.

While disabling that setting did work with that particular S5000PSL server board for Kevin, disabling the setting does not seem to work with the S3000AH series boards.

The server we are testing on is a box that is about to go into production. It is a 1U SR1530AHLX series with a Xeon X3220 Quad Core processor and 4GB of RAM. Storage is provided by two 750GB Seagate ES.2 Enterprise Storage SATA drives in a RAID 1 array. SBS 2K3 R2 Premium is installed, configured, and fully up to date.

The first thing we tried to do after the server was configured and ShadowProtect was installed was to test the warm boots against the Vantec NexStar series we have on the bench.

Sure enough, the server refused to warm boot on a restart requested from the OS while the Vantec NexStar was connected. Even after a cold boot with a quick trip into the BIOS, the server would not warm boot.

We installed a 500GB Seagate 7200.10 SATA drive into the BlacX SE and plugged it into the server. Once the USB detection steps completed, we had a 500GB NTFS formatted drive fully accessible to the OS.

We sent the server into a reboot. The server warm booted with no issues. We cold booted into the BIOS, made a couple of on/off setting changes then saved and exited the BIOS screen into a warm boot. Again, the server booted with no issues.

We then went through the same process with the Thermaltake Silver River DUO and were pleasantly surprised that the server would warm boot from any scenario.

When we first started having trouble with the Vantec enclosures connected to the S3000AH series boards, we put a trouble ticket in with Vantec and began a dialogue with their support team. We have not heard from them since the end of January.

Since the Thermaltake Silver River DUO series don't seem to have the problem, it looks as though we have found a replacement enclosure for the Vantec NexStar USB hard drive enclosures.

The BlacX SE is a pretty good alternative with a couple of caveats:

• The hard drives are bare, thus exposing sensitive electronics to physical handling.
• The hard drives can get very hot due to a lack of air circulation.

We will keep the BlacX SE around for bench work, and start using the Thermaltake Silver River DUOs for our ShadowProtect backup needs from now on.

Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists

*All Mac on SBS posts are posted on our in-house iMac via the Safari Web browser.

ShadowProtect USB Hard Drive Swap Scripts

When we first started configuring ShadowProtect on client servers, we were running into a bit of a problem trying to rotate the USB HDDs.

We would get the following error whenever we tried to stop the drive:

The device Device_Name cannot be stopped because a program is still using it. Close any programs that might be using the device, then try again later.

So, we downloaded Process Explorer and launched a find for "e:" which was the USB drive letter.

We always found that it was the ShadowProtect services holding onto the drive, with the occasional QuickBooks 2008 server TSR holding onto it too.

So, here are a couple of quick batch files to shut down the ShadowProtect services without having to jump in and out of the Server Console or the Services Console (Start-->Run-->Services.msc).

To stop the ShadowProtect services copy and paste the following two lines into a batch file called ShutdownShadowProtect.bat:

• net stop ShadowProtectSvc
• net stop VSNAPVSS

To start the ShadowProtect services copy and paste the following two lines into a batch file called StartupShadowProtect.bat:

• net start ShadowProtectSvc
• net start VSNAPVSS

Voila! A quick click and the drive should be released when we click to stop it and a quick click to start things up again once our drives are rotated.

Remember to always power down the soon to be changed USB HDD BEFORE unplugging the USB cable. And also make sure that the power switch on its replacement is off before connecting the server's USB cable.

Always startup the ShadowProtect console and "Connect" the console back to the services as the ShadowProtect Shield will remain red until this happens.

And one more thing: We keep a folder on the server desktop called Batches to keep all of our server and services batch files and scripts in. We learned the hard way when moving a services shutdown batch file remotely across the desktop that we may activate them accidentally. If that happens, click on the Command window that pops up with the scripted commands and CTRL + C to terminate the batch and restart affected services immediately!

Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists

*All Mac on SBS posts are posted on our in-house iMac via the Safari Web browser.

New Vantec NexStar 3 version does not like S3000AH Intel Boards

We have been using Vantec NexStar 3 USB 3.5" HDD enclosures with our backup solutions for a long time now.

Just recently though, we have hit a snag: With the NexStar plugged in and turned on, we go to warm boot a server with an S3000AH based server board setup and the server hangs. Cold boot the server and head into the BIOS to make some changes, save them, then warm boot the server and it also hangs.

Vantec recently went through a product revision with their NexStar 3 USB HDD 3.5" enclosures.

Here is a side by side of the previous version (left)and the newest version (right):

Vantec NexStar 3 Left=Old Right=New

The differences are pretty obvious when the two sit side by side:

• New uses a fixed SATA/Power Connector
• New uses far fewer electronic components on the PCB

When we move the the back side of the enclosures where the connectors are located, the differences become even more obvious:

Vantec NexStar 3 Left=Old Right=New

They are a mirror image of each other.

One would assume that the differences in the amount of electronics would be offset by some of them being located on the backside of the PCB on the new unit. This is not the case.

So, we are now in a quandry as we have at least a dozen of these new units either in the field or sitting here in the shop waiting to be delivered to our client sites.

For now, we have been in touch with our supplier to indicate to them that the units are seemingly defective. We will also be looking into an alternative enclosure right away.

We have sent an email into Vantec's support and, when we have a little more time, we may get in touch with Intel about it. For now though, the problem is definitely in Vantec's court.

UPDATE: Vantec has responded already! We provided some more feedback as well as sent a link of a short video of the two problem scenarios we experience on an S3000AH based 1U sitting on our bench in the process of a Swing Migration.

Kudos to Vantec for being so quick to respond!

UPDATE 2008-01-28: It now seems that we can include the Intel S5000PSLSATAR series server board in this situation. We helped out on a new SBS install utilizing that board with dual Xeon 5345 Quad Core processors this last weekend.

The server hung on reboot with the enclosure plugged in and turned on.

We sent a note off to Vantec's tech support to update them on the situation.

We have also ordered in an alternative enclosure made by Thermaltake: Silver River DUO Enclosure. The key feature on this unit is the ability to flip a switch on the back to choose between the USB 2.0 or eSATA interfaces.

We have yet to hear back from Vantec.

Now that we are seeing this issue on more than one server board, when we have more time later this week we will be initiating a support ticket with Intel too.

UPDATE 2008-02-01: We plugged one of the new sled based NexStars into an existing SE7230NH1-E based Pentium D SBS box as part of this particular client moving over to a ShadowProtect based backup solution.

In this case, the SE7230NH1-E does not hang up like the S3000AH or S5000PSLSATAR boards do on a warm boot.

UPDATE 2008-02-05: We just plugged a new sled based NexStar into a server with the Intel SE7520JR2 server board in it.

We warm booted the server after some updates and configuration changes and there was no issue.

The following list will remain at the bottom of this post for clarity:

• Intel SR1560SF and S5400SF Series (SRCASRB RAID) Warm Boot Failure
• Intel S3000AH and AHLX (On board RAID used) Warm Boot Failure
• Intel S5000PSLSATAR (On board RAID used) Warm Boot Failure
• Intel SE7320NH1-E (On board RAID used) Warm Boot Okay
• Intel SE7520JR2 (SRCS16 RAID controller) Warm Boot Okay

The hard drives in the enclosures are all Seagate hard drives with at least 320GB of storage capacity. All of the Seagate hard drives have the 150Gbps jumper removed (Previous blog post).

Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists

*All Mac on SBS posts are posted on our in-house iMac via the Safari Web browser.

SBS 2K3 - All Editions: Backing up to a USB external HDD

We have pretty much settled into backing up all of our SBS installations to a set of USB 2.0 external hard drives.

It works really well with a couple of caveats: One, it really labours the system, even the more powerful dual Dual Core Xeon 5100 series servers struggle with it. So, we start the backup when we are sure no one would be around.

It must have something to do with the USB bus being saturated! ;)

When running the backup configuration, it is important to exclude the entire USB hard drive from being backed up.

During the backup setup process, click on the Exclude Folders button then click on the (E:) - your USB drive letter may be different - drive and OK.

When the drive has been selected, you should see the following:


The drive being backed up to is greyed out.

When we first started with the USB drives, we were getting random lockups during the verify phase of the backup. We discovered that it was because we did not exclude the USB drive itself from the backups. Once we excluded the USB drive from the backups all together, the lockups disappeared.

The second caveat is to make sure that the person responsible for rotating the drives stops the drive via the "Safely Remove Hardware" icon in the system tray before switching them out.

Otherwise there will be drive space errors indicating that there is 0 MB on the drive arriving in your e-mail every once in a while. They can be troublesome to get rid of too.

Another minor caveat that may show up if you have mapped network folders to drive letters on the low side of the alphabet on your server: when you plug in the USB drive, the Drive Manager may assign a drive letter to it that is the same as the mapped drive letter.

You will not be able to access the drive if this is the case, and will have to manually set the drive letter via the Drive Manager. This can be painful because once the drive letters have been set for the first time, there is no guarantee that the drive will pickup the same drive letter when it is time to plug it back into the server.

One thing that can be done to mitigate this if there is a drive letter crunch and no applications are using the CD/DVDROM: Move it up to Z: or Y: or the like. Once you do this, the USB drives will take over the CD/DVDROM's previous drive letter without incident.

Besides being quick and easy, hard drive storage is so cheap now that tape no longer makes sense.

Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists