Western Digital USB Drives Use A Proprietary Drive PCB for USB

This comes via the SBS2K Yahoo Group.

• Spiceworks Community: WD 500gb my passport Help!!

Apparently, Western Digital in their great wisdom has decided to mass produce a hard drive controller with only one interface on it: USB.

And:

As a rule we have been using the StarTech 4 bay SuperSpeed drive dock with bare drives for our backup rotations that we run.

For clients that have been running their own backup rotations we have been recommending the WD non-Green USB drives as we have had pretty good success with them. The same goes for the Seagate USB drives that are not “Green” in nature.

The one thing we have noticed with the manufacturer built USB drives is that there is a tendency to use 5400 RPM drives. And now, perhaps we are limited in how we can access a drive if something goes wrong with the controller.

Our preference for bare backup drives are:

1. Seagate Enterprise Storage (ES or Constellation) series SATA
2. Western Digital Black Label (non-Advanced Format for VHD/Backup VHD)

Both drives are 7200 RPM with better firmware than the retail/consumer drives. So, they will perform better and last longer due to ongoing handling during rotations.

We may request that in the future clients only purchase a certain drive and USB enclosure for their backups so that we have some control over what drives are used for backups.

As usual, it is Buyer Beware.

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

Windows Live Writer

Cause for Pause: My SBS Backups Are Gone?!?

We were asked to recover a folder set for a client from the beginning of this year.

When we went to the backup destination media that should have that backup set on it we were greeted with the following shock:

In this particular circumstance the SBS in question was deployed just about a year ago. The backup destination happened to be the first disk in their three drive rotation (we rotate every two weeks and test their backups for this client).

We were fortunate that the folders needed were found on Disk 2 in the rotation. But, anything beyond that would have been useless to us as the files that were changed beyond the Drive 2 date set were still needed.

What does this mean for us?

Well, for starters any client with less than three drives in their rotations will be bumped up to at least 3.

We will be implementing a grandfather clause into the backup structure to allow for one drive to have file and folder access for the last year.

In this particular case we pulled Drive 2 out of the rotation immediately so as to use as an archive just in case.

We will be digging into this server’s logs around the time of the backup drive being blanked to see if there are any indicator log entries that we can use to flag and e-mail us. There may be cases where we would want to pull that drive right out and leave it alone for 6 to 12 months.

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

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

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

TroubleShooting: Client lost Dell image disks? Request them back...

Dell actually has a request the backup disks page.

The disks will contain the factory-installed OS and device drivers.

From the Dell site:

• Requests are limited to one (1) set of backup discs per system purchased.
• The backup discs requested must match the operating system that was factory installed on the original order.

So, if you have clients with missing disks, here you go: Dell: Request Backup Disks.

You will be required to fill out a form. Not sure if there will be a nominal cost involved.

Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists