Introducing my HP Microserver N36L using WHS2011 + XBMC

Thanks QLink.

Same situation as you describe, I am still testing with DVI connected monitor, will try with HDMI when I get home today.

Thanks QLink, was same as you experienced. Plugged in the HDMI, selected the playback device under Sound settings and all working well now.

Thanks for the help, really appreciate it.

Does this accept 3tb drives?

according HP specs up to 2TB drives...


but here you can see that 3TB drives also will be accepted.

QLink...

Just rebooted to see how fast it is with the ssd. It isn't all that fast of a boot speed. I do have a handful of added services like Abyss and Mail Forward. Looks like about 80-90 seconds from start of post to all services loaded. The bios sure takes forever.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gA4AdVe2rf4

In case anyone wants to know that it works, I specifically used this ram...
KVR1333D3E9S/4G

thx4info.

my n36l with os installed on factory 250GB HDD takes about 140 sec from first bios post till all services are loaded, if anyone is interested in.
(but acronis service takes his time for sure)

but i dont mind anyway cause i'm running it 24/7

Wondering if any of you have insight into this.

I currently have 4 2TB hard drives setup as 2 mirrored arrays using the onboard raid. I am wishing now that I had just mirrored them using dynamic disks.

Not knowing how exactly this raid controller behaves in these scenarios, I have 2 questions...

If one of the mirrored drives is pulled can it be read as a normal drive? I really don't see why it shouldn't be that way but it wont surprise me if it is locked into that raid controller now. Obviously I could re-format and start over but I have a lot of data on these drives already.

Secondly if it is readable without the raid controller can I just change it to a dynamic disk and say mirror to the other? I know that if I wasn't mirroring I could just convert to dynamic but I haven't tried adding mirroring to know if I would lose data or if it would force formatting then.

Hope that all made sense. I basically want to switch from "hardware" raid to software raid without having to reformat.

aluders Wrote:If one of the mirrored drives is pulled can it be read as a normal drive?

yes, it should still be readable.

aluders Wrote:Secondly if it is readable without the raid controller can I just change it to a dynamic disk and say mirror to the other?

never tried that too, so i can't give you a definitve answer.
but i guess this should work also, cause the pulled drive should be seen in windows as normal drive...

Worked like a charm....

changed bios from raid to ahci
booted into windows 7, it installed new hardware and I rebooted
opened disk management
convert to dynamic on the first disk of each set
deleted partition from second disk in each set
selected add mirror on the first disk in each set and selected appropriate disk

Good to know you can drop back to AHCI without any hiccups.

I'm using the onboard RAID with 4 x 2TB and I've been happy with it but one question has been bothering me.

I run my system disk off of a mirrored drive. The swapfile is also on a mirrored drive. I'd think any changes to the swapfile would also be mirrored which could mean degraded performance in some applications. Opinions? I've turned off the swapfile entirely on my rig so this shouldn't be an issue but it is something I've been wondering about.

Another question - I've spanned my disks into a single 3.6GB volume. The big risk of spans is that if you lose one, you lose everything (or spend weeks rebuilding an avocado from guacamole with obscure disk utilities). With RAID 1 there should be no issue with maintaining the volume with a single disk failure, right?

Re: boot speed - from post to XBMC screen (autologon enabled) - I'm at 68 seconds. Server 2K8 / 2GB.