Microsoft: Windows Home Server Doesn’t Support Advanced Format Drives

Yesterday Microsoft released an article regarding Windows Home Server (WHS) and Advanced Format (AF) drives which must be formatted and aligned for 4k sectors instead of the traditional 512 byte sectors.

The article states that the alignment tools that drive manufacturers provide are not always compatible with the WHS platform – and therefore Advanced Format drives are not supported:

You will experience performance degradation when using Advanced Format disk in your Home Server v1 for Server Backup, Storage Pool, or System Disk because the disks are formatted and aligned in a way Windows Home Server is not compatible with.

The article is not clear on the use of drives which can simply be jumpered before installation and then formatted by WHS. After my own experiences with AF drives in WHS I have already decided not to use them in WHS v1.

Microsoft advises users not to use AF drives in their WHS v1 systems. The upcoming WHS ‘Vail’ will support these drives.

Source: MSWHS

 

Windows Home Server – Benchmarking Advanced Format Hard Drives

In my previous post I set a jumper on my new Western Digital WD20EARS 2 TB Caviar Green hard drive to get it working in my Windows Home Server (WHS).

While the jumper setting allowed the drive to work without issues I hadn’t considered the performance of this drive and my interest was piqued by Gerrit’s comment that he only got 40 Mb/s on his Advanced Format drive.

I set about installing HD Tach on my WHS and immediately found that it ran very slow against my WD20EARS drive. In fact the test did not complete and the drive disappeared from disk management. Not quite what I was expecting!

I rebooted and found that the boot process hung – I could no longer boot in to Windows on my WHS.

Fortunately I already have a new system drive on order (as the existing system drive had started making a clicking sound) but this leaves me wondering if I should just use my WD20EARS for external back up and put a non-advanced format drive in my server instead?

It’s great that these drives will work fine in WHS Vail – but it would be nice if Microsoft and Western Digital could work together to get these drives supported in WHS (which is a very likely candidate for such drives). As such I can’t really recommend using Advanced Format drives in WHS at the present time.

I won’t recommend using HD Tach on WHS either but at least I already had all my data backed up (just in case). Looks like I will be re-installing WHS very soon!

 

Windows Home Server – Adding Advanced Format Drives To The Storage Pool

I recently bought a Western Digital 2 TB Caviar Green SATA Intellipower 64 MB Cache Bulk/OEM Desktop Hard Drive WD20EARS and added it to my Windows Home Server (WHS).

I did not realize that I needed to do anything special to my new Advanced Format drive to add it to my WHS – but soon witnessed some odd behavior after installing it.

My nightly backups started to fail and my nightly backup to the cloud hung. In the morning none of my clients were able to access any shared folders. Rebooting seemed to resolve the issue (until the next morning). I soon found the following error in Event Viewer:

Event ID: 11
The driver detected a controller error on \Device\Harddisk2

Disk Management confirmed that my 2TB drive was \Device\Harddisk2 and so I tried to remove the drive from the pool. The process for removing the drive hung – but I still waited for 24 hours just in case. At that point I discovered that the Event ID 11 error had occurred shortly after the drive removal process had begun.

The only course of action left was to shutdown my WHS and just remove the drive. I then booted WHS and removed the missing drive from the storage pool. The next step was to fix the drive – fortunately I had a spare hard drive jumper lying around and easily found the correct setting on the Western Digital site:

All that was left to do was shutdown the server again and put the drive back in and re-add it to the storage pool. I have copied to the drive and found no more errors in Event Viewer.

While this will not be an issue in the next iteration of WHS (Vail) it is surely a mistake that I won’t make again!