h340 with WHS v1 and 3TB WD Red

[snuuggles]

Hi, I've been poking around different forums, and I think I'm out of luck, but I thought I'd just check here before giving up.

I own an Acer h340 with the original WHS v1 running. I purchased--without doing any research (dur)--a new WD Red 3TB drive (WD30EFRX). I knew that the server would only use up to 2TB of space as-is, but I thought that the 3TB was like $20 more, so I'd just get it, and when I eventually upgrade or whatever, I'd get to use the extra 1TB.

However, when I try to add it to my drive pool, it's only showing ~750GB of space, not the 2 or 2.2 or whatever is the limit of WHS v1. I've tried to partition the drive manually in my win 7 machine, then bring it over to the WHS, but no matter what I do, I can't seem to get it to recognize anything more than 750GB.

I don't have time to futz with setting up a more modern OS for my server, so:

- what is the simplest way (if it's possible at all) to prepare the drive so that WHS will at least use the max 2TB of space?

- I understand that some (all? many?) of the new drives now use 4k blocks or something, and WHS wants 512b blocks. Will this drive adjust to use the smaller blocks WHS requires? My understanding is that some new drives have firmware that will do this automagically

- I'm a little unclear on if the TLER feature on the WD Red drives is even useful in a system like this. Should I have not bothered with the WD Red in the first place?

- Finally, if the WD Red 3TB is no good for any of the above reasons, is there a consensus on the best 2TB drive to get to put in a WHS v1 box? I've just been getting WD Green drives and putting them in over the years, but while reading up on this little situation, I've come to learn that the greens have a "head parking" issue of some kind, which make them a bad choice for servers.

Oh yeah, here's my use-cases for this thing, in case that matters:

- I use it to store files, pictures, and music
- I use it to stream movies to my PS3
- noone else uses it with any frequency.

I realize that all I really need is a NAS for the above, but I've got what I've got for now...

Thanks for any help!

Edit: just to be clear, I'd be fine with just exchanging the WD Red 3TB for a WD Red 2TB, but I want to be sure there isn't a better product for my application.

 

[bill33]

Αre you sure that the disk is working ok?Try it on a pc and see.

 

[VirtualLarry]

My understanding was that WHSv1 does not support "Advanced Format" HDDs. Which are pretty much all of them on the market, save for possibly the 500GB WD Blue HDD.

I'm using 2TB Hitachi 7K2000 HDDs, which turned out to be 7K3000 inside the box. They were some of the last non-AF 2TB HDDs made.

 

[Cerb]

The ~750GB should be about 0.73TiB (~746GiB, ~800GB). That's not an AF problem, but a lack of support for larger than 2TB HDDs*. That said, AF drives can be an issue with WHSv1, due to lingering low-level code from much older OSes. If it shows that way using the internal SATA controller(s), it's the OS at fault. If you are using a USB bridge of some kind, update it to one supporting larger drives. Still, AF might cause problems.

Get a mainstream non-server HDD, 2TB or smaller. Toshibas (formerly Hitachi) make no mention of 4K support in their docs, so those are good bets.

If you aren't making use of client system image backups, or other special WHS goodies, you should really consider moving to different NAS setup soon, rather than when you finally must.

* A common failure is for the big drives to show up as being only as large as the lower 32 bits. Each sector is 512B, 9 bits. So, a 32-bit size in sectors, which also the MBR partition size limit, is 2^41B.
1TiB = 2^40B, 2TiB = 2*2^40B = 2^41B.
3TB = 3*10^12 = 3,000,000,000,000B.
When a drive can be used, but the hardware or driver or OS can't support larger addresses, the higher bits are generally ignored (rather, thrown away), so the result is the remainder (%) of the lower bits.
3TB % 2TiB in GiB = (3*10^12B % 2^41B)/2^30B/GiB ~= 746GiB