Okay. That's the RTM version. I was just afraid you had installed the older Beta or RC.
Good to know. I'm still struggling to figure out why parity writes are as slow as they are; if it's not a CPU bottleneck then it seems to me that they should be writing at the speed of the slowest drive. Unless WS2012E is doing a poor job of avoiding skipping around to different slabs.
Oh, and if you do add a 5th drive, keep in mind that W2012E apparently doesn't have an automatic rebalance function. To the best of my knowledge you have to create a new storage space and move all of your data to that space in order to get existing data balanced across all of the drives.:|
How does this compare to Nexentastor? I wouldn't mind moving to Windows Server due to support.
It's normal for Windows Server to buffer writes using RAM. It's done that for ages; even WHSv1 does it. That said it's not delaying parity writes, it's just that with a large enough file you reach the buffer limit (i.e. all available RAM), at which point you can only push more data into the buffer as fast as it can write out, which is the speed your system writes out to the parity storage space.
When I build my new Essentials server I'm definitely going with 16GB of RAM for precisely this reason.
WHS v1 was not without its teething problems despite Microsoft's seal of approval, but in the end it worked quite well. As for 2012E, if you want to be really cutting edge use Storage Spaces with the new ReFS file system.Oh that's good to know, at least I did double the ram from WHS2011. Overall I do like storage spaces, although it makes me nervous using a v1 of something like this, but I can only assume Microsoft feels its fairly robust since they included it in windows 8.
*looks at price*
Oh dear.
Keep in mind that Technet is for evaluation only. If you're not evaluating it then you're violating your license. Furthermore you are required to discontinue your use of all Technet software if your subscription ever lapses.Yeah; $400+ is a bit too dear. I'm planning on buying a Technet subscription and getting mine that way. Cheaper and I get all of Technet as well. In the meantime, my Trial Version is humming along nicely. Still not happy that you can't move Server backups to other drives (short of Ghosting the physical HD to another physical HD) but so far it's running really well on just 4GB of RAM.
I had to disable SMB Signing (I didn't know what that was until tonight :| )
I followed this guide, disabled SMB Signing in the Computer Management GPO for both the server and client and now I get 81+MB/s! That's pretty smokin' for a Gigabit network.
http://mctexpert.blogspot.com/2011/02/disable-smb-signing.html
Interesting find.
Can this be used for server 2008r2 and Win 7 clients?
TIA