The BYOB Podcast Episode 105

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Another episode of the BYOB podcast is up, and in this episode:

A meat n potatoes show. Home Automation, USB over IP, poke your surface? Crashplan, Cromebook, Windows 8 All In Ones. Prepare yourself for The BYOB Podcast Episode 105.

And you can find episode 105 here.

Add-In: StableBit DrivePool v1.2.4.7226

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StableBit DrivePool has been updated to fix extremely deep directory paths:

  • [D] Measuring the pool would crash the system on pools with extremely deep directory structures.

[D] = Driver was modified (reboot required after update)

Version 1.2.4.7226 can be downloaded from here.

Video: Stephen Rose on Storage Spaces

Stephen Rose presents a 6 minute video on Storage Spaces.

In the vid Stephen explains about Storage Spaces and Storage Pools and tells us about thin provisioning and resiliency type.

Stephen Rose on Storage Spaces

You can find the video here.

Primer on Storage Spaces

Mitch Garvis has a great primer on Storage Spaces which takes us through the process of creating a Storage Pool and how to extend it if the need arises:

Storage Spaces are going to revolutionize the way we (as administrators) think about storage.  We can now hot-add drives to volumes and extend them in seconds and not hours, and because there is no downtime involved we will not have to do any of this after hours.

Primer on Storage Spaces

You can find Mitch’s article here.

Add-In: StableBit DrivePool v1.3.0.7252 Beta

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The beta build of StableBit DrivePool has had an update.

Version 1.3.0.7252 has the following changes:

  • File evacuation is now more persistent. Added new .config option FileBalance_EvacuationPadding.
  • Fixed some memory leaks in the Dashboard.
  • Show the pool statistics for the correct pool after removing a missing disk.
  • [D] Merged changes from 1.2.2 to 1.2.4.

[D] = Driver was modified (reboot required after update)

This beta release can be downloaded from here.

Using WS2012 Essentials with more than 25 users

The Windows Server Essentials and Small Business Server Blog has a post on using Windows Server 2012 Essentials with more than 25 users.

Using Windows Server 2012 Essentials with more than 25 users

The post explains how to run Essentials as one of your two virtual instances once you have a Windows Server 2012 Standard license.

Scenario’s are also taken a look at in this post, which you can find here.

Archive Optimizer for StableBit DrivePool v1.0.0.2

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The Archive Optimizer plug-in for StableBit DrivePool has had an update.

  • With this plug-in you designate one or more disks as special Feeder disks.
  • Feeder disks will receive all new files created on the pool.
  • It will be the balancer’s job to move all the files from the Feeder disks to the Archive disks in the background.
  • You can use this plug-in to designate one or more fast disks as special feeder disks in order to improve write performance.

Version 1.0.0.2 fixes the following problem:

  • Fixed incorrect balancing when more than one feeder disks are enabled.

Archive Optimizer can be downloaded from here.

Add-In: StableBit Scanner v2.2.0.2819

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StableBit Scanner for WHS 2011, SBS 2011 Essentials and Storage Server 2008 R2 Essentials has had an update.

Version 2.2.0.2819 has the following changes:

  • Advanced format sector information was not being reported properly.
  • Updated with SATA 3.1 spec.
  • Fixed pointer overflow in Microsoft’s library when showing SMART ignore warning dialog.
  • Added new welcome screen with support for 4 different settings profiles (mostly for non-WSS).
        – Tablet – Scan more often but only while charging.
        – Laptop – Never scan while on batteries, and scan sparingly.
        – Desktop – Scan any time of day while not interfering with disk access.
        – Server – Scan only at night, do not throttle but still de-prioritize the scan I/O.
  • Added option to prevent automatic scanning when the system is running on battery power.
    When enabled and the system transitions to battery power, any currently running scans that have been started automatically will be stopped. Scans will be resumed when the system goes on A/C power, if we’re in the user configured work window.
    Any manually started scans will not be affected by this option and will continue.

This release can be downloaded from here.

Add-In: Drive Bender v1.4.5.5

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The add-In Drive Bender has been updated to version 1.4.5.5.

This release brings with it some major performance tweaks:

  • Update: Enabled some of the low level caching to improve pool enumeration and access speed. This caching can improve some operation by up to 10 times.
  • Bug fix: Under some extreme circumstances, file reads while using Smooth Stream can stall indefinitely. When this happens Drive Bender will now drop out of Smooth Stream mode for this specific file context.

You can download Drive Bender from here.

The Home Server Show Podcast Episode 208

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Its another week and its time for another episode of "The home Server Show" podcast.

This week its episode 208:

Update Rollup 4 is out for Windows Home Server 2011 and John, Jim, and Dave are here to dissect it.  There are new Microservers, Drobo 5N, Western Digital Sentinal, 6 watt processors, you name it! Tons of news …

You can find the audio for this episode here or you can watch the video below: