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HP MediaSmart Server? - Page 30

post #871 of 952
12/16/11 at 9:17am
Also, I forgot to mention that a server recovery should only be done through a wired connection. Not wireless.
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post #872 of 952
12/16/11 at 9:23am
Quote:
Originally Posted by Nathan Webel View Post

Here is a guy that had that same problem. Turns out Twonky had failed while indexing and was causing the problem, and stopping the service resumed functionality. Maybe your problem is related?

http://homeservershow.com/forums/ind...em-with-ex490/

Thanks but I don't think that's it. I removed Twonky when I first got the WHS. The router overheating issue has me thinking now though. I use a Belkin N+ F5D8235-4 v2 and it has been pretty flaky the whole time I have owned it.
I wish it would be something that simple.
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post #873 of 952
12/16/11 at 11:13pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by dropzone7 View Post

Thanks but I don't think that's it. I removed Twonky when I first got the WHS. The router overheating issue has me thinking now though. I use a Belkin N+ F5D8235-4 v2 and it has been pretty flaky the whole time I have owned it.
I wish it would be something that simple.

I had a very similar thing happen with my Acer WHS to the point where I bought an HP MediaSmart EX490 and have rarely used the Acer since as I didn't trust it. Turned out to be a few music file that were damaged and had odd characters in their names. I deleted the share and rebooted and everything returned to normal. I was not using DE but had a complete backup of the Acer. I replaced most of the music files and it went back to normal, except that I now have 2 WHS's (and have been getting rid of NAS's whereas I thought I had decided to do the opposite). Glad it turned out that way.

Did you check the files?

philip
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post #874 of 952
12/17/11 at 11:58am
Quote:
Originally Posted by pmcd View Post

I had a very similar thing happen with my Acer WHS to the point where I bought an HP MediaSmart EX490 and have rarely used the Acer since as I didn't trust it. Turned out to be a few music file that were damaged and had odd characters in their names. I deleted the share and rebooted and everything returned to normal. I was not using DE but had a complete backup of the Acer. I replaced most of the music files and it went back to normal, except that I now have 2 WHS's (and have been getting rid of NAS's whereas I thought I had decided to do the opposite). Glad it turned out that way.

Did you check the files?

philip


Strange. Sounds a lot like what was happening with my setup. Knock on wood...things seem to be working right now. I found three music files with conflicts within a larger folder. I deleted the whole folder. I also noticed that all of my shares had a file in them called "desktop.ini". All but the Music share had this file in it but the Music share was the one marked as failing. Now none of my shares have this "desktop.ini" file in them. Weird. Three attempts at recovery failed so I gave up on that and deleted these problematic files and about 5 restarts later things seem more stable.
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post #875 of 952
12/31/11 at 1:42pm
Hi,
I was trying to balance my storage on my EX490 and was trying to add an external USB Drive. So, I tried to copy all the data that was there on my external drive onto other drives and partly onto the home server. My home server was almost full with only about 45 GB to spare. I then added the external drive (2.73 TB) to the pool. I was expecting that the free space left after adding that would be 2.73 TB or a little more. Surprisingly after adding it, I see that the free space is now 2 TB. Did I do something wrong or is there something different about adding a USB drive that does not give all the space. When I look at the Server storage, the one thing that seems to have changed suddenly is the System space that is now showing as 773 GB. I know it was much less before I added this drive. Not sure if this is just a display issue. When I go into System Status on the main tab on the WHS console, system space shows up as 20 GB, but free space is still only 2.05 TB. Has anyone else run into this problem. Any suggestions on what I need to check or change in order to get my storage space back.
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post #876 of 952
12/31/11 at 1:44pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by npradeepkumar View Post

Hi,
I was trying to balance my storage on my EX490 and was trying to add an external USB Drive. So, I tried to copy all the data that was there on my external drive onto other drives and partly onto the home server. My home server was almost full with only about 45 GB to spare. I then added the external drive (2.73 TB) to the pool. I was expecting that the free space left after adding that would be 2.73 TB or a little more. Surprisingly after adding it, I see that the free space is now 2 TB. Did I do something wrong or is there something different about adding a USB drive that does not give all the space. When I look at the Server storage, the one thing that seems to have changed suddenly is the System space that is now showing as 773 GB. I know it was much less before I added this drive. Not sure if this is just a display issue. When I go into System Status on the main tab on the WHS console, system space shows up as 20 GB, but free space is still only 2.05 TB. Has anyone else run into this problem. Any suggestions on what I need to check or change in order to get my storage space back.

It will only see around 2TB per drive max.(or is 2.2TB?)
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post #877 of 952
12/31/11 at 3:34pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by npradeepkumar View Post

Hi,
I was trying to balance my storage on my EX490 and was trying to add an external USB Drive. So, I tried to copy all the data that was there on my external drive onto other drives and partly onto the home server. My home server was almost full with only about 45 GB to spare. I then added the external drive (2.73 TB) to the pool. I was expecting that the free space left after adding that would be 2.73 TB or a little more. Surprisingly after adding it, I see that the free space is now 2 TB. Did I do something wrong or is there something different about adding a USB drive that does not give all the space. When I look at the Server storage, the one thing that seems to have changed suddenly is the System space that is now showing as 773 GB. I know it was much less before I added this drive. Not sure if this is just a display issue. When I go into System Status on the main tab on the WHS console, system space shows up as 20 GB, but free space is still only 2.05 TB. Has anyone else run into this problem. Any suggestions on what I need to check or change in order to get my storage space back.

The EX490 (WHS v1) can only 'see' HDDs up to 2 TBs in size ("Non"-Advanced Formatted HDDs) - I suspect your (2.73 Tb HDD) is a (3TB) AF HDD - and I'm kind of surprised it was even recognized at all

Personally, I stear clear of AF HDDs used with my EX490 and stay with the 512 byte sector sized regular HDDs which top out at 2TBs in size
-------------------------------------------------------------

Actually aaronwt, per your quote... ("It will only see around 2TB per drive max.(or is 2.2TB?) ) - I believe Windows measures a 2TB HDD as 1.83TBs, or close to that # - iirc?
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post #878 of 952
12/31/11 at 8:31pm
Thanks for the information. Earlier I had incorrectly stated that my WHS is an EX 490. It is actually EX 495. Not sure if that makes any difference. The Hard Disk that I am trying to add is a WD My Book 1140 (USB 3.0) drive. When I look at server storage, it shows the capacity of the hard drive correctly. The total size of my storage pool is also calculated correctly including the 2.73 (it is a 3 TB external drive) external drive. It is just when it comes to calculating the used space (where the System space seems to be more than what it should be) and hence, when showing the free space, it is reducing it.

Is there an easy way to find out if this is an advanced format drive? If so, can I change it or reformat it so that it can be considered a normal format drive. I thought that the WHS formats it anyway when adding the drive to the pool.

Some more information that I should give here is that this drive was formatted as FAT32 and not NTFS before I added it to the pool. Not sure if that makes any difference at all.

One other question would be, does anyone else have 3 TB drives in their storage pool. If yes, have you seen anything like this.
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post #879 of 952
3/3/12 at 11:49am
Thread Starter 
I'm selling my Sans Digital Enclosures I used with my HP MediaSmart Server. See Classifieds for info..

Open to offers
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post #880 of 952
3/4/12 at 7:01pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by Chrisx510 View Post

I'm selling my Sans Digital Enclosures I used with my HP MediaSmart Server. See Classifieds for info..

Open to offers

Selling any of your hard drive lol...i'm running out of space.
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post #881 of 952
3/4/12 at 8:15pm
Thread Starter 
Quote:
Originally Posted by GusGus748s View Post

Selling any of your hard drive lol...i'm running out of space.

I'll be selling off 4 1.5TB drives on eBay. Might have 1 2TB for sale also.
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post #882 of 952
3/4/12 at 8:25pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by Chrisx510 View Post

I'll be selling off 4 1.5TB drives on eBay. Might have 1 2TB for sale also.

Send me a PM with prices
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post #883 of 952
3/4/12 at 8:35pm
Thread Starter 
Quote:
Originally Posted by GusGus748s View Post

Send me a PM with prices

I'll probably just take best offers.
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post #884 of 952
4/15/12 at 7:10pm
It's been in service for over two years without a hitch, but suddenly is not, well, "serving" anything.

First symptom-on booting my office PC this morning I got a "could not connect all network drives" error message. My Computer then shows all the 490 folders offline. Couldn't start Console as the tray icon was not the usual "network healthy" green but was greyed out. Couldn't RDP in either, of course.

Cold booted the box, and the green "healthy" icon came back on all PCs, but drives still don't map, console won't start, still can't RPD either.

Router reports the 490 sucessfully got its usual fixed IP address after the boot. Router shows typical activity light flashing on the port the 490 is connected to. All 3 lights on front of 490 are solid green. Last time I looked at SMART info in console (few days back) both disks showed "failure not predicted" (but the one with the OS partition has had 4 bad/reallocated sectors for many months, no recent increases.)

What should I try next??

Thanks for any advice.

Mike
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post #885 of 952
4/16/12 at 4:08am
It sounds like a 'Server Recovery' may be in order using the Recovery disc that came with your EX490 - hopefully the issue doesn't require a factory 'Reset' which refreshes your 490 back to day one when you 1st got it

I would 1st contact HP's MediaSmart/MediaVault tech support dept - they are 'the best' tech support dept I've ever spoken to - they supplied a Recovery disc for me (Free of charge) after I told them I misplaced my original -- if you call them, use the word "MediaVault" when telling the automated phone lady what type of tech support you need (she has trouble understanding the word "MediaSmart" )
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post #886 of 952
4/16/12 at 6:23pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by gmd024 View Post

It sounds like a 'Server Recovery' may be in order....

Thanks for pointing me in the right direction! It took me all day, from just after breakfast until now, about 12 hours, to "recover" my EX490, and while it was not fun, I learned a lot.

Bottom line is I think disc 0 is getting flaky. SMART now reports 21 bad sectors, 319 pending bad sectors, and 21 reallocation events, all of which are dramatically higher than my last look last week. It still says "failure predicted = false", but it probably only takes one really unlucky sector loss to flummox the OS. Anyway, I'll be shopping for new drive(s) tomorow. Wanted to go to 2GB size anyway, so this is a good excuse.

I will also say a little prayer of thanks to the MSS Forums on mediasmartserver.net. After some digging I found several good posts on the pitfalls and stratagies for recovery. I count myself lucky as it only took 4 passes to get "success". That was about 5 PM this afternoon, and I thought I was out of the woods, but I still had a good hour of updates, another of Connector re-installation, setting users up, and updates (!). Updates took over an hour alone... thought I was hosed because it "hung" at 67% completed for the longest time.

Anyway, I did a recovery, not a reset, so all the data is intact.

I guess I get to go through this minefield again once I have a new disc for slot 0?

Thanks again for moral support and good advice.

Mike
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post #887 of 952
4/17/12 at 5:30am
Quote:
Originally Posted by Satori84 View Post

Thanks for pointing me in the right direction! It took me all day, from just after breakfast until now, about 12 hours, to "recover" my EX490, and while it was not fun, I learned a lot.

Bottom line is I think disc 0 is getting flaky. SMART now reports 21 bad sectors, 319 pending bad sectors, and 21 reallocation events, all of which are dramatically higher than my last look last week. It still says "failure predicted = false", but it probably only takes one really unlucky sector loss to flummox the OS. Anyway, I'll be shopping for new drive(s) tomorow. Wanted to go to 2GB size anyway, so this is a good excuse.

I will also say a little prayer of thanks to the MSS Forums on mediasmartserver.net. After some digging I found several good posts on the pitfalls and stratagies for recovery. I count myself lucky as it only took 4 passes to get "success". That was about 5 PM this afternoon, and I thought I was out of the woods, but I still had a good hour of updates, another of Connector re-installation, setting users up, and updates (!). Updates took over an hour alone... thought I was hosed because it "hung" at 67% completed for the longest time.

Anyway, I did a recovery, not a reset, so all the data is intact.

I guess I get to go through this minefield again once I have a new disc for slot 0?

Thanks again for moral support and good advice.

Mike

Glad to hear you're WHS is 'back'

Yeah, saying that recoveries are 'no fun' is definitely an understatement

Hopefully you have 'duplication' set on your WHS - it will make the HDD replacement a little less painless

And good luck on your 2Tb HDD search for 2 reasons - 1 - the floods in Thailand are still keeping the price of HDDs quite high - and 2 - Personally I stay away from 'Advance Formatted' HDDs but it's getting increasingly harder to find HDDs that are not AF drives

The last few 2Tb drives I found were Hitachi drives - some will say the reviews are not that great for these drives - but I've purchased 11 of them (currently 7 are being used in my WHS's pool and running fine)
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post #888 of 952
4/17/12 at 5:50am
I've had zero issues with my 2TB Seagate AF drives with my WHS. I've been using around eighteen now for over a year with my WHS.
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post #889 of 952
4/17/12 at 6:40am
Quote:
Originally Posted by aaronwt View Post

I've had zero issues with my 2TB Seagate AF drives with my WHS. I've been using around eighteen now for over a year with my WHS.

I realize others do use AF drives and haven't seen any problems -- that's why I said "Personally" I stay away from them

Did you tweak the AF drives before using them in your v1 WHS - (ie... jumper or an alignment tool)
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post #890 of 952
4/17/12 at 9:07am
I know as soon as I post this, something will happen, but I've got somewhere around 18 or so Hitachi's (2tb and 3tb) in my WHS2011 box, and they have been rock solid compared to the WD's I was using (knocking wood hard right now). I swear by them now, and it would be very difficult for me buy a different brand. In fact, as I've been upgrading to 3tb drives, my old WD's have been going to my buddy for his WHS v1 setup - which unfortunately crashed the other day with similar issues to the poster above - EXCEPT his attempts at a recovery have been unsuccessful to date.
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post #891 of 952
4/17/12 at 10:05am
Quote:
Originally Posted by gmd024 View Post

I realize others do use AF drives and haven't seen any problems -- that's why I said "Personally" I stay away from them

Did you tweak the AF drives before using them in your v1 WHS - (ie... jumper or an alignment tool)

With the Seagate drive you don't need to mess with any of that. That was one of the reasons I bought them after reading about it.

I had previously used WD 2TB drives before the AF ones, but with the issues the AF drives seemed to cause people I decided to switch to another brand.
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post #892 of 952
4/17/12 at 12:26pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by aaronwt View Post

With the Seagate drive you don't need to mess with any of that. That was one of the reasons I bought them after reading about it.

I had previously used WD 2TB drives before the AF ones, but with the issues the AF drives seemed to cause people I decided to switch to another brand.

I was using the WD EADS drives until one started to show errors in SMART and WD replaced it - but I purchased a Hitachi drive to replaced the WD while waiting for WD to replace it and noticed it was running quite a bit cooler than the other WD drives - and I started purchasing Hitachi's as I needed more pool storage

I actually did buy a couple Seagates sometime ago because nowhere in the description could I see that they were AF drives until I received them - the "very fine print" mentioned they were AF drives and I returned them

I'm sure at some point in time the Hitachi non-AF drives will not be available, since the entire industry seems to be headed the AF route - maybe at that time I'll give the Seagates a try
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post #893 of 952
4/17/12 at 1:16pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by aaronwt View Post


With the Seagate drive you don't need to mess with any of that. That was one of the reasons I bought them after reading about it.

I had previously used WD 2TB drives before the AF ones, but with the issues the AF drives seemed to cause people I decided to switch to another brand.

Does Seagate support whs1? I had one of their drives and replaced it with a Samsung. I moved it to a Drobo and it works great.

What happens if you upgrade to WHS 2011? Can you then use AF drives or is this a bios thing.

Philip
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post #894 of 952
4/17/12 at 1:40pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by pmcd View Post


Does Seagate support whs1? I had one of their drives and replaced it with a Samsung. I moved it to a Drobo and it works great.

What happens if you upgrade to WHS 2011? Can you then use AF drives or is this a bios thing.

Philip

I'm using my Seagates with a WHS v1.
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post #895 of 952
4/17/12 at 1:40pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by pmcd View Post

Does Seagate support whs1? I had one of their drives and replaced it with a Samsung. I moved it to a Drobo and it works great.

What happens if you upgrade to WHS 2011? Can you then use AF drives or is this a bios thing.

Philip

Sorry to but in on aaronwt, but yes, he does use a v1 WHS -- and it's my understanding that WHS 2011 does support AF HDDs
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post #896 of 952
4/17/12 at 1:54pm
yes, WHS2011 supports AF drives natively assuming your hardware supports it. The only drive level quirk I've found (and perhaps I'm doing something wrong) is with my >2tb drives, I have to format them in my Win7 machine first to make sure I get a GPT partition to use the full 3tb - for some reason when I try to format in my WHS2011 box, it only gives me MBR as an option.
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post #897 of 952
4/19/12 at 9:28am
Quote:
Originally Posted by gmd024 View Post

Glad to hear you're WHS is 'back'...

Hopefully you have 'duplication' set on your WHS...

And good luck on your 2Tb HDD search...

It was good while it lasted, but this AM the EX490 was unresponsive again. Mapped drives were unavailable, MSS Icon greyed out, etc, so could not even start Console.

After a hard reboot, it woke up, sort of, enough to let me RDP in and then start Console and task manager from inside the RDP link. SMART now reports 25 bad sectors/reallocations and 448 pending bad sectors on disc 0. Still no mapped drives or nomal access.

While I watched, first task manager then console halted, so now the RDP session is frozen. Think I'll just unplug the box and let it sit until a new drive is in hand. May have to make a trip today to the big blue and yellow box store to get an emergency replacement.

I am no HD expert but my guess is that sectors are failing faster than the OS can fix them by reallocation, and enough of them are in the OS partition that it is not able to reliably start or run all needed services. Funny thing is, SMART still says drive failure is not predicted!

Out of curiosity, why isn't the system partition also duplicated in a std WHS install? Or even better, why doesn't the OS reside in its own SS HDD or on-board RAM, and not co-habitate with the data files?

Yes, all file folders in use had duplication set, so I know the data is safe, just can't get to it for now. Annoying because all the house music, video, photos, and documents are there. Copies exist elsewhere but not all in one place, so it's awkward.

Thanks for the advice on non-AF drives. For today I may have to take what they have in stock at ..... but I will search online for a pair of 2TB drives.

Questions: if I remove disc 1 from the 490 case, is it a std NTFS format so I could temporarily install it in the office desktop? If I do that without first properly removing it from the pool, will there be any consequences? (don't know if the 490 will be responsive enough to let me do that in Console). And if I later reinstall the former disk 1 back in the 490 case once the OS is stable again, will it think it's new and format it? I'd like to avoid having to rebuild the data from the original sources, and if disc 0 is replaced, the only full copy would be on disc 1 (it's only populated with two 1 TB drives now.)

Maybe I'm better off just leaving disc 1 where it is, and let WHS do the rebuild in the background once disc 0 is replaced and the OS restored?

Thanks,

Mike
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post #898 of 952
4/19/12 at 10:08am
Quote:
Originally Posted by Satori84 View Post

It was good while it lasted, but this AM the EX490 was unresponsive again. Mapped drives were unavailable, MSS Icon greyed out, etc, so could not even start Console.

After a hard reboot, it woke up, sort of, enough to let me RDP in and then start Console and task manager from inside the RDP link. SMART now reports 25 bad sectors/reallocations and 448 pending bad sectors on disc 0. Still no mapped drives or nomal access.

While I watched, first task manager then console halted, so now the RDP session is frozen. Think I'll just unplug the box and let it sit until a new drive is in hand. May have to make a trip today to the big blue and yellow box store to get an emergency replacement.

I am no HD expert but my guess is that sectors are failing faster than the OS can fix them by reallocation, and enough of them are in the OS partition that it is not able to reliably start or run all needed services. Funny thing is, SMART still says drive failure is not predicted!

Out of curiosity, why isn't the system partition also duplicated in a std WHS install? Or even better, why doesn't the OS reside in its own SS HDD or on-board RAM, and not co-habitate with the data files?

Yes, all file folders in use had duplication set, so I know the data is safe, just can't get to it for now. Annoying because all the house music, video, photos, and documents are there. Copies exist elsewhere but not all in one place, so it's awkward.

Thanks for the advice on non-AF drives. For today I may have to take what they have in stock at ..... but I will search online for a pair of 2TB drives.

Questions: if I remove disc 1 from the 490 case, is it a std NTFS format so I could temporarily install it in the office desktop? If I do that without first properly removing it from the pool, will there be any consequences? (don't know if the 490 will be responsive enough to let me do that in Console). And if I later reinstall the former disk 1 back in the 490 case once the OS is stable again, will it think it's new and format it? I'd like to avoid having to rebuild the data from the original sources, and if disc 0 is replaced, the only full copy would be on disc 1 (it's only populated with two 1 TB drives now.)

Maybe I'm better off just leaving disc 1 where it is, and let WHS do the rebuild in the background once disc 0 is replaced and the OS restored?

Thanks,

Mike

I believe I would do what you mentioned in your last sentence above

I've heard that others don't rely to much on the SMART reports in MSS's and pay more attention to the basic 'healthy/not healthy status in the Server Storage tab, in the Console

But no matter what SMART or Server Storage says, I believe I'd be doing what you're pursuing (replacing disc 0)

One other thing I would consider is to contact HP's MSS tech support - the few times I've contacted them, I didn't have to wait on hold much at all, and most of the techs I spoke with were 'very' knowledgeable and their recommendations were just what was needed most of the time

There are some that might recommend that you try to find/repair the problems in your disc 0 by connecting it to a Windows computer and using Chkdsk - I believe HP's tech support might also recommend Seagate's 'SeaTools for Windows'
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post #899 of 952
4/19/12 at 1:54pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by mike1812 View Post

yes, WHS2011 supports AF drives natively assuming your hardware supports it. The only drive level quirk I've found (and perhaps I'm doing something wrong) is with my >2tb drives, I have to format them in my Win7 machine first to make sure I get a GPT partition to use the full 3tb - for some reason when I try to format in my WHS2011 box, it only gives me MBR as an option.

Does the HP MediaSmart EX490 support AF drives in hardware?

Philip
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post #900 of 952
4/19/12 at 3:08pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by pmcd View Post

Does the HP MediaSmart EX490 support AF drives in hardware?

Philip

I don't know. I have an older 470. Your best bet is to ask HP through a tech support call. If I had to guess, I would say no - I think the 490 came out before AF drives did, but that's all it is - a pure guess - and an uneducated one at that!
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