WHS 2011 / Server essential 2012 woes

3/21/12 update: If there is an OP that can change the title of this thread that would be great. I have found my issue and it is the Seagate ST3000DM001 drives so the title should read "ST3000DM001 Problems"

see my post on 3/21 for what I have found so far.




Ok I have a really really confusing problem going on......

I recently decided to get rid of my power hog dell 690 server, replace it with something low powered, and increase the storage. It's main purpose is to house movies (mixture of MKV blu-rays and DVD).

Having a tech-net subscription I downloaded WHS 2011 and Sever 2012 essentials to play around with, and brought it all in to work to experiment with.

I started out on a biostar G41ds3 board with a celeron 3.33GHz CPU and 4GB of memory (should have been 8 but it wont see it.... sigh oh well) and for storage was going to use this 5 bay eSATA dock I had, with 5 3TB Seagate drives. For the eSATA controller I had two laying around that were SIL3132 controllers.

I start out with server 2012 Essentials (henceforth known as SE12) install it to a WD green 1TB drive since it was the only drive I had handy, install all updates, install drivers for eSATA card, play around with different configurations for storage and just said Meh, I'll just to all separate drives no biggie.

I then pull one of my 2TB drives from my old server to start copying over using a single eSATA dock. This drive has all blu-ray rips in MKV so 12-24GB approx file size for each movie.

Files start copying....it's friday and time to leave so I say the heck with it and go home. I come in Monday and out of 1.8TB to be copied.... it is at 69% and going from 3MB/s to 0 to 1.5MB/s to 0, looking at the beginning of the chart you can see it starts out strong then craps out. I thought to myself...ok.... maybe there are issues on the 2TB drive so I scan it, try it again and same thing... transfer starts out strong 100-120MB/s after a minute it goes to crap and bottoms out and stays there.

My next train of thought...maybe there is a serious issue on the 2TB drive, so I try another one...same issue.

I then think ok maybe it is the 3TB drive I am copying to...same issue

I then think ok maybe I am saturating the eSATA card so I hoook the 2TB internally and copy off on board sata to esata..same result.

I then think ok maybe there is an issue with the esata card so I swap it out with a rocketraid 622...same issue

I then think ok maybe this is a PCIe issue let's copy from drive to drive onboard, same issue

ok maybe chipset drivers need to be updated, bios updated, different memory, same issue.

I then assume this is a SE12 issue and proceed to install WHS 2011 on a 250GB drive instead....all the same issues as above.

Ok at this point I say screw it I take a little dell system I have here that has a different chipset and a core 2 quad 2.4GHz CPU 4GB mem and get SE12 going in it from my original install, I reupdate all drivers and try everything again...same freaking issue?????


I have tried every combo of copyign from point a to point b and it always starts strong for a bit 120MB/s then bottoms out to 0MB/s and stays there. I did have one instance where it teased me and peaked back up and then bottomed out again..then up and down constantly from 0-3MB/s usually hanging out at 0.

Has anyone else run in to this issue?? I mean for both WHS 2011 and SE12 to do this to me is blowing my mind, even on different hardware??

CPU use seems to be very low so it isn't like it is pegging out and preventing it from working..... The only common thing is 4GB of mem between systems...but I wouldn't think that would cause issues.

I'm getting ready to wipe the system out again and try it all over using the core 2 quad just to make sure nothing weird carried over.
Edited by nintari - 3/21/13 at 7:01am

thats whats bugging me, I have it runnign on a celeron system at my fiancees house for quite some time (2011) and my house on this dell 690 dual xeon lol

I'd just hook the 3TB drives ot the 690 system and copy things over that way but if there is an issue to start with don't want to gimp myself right out of the gate.

I tried looking at resource monitor and doing xcopy still same issues.... So I am proceeding with rebuild... found an SSD laying around to test with

for the most part my home is a long term testing environment part of the reason for looking in to SE12 was to have a domain PC setup in my home to test with clients and active directory / dns, group policy etc etc so I can get the hang of it for work later on. Then I don't have to run seperate machines for domain controller testing and etc, all I would need is a domain client machine to test with. It's just an added benefit I can use it for a storage server in the mean time.

Yeah but were not just talking about eSATA, my problems exist with the onboard SATA as well going from on board to on board.


I just put the SSD in and am updating and configuring the fresh install of server 2012, hopefully I'll have no issues!

Found my issue I believe... it is the drives

for this build I ordered 5 3TB Seagate drives model number ST3000DM001 part number 1CH166-301

what I am finding is this:

If I start a copy to these drives fresh unused they work fine. Once I go to copy all the media from my 2TB drive to these drives it works fine, but after time, I assume from long writes, the drives degrade in performance and start to show the signs mentioned above.

So the first time I did this I just formatted the drive on a friday, started copying all the media from my 2TB drive to the 3TB, left it for the weekend only to come back in and find it has failed, as in it stays down at 0MB/s transfer for a few seconds, peaks up to 12MB/s for a few seconds then back down to 0MB/s for a few seconds, then peaks back up to 3.5MB/s for a few seconds and falls back down again over and over.

so going through I found two of the three drives were doing this but three werent....so I thought ok.... maybe these two are just bad drives.

So starting with a fresh unused 3TB drive last night I started another transfer form my 2TB drive and let it churn overnight, the transfer for the first several hours was strong staying around 135MB/s and dipping down once in a while to 74MB/s, I leave work. When I come in today the transfer is done! Great I think to myself, I grab another 2TB drive stick it in and go to copy over another 840GB to fill the 3TB drive up, starts out strong and then SMACK!! Down to 0MB/s, 3MB/s, 0MB/s, 12.5MB/s and has been doing this for the past hour.

So apparently these drives seem to crap out after being written to for a long time period.....

I bought these 46 days ago from our rep at tiger direct....I'm goign to try and contact him first as I would rather swap them out for WD Green drives if possible and stay away from seagate. I hope he can help as I DO NOT want to RMA these and run in to the same issues and to top it off have refurb drives already within the first 60 days!!

running the SeaTools for windows utility each drive is coming up as failed when running the Short DST test. One code given was 6C9AC2A4

bryansj do you have the PN 1CH166-301 or the 9YN166 part number that has a firmware update tool and utility available? The part number I have does not have any update firmware is CC24

I was able to make them all fail by leaving them copy large amounts of data (after a long time the transfer rate drops down to 0 and hangs low), form there if I run SeaTools it gives a failure code. If I turn everything off for a long time and then back on, run SeaTools, no fail code, but I can then start to copy just one MKV after a minute it goes in to fail mode where transfer bottoms out, then Run SeaTools and fail code shows up.

I already worked out with my rep to replace them with WD Greens