Now the first thing you’re probably thinking is “SSD in a storage server? Is this guy out of his mind?”

The answer is “Probably.”

I’ve lost 3 boot drives in my Windows Home Server since I started using it, and while it’s quite painless to replace a dead drive in WHS if it’s NOT the boot drive, the procedure when it’s your OS drive is LONG and ANNOYING. Since SSDs are supposed to be so “reliable” and Corsair claims their S128 SSD has a MTBF of 100 years or something, I thought “Why not give it a shot”.

I also added a much better HDD mounting caddy to my WHS because the one in this rubbish case vibrates like crazy. It also couldn’t have been helping that I had no fan blowing over the drives. It should be an overall large improvement to my WHS assuming the SSD doesn’t cack out.

Well my WHS has finally been put to the test. I sat down to my computer to see this error message pop up

Intrigued, I opened up my WHS Connector Software to discover that the status for one of my Seagate 7200.10 500GB drives was “missing”.

I think that this whole experience could have been made more intuitive for the non-tech-heads that Microsoft is apparently targeting with this product, but without too much trouble I was able to get through the removal wizard.

The process took about 1.5 hours. In that time it was rebalancing the data that was replicated on the 500GB drive I removed and splitting it between the 320GB OS drive and the other 500GB drive that remained in the home server.

There wasn’t enough space for the server to duplicate all of the data on only two drives, so this error came up prompting me to add another hard drive. That was relatively simple, and shortly after I added the new drive, this error message went away.

All in all I’m very pleased. I lost some episodes of Numb3rs and a few old Disney movies that I had saved, but not replicated. Congrats to the Windows Home Server team for making this 500GB hard drive failure as simple as an RMA with no loss of important data!

Well I was having a heck of a time getting either the automatic port forwarding working in Windows Home Server for my web access to my files, and weirdly enough I couldn’t get it working externally even by manually forwarding all the appropriate ports to the home server through my DIR-655 router.

Turns out the problem was caused by having two routers connected on the same network. It was making it impossible for the Home Server to automatically configure the network, and somehow seemed to be breaking it even when I manually forwarded the ports. By unplugging the wireless G router, setting the Home Server to auto-config, then plugging the wireless G router back in, I was able to get my remote access working again. Horay!