I have a 300GB IDE/PATA (40 pin parallel ATA) drive laying around that I'd like to use in my Windows Home Server (WHS). The problem is that I have an HP EX470 which only supports SATA (serial) drives.
You can, however, purchase an external enclosure that supports PATA drives and has a USB interface. I'll show you the steps on how to add an External USB Hard Drive to WHS and not break the bank! The whole process should take no longer than 10-15 minutes and is very easy to perform.
- Purchase an external enclosure. I used this USB enclosure that I bought from Newegg for $23.99, buy most any should work.
- Open the enclosure.
- Jumper the drive to "cable select".
- Connect the power and ATA cables to the drive.
- Mount the drive, usually by using the included screws.
- Close the case.
- Plug in the transformer.
- Attach the USB cable from the enclosure to any of the open USB ports on the WHS. This is probably common sense to most, but you do NOT need to shut down the computer first.
- Open the Windows Home Server console and click on the Server Storage tab. You should see the newly attached drive appear with a status of "Not Added".
- Highlight the drive and click "Add".
- When the "Add a Hard Drive" wizard appears click the Next button.
- You will get a warning stating that the drive will be formatted. Click Finish to format the hard drive.
- It only takes a few minutes (or less) to prepare and add the new hard drive to the server storage.
- When it's added, you will see this confirmation screen.
- And the status should change to "Healthy".
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4 comments:
Does adding a USB drive in this way impact performance, or is WHS smart enough to only use it for backups and/or mirroring?
I have two 500GB AcomData USB drives that I originally bought for rotating backups on my main machine and was considering attaching these to WHS. But I don't want these logically mixed in with the internal drives, since they'll probably max out at 20-30MB/sec vs. twice that for the internal drives.
It would be nice if the WHS would back itself up to these -- maybe that feature will be added by the next release.
Do you know what I should do when adding multiple external drives connected via ESATA and an Addonics External Port multiplier? The WHS is not seeing the new drives. Is there a bios setting that has to be enabled? if so where is it?
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