I pushed too much data on to the Windows Home Server (WHS) and I started to get health warnings indicating which files it could no longer duplicate. My data was stored OK, just at risk. Given that the WHS experience was going well I ordered up a Lacie 500GB external USB 2 drive. To tide me over, I plugged in a little 100GB host powered USB drive and added it to the pool. Slowly the data balanced out across the three drives with enough space for all content to be duplicated. I then continued to copy more data on to the server. Transfer rates were abysmal! 500k/s. Oh dear. All my content finally copied over and eventually my critical health warning went away as it finally migrated enough data off the smallest system drive.
The Lacie 500GB drive arrives and I plug it in. A couple of clicks later it is added to the storage pool. It starts to balance the content whilst I right click the little 100GB host powered drive and remove it from the storage pool. WHS can see that there is enough storage and drives to successfully duplicate content across the remaining drives and so it starts to migrate content off... how slow?! it can only have about 30GB on it. Max! Anyway, time for bed.
By the next morning all the content has migrated off the drive. I go to the WHS to remove the drive... Ah... I'd forgotten that this old machine still had USB 1.0 ports. In the darkness under the desk it would appear that I had rediscovered them when I had plugged in the 100GB drive! Copying files and balancing storage with the 500GB drive plugged into USB 2.0 is now going up to 8MB/s (given I have a 10/100 switch in the way it won't get much higher than that). When MS say they don't recommend USB 1.0 they weren't kidding. Copying large AVCHD files onto the WHS is nice and fast and I can happily watch the HiDef videos directly off the WHS.
Applied WHS Power Pack 1 last night. All straight forward. Go get it here: http://download.microsoft.com/download/8/b/d/8bd7fe82-34cc-4026-b8e5-e9e10902312c/WHS-KB944289-v1-x86-ENU.exe
and read about it here: http://blogs.technet.com/homeserver/archive/2008/07/21/power-pack-1-come-and-get-it.aspx