Issues with Windows Home Server (WHS)...

I've been quite satisfied with WHS until recently. I recently had issues with very slow transfer rates, streaming media skipping, and frequent error reporting popups (which shed no light on the subject).

I guess at this point, not looking for pointers as much as sharing what I've done in case anyone else has similar issues. I have so far installed an Intel NIC to replace the onboard NIC. I have changed ethernet cables to all machines and between switches and routers (thank goodness for monoprice, cost me all of about $25).

DEmigrator.exe was also showing spikes in CPU useage for extended periods as was DW20.exe. DEmigrator basically makes sure all drives are duplicated properly, and shouldn't run very long on a regular basis. DW20.exe is the Dr Watson error reporting. I disabled that and put DEmigrator.exe on a scheduled run when I wouldn't be streaming media.

I still ended up with same issues. WHS showed all drives as healthy. I then ran CrystalDisk Info and it showed SMART errors with one of the drives. I did a checkdisk and that drive showed errors, and ran for nearly 48 hours and was still churning in chkdsk while the others finished in a few hours. So I exited. I then found that the drive would max throughput at ~1.5MB/s. I mean that's USB 1.0 speeds. Horrible. So right now I'm "removing" the problem drive from the pool (a WD Caviar Green 2TB) and RMA'ing it. Hopefully the removal of the drive will be complete by the time the new drive gets here. Probably a few days.... sigh.

 

Have you installed any Windows Updates recently?

 

WHS has all updates on automatic, it basically needs to be that way. The system is pretty much hands off. Looks like it's a bad hard drive anyhow. We will see.

 

hm.. guess i have to checkdisk mine, too. i have similar symtoms with sometimes abysmal networking performance (in the kilobyte range). in other cases, i can watch several fullhd movies in parallel.. might be a disk.

 

Run crystaldisk info. That's what flagged my drive, basically checking the SMART attributes, which is why I wonder why WHS didn't pick up on it. My chkdsk took FOREVER to run through the faulty drive, I had to stop it since it was clearly bad, just want to get data off it now. But it's been almost 24 hours since I started to remove the disk and has only processed about 8% of the data from a 33% full disk. So only 3 more days to go, lol.

If interested try this chkdisk that will check all drives appropriately:

Check All Drives In Your Server For Errors - We Got Served Wiki

 

just shutdown the server, plug the disk out, and start again. much quicker to get it out and get the system to know it's out. except if you didn't have duplication on everything and don't want to lose anything, of course.

i checked crystaldisk, they're all good, no errors.

 

Well, I didn't have duplication on a couple folders, because, well I can recreate them if needed. Just don't want to. I think mainly my Games folder with tons of patches and Steam games backed up. Just hate to hunt all that down again in the future, although I probably have 80% of it on my desktop PC anyhow. I'm not doing anything critical at the moment that needs to be backed up daily, and can stream media from my desktop. Just a pain to switch things around for a few days.

 

Gah! It just failed removal. I just checked and I did have folder duplication on all folders. I guess I added that at some point. Good. Although if its been faulty all along then I hope it does have proper duplicates. Time to just yank the drive I guess.

Regarding your slowdowns, etc, also check the CPU useage for DEmigrator.exe. It seems to be a known issue causing some headaches for people

 

it's not demigrator, i know DE very well (i have written a tool to disable it and other services that can kill bluray playback, and enable it again afterwards).

it's some weird setting. there's NOTHING even close to 10% usage. cpu. ram. network. disks. not on the client, not on the server. something's wrong here, buddy...

well, i'll find out. at least it's no dying disk. good luck with yours.

 

Can you share that tool? Does it have to be run on the server itself? I found a couple command line tools that will do that, as well as add it to a schedule. But I would prefer it to be run remotely from my laptop so I don't have to remote into the server. Just rather double click a desktop icon and have it disable. Better yet, have it disable it for a set time and then reactivate it again, like say, after four hours. That way if I forget to turn it back on...

 

it's not in a shareable state right now but i think about it. it's a webapp btw. you could even disable right now if you knew the link

 

See, now that's what I'm looking for. A simple web interface would be perfect.