Expertise Level: Standard

Home Server Smart 2012 is a disk health reporting add-in for Windows Home Server 2011 and Windows Small Business Server 2011 Essentials. The add-in monitors your server’s hard disks at user-defined intervals for errors and issues, raising alerts and issuing email notifications when problems are detected.

Features:

• Continuous disk health monitoring by an always-on service.
  • Monitors health of attributes and will generate alerts when a failure condition (threshold is met or exceeded) is detected.
  • Monitors disk temperature and airflow temperature, and generates alerts when unacceptable temperatures are detected (airflow temperature is flagged in HSS 2012 only).
• Customizeable temperature thresholds for Warm, Hot, Overheated and Critical.
• Temperature display can be shown in Celsius (default), Fahrenheit and Kelvin.
• Proactive alerting when changes occur on certain “super critical” attributes such as bad sectors, spin retries and end-to-end errors, even if they have not actually “failed.”
• List of physical disks shows status icons for an “at-a-glance” view of disk health.
• Each attribute shows a colored icon in addition to a status message relative to its health.
• Double-click any SMART attribute to learn more about that attribute on the selected disk.
• Supports most IDE/PATA and SATA controllers that expose SMART data via standard Win32 IOCTL calls or WMI.
• Supports most USB and FireWire enclosures that expose SMART data via standard Win32 IOCTL calls.
• Allows you to clean up data from “stale” disks — disks you’ve removed from the server.
• Allows you to perform a manual polling of the disks for the latest data, rather than waiting for the service to poll them again
• Works with disk pooling software Drive Bender and StableBit DrivePool.
• Default setting not only ignores virtual disks, but hides them from the UI (since they have no SMART data anyway).
• BitLocker Drive Encryption integration – encrypt, decrypt and manage all of your volumes, whether or not those volumes have a drive letter – you can even enable the BitLocker server role from within the add-in!
• Allows you to encrypt drives that participate in drive pools.
• Allows you to hide disks that cannot be encrypted, decluttering the UI.
• Allows you to make use of an HSS helper service to unlock BitLocker-encrypted USB volumes at boot time when those disks participate in disk pools. This can help ensure the disks are ready for use when the pool is started.
• You could ignore individual problems on disks in HSS for WHS v1, but now you can un-ignore (resume) them, either on an individual basis or for all problems on all disks.
• You can now ignore entire disks (and resume them as well) – useful for hiding flash drives and media card readers, as well as disks that you know are showing incorrect information (rare, but it’s been reported).
• Improved the ability to stop, start and restart the HSS service.
• Shut down or reboot your server from within the add-in.
• Send alerts via email.
• Bug Report Helper – runs a small self-test to detect installation problems and provide details to help in troubleshooting.
• Don’t use, and don’t plan to use BitLocker? You can hide the BitLocker tab completely.

Developer: DojoNorth Software

Download: Home Server SMART 2012

Release History

v2.2.1.21 (21st January 2012)

• Beta release

Manchester’s Tranquil PC this week announced the release of a new diskless edition of their Leo HS4 Home Server. According to the company, the move is a response to the dramatic rise in hard drive pricing seen across the market as a result of this year’s flooding in Thailand.

That event has seen constraints in supply, leading to significant price hikes – a spokesman from one company I spoke with this week suggested that a number of companies were taking advantage of the disaster to inflate pricing unfairly. However, the new diskless Leo HS4 edition will allow you to use hard drives you already own, rather than be forced to buy new. Hard drive supplies are expected to recover by Q1 2012.

The Leo HS4 SE is now available from £495 ex VAT (£594 inc VAT).

More: Tranquil PC

Raxco Software today announced the immediate availability of the latest release of their Disk Defragmentation software, PerfectDisk 12.

As previously revealed here at WGS, the company have extended their support for Windows Home Server with separate releases for both WHS v1 and a 64-bit edition for Windows Home Server 2011 – both Home Server products are part of a vast array of platform releases, with versions including PerfectDisk 12 Home Premium, PerfectDisk 12 Home Server, PerfectDisk 12 Professional, PerfectDisk 12 Professional for Networks, PerfectDisk 12 Server, PerfectDisk12 Exchange, PerfectDisk 12 Hyper-V, PerfectDisk 12 vSphere, PerfectDisk 12 VMware Workstation, and PerfectDisk 12 Enterprise Console.

A variety of new and improved features ship with PD12, including:

• New OptiWrite™ technology prevents most fragmentation on your drive before it occurs by detecting when Windows is going to fragment files and intelligently redirects I/O so that most fragmentation does not occur. It is the only technology available today that can minimize free space fragmentation while preventing file fragmentation.
  
• Exclusive StealthPatrol™ tab is used to set automatic fragmentation prevention and optimize your system when it isn’t busy. Users can select the desired automation settings in one location and PerfectDisk 12 will run in the background to keep all drives optimized and running at peak performance.
• Improved SSD optimization that specifically focuses on free space consolidation without defragmentation of files to improve write performance.  SSD optimization is included free of charge in all editions of PerfectDisk 12.
• Enhanced capabilities to optimize virtualized environments through auto detection and configuration of PerfectDisk based on virtual hard drive type including thin provisioned drives, linked clones and non-persistent drives.
  
• New Short Stroke method improves optimization speed and support for thin provisioned drives.
• New Zero Fill Free Space capability to assist with migration from physical to virtual environments, shrinking virtual drives and the recovery of valuable disk space.
• Enhanced scheduling that provides the world’s most flexible scheduling options according to a user’s or businesses’ unique requirements.

PerfectDisk 12 Home Server is available from $39.99 for a single license ($19.99 upgrade), with a variety of client/server bundles also on offer. A free 30 day trial can also be downloaded from the company’s website.

Jim’s had the application on test this week, and will be sharing his thoughts with a full review. In the meantime, look out for a WGS competition later today in which we’ll be giving away FIVE copes of PerfectDisk 12 Home Server.

More: PerfectDisk 12 Home Server

Diskeeper 2011 provides real-time and scheduled defragmentation of your home server’s hard disks.

It can prevent most fragmentation before it happens, freeing up system resources and extending the productive lifetime of your server by years. For pre-existing fragmentation and for the small percentage of fragmentation that is not prevented, Diskeeper comes equipped with powerful defragmentation engines that will quickly and invisibly eliminate it.

As reported by MSWHS, Build 956 of Diskeeper 2011 Home Server has just been released. It’s a minor update with the following fixes:

• Fixed an incorrect warning in the Performance Report. If a volume is smaller than 2GB (e.g. a recovery partition), on which IntelliWrite may not be enabled, this is not flagged in the Performance Report as not optimal configuration.
• Added date, time, and product version to the saved and printed Job Reports.
• IntelliWrite, if you have licensed HyperFast, can now be enabled on SSD-backed volumes (note the default setting is “off”).

Download: Diskeeper 2011 Home Server

Diskeeper Corporation have announced the availability of their all-new disk defragmentation software, Diskeeper 2011 Home Server. According to the company, the software optimizes performance from streaming media and provides faster access to shared files and folders once drives have been defragmented. Diskeeper claim the product can extend the life of a home server by up to 3 years.

The latest edition of the application for Windows Home Server ships with a number of enhancements over last year’s release, including a new “just in time” instant defragmentation feature which is claimed to work within milliseconds of fragmentation occurring, improved automatic background processing, a new free space consolidation engine and more.

Diskeeper 2011 Home Server is shipping now for $59.95. A free 30 day trial edition is also available.

More: Diskeeper 2011 Home Server

Diskeeper Corporation have a new version of their disk defragmentation application for Windows Home Server waiting in the wings.

Predictably titled Diskeeper 2011 HomeServer, the application is designed to boost the speed and efficiency of file access to and from your home server and offers a number of updated features over its predecessor, including:

Efficiency

New technology and advanced algorithms maximize performance while eliminating disk I/O activity not conducive to improving your computing experience. Maximum performance from minimal effort!

Immediacy

With IntelliWrite continuing to prevent most fragmentation before it happens, the new Instant Defrag feature of Diskeeper now rapidly eliminates any fragmented data that does occur.

Scalability

With the immediate file-by-file approach to optimization, time and resource consuming whole-volume analysis and defragmentation operations are rarely, if ever, needed. This revolutionary new design scales to much larger volumes than traditional disk defragmentation technologies!

Defragmentation Options

Diskeeper now defaults to an “Efficient” defragmentation method to maximize efficiency and performance while minimizing disk I/O by intelligently determining which files, folders and free space should be defragmented. This setting can be changed to a more extensive defragmentation option from the Defragmentation Options tab in the Configuration Properties.

Savings

Diskeeper now tracks I/O’s saved on your system. Taking into account the I/O activity of Diskeeper as well, this cumulative net figure equates to less system processing overhead, disk head movement, and total power consumption resulting in reduced operating costs. Now it’s even easier to gauge the benefits of your new investment !

The new version supports Windows Home Server v1, and we’re waiting to hear back from Diskeeper on plans for Windows Home Server 2011 and Windows SBS 2011 Essentials. Pricing and release dates have not been shared at this point, but from the advance copy we received, the app looks ready to ship. We’ll keep you updated as we learn more.

Here’s a few screenshots of Diskeeper 2011 Home Server in action:

Experience Level: Medium

StableBit Scanner is an advanced hard drive scanning and monitoring tool for Windows Home Server v1, Windows Home Server 2011 and Windows Small Business Server 2011 Essentials. It monitors all hard drives in your home server looking for damage then analyses and retrieves files from the damaged sectors of the disk.

StableBit Scanner reads and monitors the on-disk Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology data in order to predict disk failure. StableBit Scanner tries very hard to get at the S.M.A.R.T. data, it asks the Operating System, it asks the disk directly by issuing commands to it, and it talks to USB bridge chips in order to get direct access to drives behind USB enclosures. If S.M.A.R.T. detects disk failure, you are notified immediately.

StableBit Scanner is designed not to interfere with any other disk access. If another application starts accessing the disk, or if you start copying a file over the network that is coming from the disk being scanned, StableBit Scanner will suspend the current scan operation and wait for the disk to become free.

Features:

• Hard Drive Monitoring
• File Aware Scanner
• Scan throttling
• Disk overheat protection
• Reading and analysis of SMART data
• Perpetual, scheduled and manual scanning available

Developer: Covecube Inc.

Download: Stablebit Scanner (WHS 2011) | Stablebit Scanner (WHS v1)

Release History

v2.0.0.1261 BETA

• Added per-disk settings. These settings are stored in the Scanner’s store and are associated with a particular disk. They are not stored on the disk itself.
• Give your disks a custom name.
• Disable SMART.
• Disable Direct I/O.
• Added option to “ignore” SMART warnings. Ignore is intelligent, where it will re-issue the warning if any of the problem attributes change. There is also the option to permanently ignore all SMART warnings on a per-disk basis. To access this feature, a new button will become available on the SMART dialog when you have SMART warnings issued for a disk.

v2.0.0.1020 Beta

• Added disk control dialog.
• Automatic acoustic management (AAM).
• Added SCT support.
• Current temperature.
• Life maximum / minimum.
• Manufacturer recommended maximum / minumum limit.
• Temperature sample history, as recorded by drive.
• User can change sample interval (this is on the drive itself).

v2.0.0.939 Beta

• Support for Windows Home Server 2011 and Windows Small Business Server 2011 Essentials
• Automatic updating uses the built-in WSS add-in update mechanism.
• Supports all the features from 1.0, except file recovery (coming soon).
• The WSS Dashboard interface was written from scratch using WPF.
• The entire back-end was ported from 1.0 to work on Windows Server 2008 R2.
• First public BETA.

v1.0.4.2590

• Added confing option for maximum number of trace lines to log on error report
• Fixed rare access violation in native code handler.
• Fixed insane bytes per sector value on one particular USB enclosure (based on auto error report).
• Fixed omni-store tree node delete.

v1.0.2.2542

• Fixed issue with sector map not re-drawing.
• Updated SMART attribute formats / warnings to bring it in sync with the latest BitFlock.com (Cloud).
• Fixed deadlock that could potentially lock up the service in some rare cases (and by proxy the console if user tries to interact with the service).

v1.0.1.2530

• On fresh install, cloud integration dialog should be shown right after licensing.
• Keep at most 20 error reports saved at all times.
• Only show UI error dialog if the error actually came from us.
• Prior to this, the StableBit Scanner would show the error dialog no matter which add-in crashed the console. This will reduce false positives.
• Errors from client-service synchronization will not crash the console. This had the potential of crashing the console while disk removal was in progress.
• WHS Missing disks will be reported as missing.

v1.0.0.2490

• Archive disks running low on space will no longer be reported as damaged. WHS APIs return “FAILING” in this case.

v1.0.0.2488

• Activation ID will update instantly.
• Trial extension will be offered for beta trial -> release trial.

Diskeeper Corporation are at CES this week talking about their plans for the forthcoming Diskeeeper 2011, which is due in the first quarter of this year.

Not a lot is known about the release, but the company are teasing a new feature called Instant Defrag, a new defragmentation engine that will “immediately eliminate defragmentation”. In an announcement today, the company said:

Diskeeper 2011 intelligently monitors newly created fragments and then runs Instant Defrag to remove the fragmentation that is degrading system performance. Rather than waiting for fragmentation to build up, Instant Defrag provides uninterrupted peak system performance and reliability.

We’re hoping to chat more with Diskeeeper tomorrow evening about what’s coming in the latest version of their application. As soon as we know, so will you.

MSWHS.com has the scoop on an update to Home Server SMART, a Windows Home Server (WHS) add-in that enables you to monitor the health of most of your hard disks attached to WHS. It examines the S.M.A.R.T. data exposed by your disks and determines the health of the disk.

If problems are detected, Home Server SMART informs you which attribute(s) are critical or problematic, and it presents a summary of problems found. If the problems are serious, the add-in will make a recommendation to you that you replace the disk.

The developer, DoJo North Software released a new version of the add-in this week with a number of bug fixes, including:

• The dreaded “WMI worker process has encountered an exception: not supported” is no more. The code and try/catch block that encountered this has been adjusted so if the error condition arises, it doesn’t prevent the disk list from being populated. I also checked for this condition and if it occurs, a more useful message is displayed.
• Fixed the NullReferenceException that occurred when clicking on some disks.  Home Server SMART wrongly assumed all disks exposed every attribute (i.e. model, interface, partition count, etc.) and if a disk didn’t expose the attribute, then an error was displayed and any remaining data was not displayed.  The code now checks the validity of each item, and only invalid items are skipped.
• Fixed the Capacity column sorting – if you click on the Capacity column, the disks sort in correct numeric order now!

Download: Home Server SMART

Back in January, we discussed Western Digital’s new Advanced Format Drives, which WGS readers were finding caused performance and incompatibility issues on Windows Home Server v1. At the time we advised against using these drives and selecting a standard drive instead:

For now, your safest bet is to avoid the new Western Digital Advanced Format drives with Windows Home Server until a full resolution can be found. With WHS v2 being based on Windows Server 2008 R2, it should not be affected by this problem.

This week, Microsoft issued an advisory note which backed that advice. KB2385637 digs into the issue with Advanced Format drives and their incompatibility with Windows Home Server v1. They conclude:

It is important to note that some hard disk manufacturers are releasing Advanced Format drives in the same base models as traditional 512 byte sector drives. Because of this, it is critical that you make sure that the drive you are purchasing is not an Advanced Format drive if you are running Windows Home Server v1. Before you purchase a disk drive, review the product specifications or visit the manufacturers Web site to ensure that the drive is compatible with Windows Home Server. Be aware that Advanced Format drives are not always clearly identified on the retail packaging.

For more on this issue, make sure to check out this thread over at WGS Forums.

I have been itching to get my hands on one of LG’s NAS units for a little while and have been looking at one of the very attractive N2B1 units with two disks and a Blu-Ray Writer. Before we review that model, however, we have the opportunity to review its smaller brother, the N1T1 (courtesy of network storage specialists IT247.com)

LG’s entrance into network storage may be considered a little surprising. While known for monitors and optical drives, I had only recently discovered they have a range of notebooks on the market too. Looking at the scope of their ‘Computer Products’ site though shows the range is still quite limited. It will be interesting to see how they stack up against the established storage vendors.

If I was to put in the usual section about the manufacturer at this point, things would start to get quite confusing. With everything from household appliances, through mobile phones and on to computer accessories, I am sure all of you will have been ‘touched’ by LG is some way.

Getting on to the N1T1 NAS Unit itself. It is a very solid-feeling ‘lump’ weighing in at 4.2lbs (nearly 2kg). The engineering sample provided to us to review was in black and white shiny finish. It is also available in plain shiny ‘piano black’.

The main features are:

• Network Attached Storage
• DVD Re-Writer and Playback
• DLNA Protocol
• Easy Setup
• Access your Data Anywhere via the internet
• User Management with Security
• Gigabit Networking / USB connectivity.
• DHCP/NTP/HTTP/HTTPS/FTP/FTPS
• Near Silent Operation
• iTunes Server
• Status Monitoring with Email Alerts
• Windows, Linux and Mac compatible

Having had a look at the EM4072 NAS Pro Duo which is capable of taking two 3.5” SATA disks, we can now look at its smaller brother, the EM4071. This announces itself as a ‘Unique Screwless Design’ which makes a pleasant change as just fitting one drive in the EM4072 meant undoing 6 screws and doing up 10. For those of you wanting to know a bit more about Eminent, I refer you to the previous ‘Hands On’. The Manufacturer’s details for the unit are:-

• 3.5″ GigaShare NAS
• Gigabit (1000Mbit) LAN interface for high transfer rates
• Suited for 3.5″ SATA harddisk
• Connect additional harddisk via USB
• Includes NZBget, Bittorrent, Mediaserver and MLDonkey modules to download files
• Equipped with FTP/SMB/NFS server, 64MB Fast DDR memory and printer server
• Easy installation
• 5-Year warranty
• Accessible helpdesk
• Multilingual user manual

Given the EM4071 only holds one drive, it is no surprise that the packaging is half the size of the Pro Duo. Opening it up, you find it is much simpler with no cables or screws. Access to fit the necessary drive (which had become available from the EM4072 review unit) is through the front panel. There is no externally visible retention but gripping and pulling gently reveals it is held on with two magnets at either end.

Looking inside, one can see the SATA connectors and a couple of large springs (to help release the drive for removal). At the front is a sprung-loaded clip that holds the drive in place an ensures a good connection. There appeared to be very little play one the drive was fully inserted.

The CD-ROM and Manual contain exactly the same content as the EM4072 and so the comments regarding the Discovery and the SyncQuick Backup software are as in the previous article.

The simplicity of connection also mirrors its big brother with a single USB for external drive or printer, Gigabit Ethernet RJ45 and a power connector.

The external power supply is a much smaller unit with integral plug as the power requirements are so much less. The review model came with a 2-pin European-style adaptor, but we were advised this would be changed when units ship into the UK.

The power-switch is a biased slide-switch on the rear. Again, as with the EM4072, sliding it to turn the unit off does not kill the power immediately but allows for an orderly shutdown.

With the unit powered up, you immediately discover this is not a quiet unit. A combination of the drive in a thin plastic chassis and the cooling fan make this one of the loudest external drive units I have come across. There are two blue leds on the front, illumination through the removable panel, one for power, and one for activity.