Free Computer Consultant ………. Daily Insights

When you install a server you have to make some decisions on partition sizes for the different drives. The wise individual will buy as big of disk as he/she can afford and double every estimate for size.

Just a couple of years ago it seemed perfectly logical to allocate 12GB to a Windows Small Business Server C drive partition, especially when many of the features would be installed to a partition other than C (ie, any application that would grow in size - especially SQL).

But everyone underestimates the disk space required by those darn Windows updates, if nothing else. You actually can go into the Windows subdirectory and delete the compressed directories of old, proven updates and reclaim a lot of space.

Sooner or later, though, you start getting those emails from the server “low on disk space”.

What do you do?

The fix for a server partition that is too small

This happened on a server I am responsible for this past week. First, 1.2GB free wasn’t enough space to even run a Windows Update Services update. Then, once some other updates ran, it was all of sudden less than 100mb free.

Since the D: drive partition could easily spare 10GB, the obvious answer for me was

With Acronis® Disk Director® Server 10.0 I was able to easily steal some space off of the front of the D partition, then expand the C partition to use that space.

Upon reboot, Acronis Disk Director moved the data out of the way, then reallocated the space.
Windows Small Business Server 2003 then booted up and all was happy. I defragged the C drive with a very comfortable 47% free space.

This was a pretty nasty bind with what turned out to be a very simple solution.

Acronis Disk Director actually does more than just reallocate hard drive partitions. It includes

• Partition Manager
• Partition Recovery
• Disk Editor
• Data Destruction

I highly recommend Acronis products in general, but I was really happy with Acronis® Disk Director® today.

Windows Home Server is advancing on track and due out sometime this fall.

My prediction: It won’t be just for the home.

I can see this product ending up in small offices where maybe an attorney or two and a secretary or two might finally get serious about sharing files and backing up data.

These offices probably could afford me to come in with Microsoft Small Business Server, it would offer them a lot of advantages. But many of these professionals are just too cheap for that. I’m sorry, stingy; I mean frugal. You get the idea. (They use Yahoo! email accounts, now that’s professiona!)

Where Small Business Server is designed to be easy to manage, Windows Home Server is designed to require practically no management at all.

Will it deliver on this goal? I think it has a good chance. Doesn’t mean they won’t call someone like me every few months to check on it or answer a question, but it will probably run unattended in a closet quite nicely.

It will probably be the first time these offices have had anything close to a proper storage of their data.

For many laptop users, USB 2.0 or Firewire offer fast enough speeds for external storage. For others, though, 400mbps just isn’t fast enough.

My work with the MBox and ProTools is one example. ProTools recommends recording music to a non system hard drive - tough to do on a laptop unless you’re talking external. Yet tech support specifically states that USB is NOT fast enough.

Welcome eSATA. I love eSATA external hard drive enclosures, the one from Vantec I’ve written about in the past. But how do you connect eSATA to your laptop?

Easy, now anyway. SIIG makes an expresscard adapter that sells for less than $70. The card slides right in to a slim ExpressCard/34 slot and features two eSATA ports stacked on top of each other. The controller housed inside supports a standard second-gen feature set, including 3 Gbps transfer speeds, Native Command Queuing, hot plugging, and support for drives that exceed 137GB.

If you want the latest and the fastest, go eSATA. You can pick up the adapter here -
SIIG eSATA II 2-Port ExpressCard - 2 x 7-pin Serial ATA/300 External SATA - ExpressCard/34