Windows Server Back on SBS2011 using 4TB drive with drive sector 4k
Hi All
I have recently had my 2x 2TB seagate drives fail that have been used for the SBS2011 Server Backups for ages. These were replaced with new 2x4TB seagate drives. However the backups keep failing since the new drives.
I have done some digging and it looks like SBS Server back has issues with drives with 4k sectors and seems to only want to on drives with 512 byte sectors.
is there a way around this ? i have seen some links about 512e formats, but im not sure how to get this working on the external 4TB seagate drive and then to get windows server backups to work with this?
thanks
I have recently had my 2x 2TB seagate drives fail that have been used for the SBS2011 Server Backups for ages. These were replaced with new 2x4TB seagate drives. However the backups keep failing since the new drives.
I have done some digging and it looks like SBS Server back has issues with drives with 4k sectors and seems to only want to on drives with 512 byte sectors.
is there a way around this ? i have seen some links about 512e formats, but im not sure how to get this working on the external 4TB seagate drive and then to get windows server backups to work with this?
thanks
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McKnife
First, we need to know the model of your new drives to determine if those are 512e or 4k drives. Then, it would be valuable to see the full error message.
Either get 512 sector disks, or use a 3rd party backup software. Getting 512 sector disks is probably cheaper, and the disks you already have can probably used for other things easily...
Windows Server Backup uses a VHD file as its repository.
VHD files only support an underlying 512b setup on disk.
VHD files have a supported size of ~2TB maximum.
Therefore, one can only use 512b disks for backup with about 2TB of space being used.
We hit this early as we had a bunch of backup drives that needed to be rotated out (3 year life limit in our rotations). Purchased a bunch of Seagate Advanced Format drives (did not know they were) and hit the wall.
We then purchased a bunch of WD Black 2TB WD2002FAEX drives as they are 512b. We just deployed our last few sets of these drives.
VHD files only support an underlying 512b setup on disk.
VHD files have a supported size of ~2TB maximum.
Therefore, one can only use 512b disks for backup with about 2TB of space being used.
We hit this early as we had a bunch of backup drives that needed to be rotated out (3 year life limit in our rotations). Purchased a bunch of Seagate Advanced Format drives (did not know they were) and hit the wall.
We then purchased a bunch of WD Black 2TB WD2002FAEX drives as they are 512b. We just deployed our last few sets of these drives.
ASKER
thanks all, this pretty much confirms what i did find out on web yesterday