Home Forums Windows SBS 2011 Essentials and 3TB external drive

Hi,

Can SBS 2011 Essentials recognize a 3TB drive and use it for backup?

No it cannot. None of the Server 2008R2 series can use a 3TB drive for backup. It has to do with the way it makes backups using vmdk files. The VMDK (virtual disk) files are limited at 2TB. This limit has been removed in Server 2013.

Some Western Digital Drives have a had a custom firmware to get around this issue. Seagate does not have one.

If you use a Linux server with a share, it will support 32TB volumes (or more if you use ext4). The disk tools will easily format the drive.

Just sayin'

We RAID 3TB drives for our near-line backup storage.

Windows has no problem with using drives larger than 2TB. The problem is the VMDK limit that the server backup uses. Third party programs like Acronis don't have that problem. Downside is that they like to charge ALOT more for the server versions of their backup program. Your best best is to return the 3TB drive and get a 2TB drive.

Apparently Sandeep are reading the question two different ways - when you say recognize, are you asking if the OS/Disk tools can mount and access the drive, or are you asking if you can write a 3TB backup image?

I was wondering if the SBS native backup routine could access and make backups to a 3TB drive.

I read it both ways.

1) Yes SBS can see drives larger than 2TB.
2) No it cannot backup to drives larger than 2TB unless you use a custom formatting tool. I believe Western Digital has it not Seagate.

So part of it is the SBS isn't going to be be able mount the drive as-is, so you can take the drive back, or you can run a live Linux ISO/CD, and from there you can disk partition the drive into a 2 TB (or smaller) partition, with another disk of the remainder.

all tings be equal, You might be better served to get one of the inexpensive NAS drives so that you can backup across the network, which keeps the backup physically separate from the server that is being backed up.

Example being, if a room floods, or the server is snatched, the NAS is tucked away in a phone closet or some other out-of-the-way place.

Drop some other hardware in, start the restore.

If you have some old hardware, I recommend you try out Ubuntu using the Live CD - every network can use a utility server.

This won't work as the way Windows see the physical sectors and emulates the sectors are irrelevant to how you format it. It's not a hard capacity limit that is the problem. It's the sector size.


Using a NAS device in conjunction with server backup does not allow you to use incremental image back ups. The server backup utility uses block level backup which is why SBS usually hijacks the drive. If you tried it, your drive would take an image each day and fill up the drive relatively quickly.