I recently encountered an issue with an external drive connected to a SBS 2011 server. The backup had errored and the issue was with the external drive.
Finally, I was reminded about the Technet blog post on Windows Small Business Server – External Backup Drives Compatibility List. The post has two parts:
- Guidelines on proper formatting requirements of the external drive, with an explanation of why 512 Bytes sectors are required.
- List of external drives for a variety of vendors, with a rating table that indicates if it works on the various versions of SBS and Essentials 2012/R2.
The post also documents a simple command that you can use to check the sector size of your external drive. Be sure to do it from an elevated command prompt. The command is:
fsutil fsinfo ntfsinfo X:
Here’s an example of the results:
