WHS box advice

hawker1986 · 8 Aug 2010 at 10:16

Hi all,

Not quite sure where this belongs so ive hedged my bets and put it in general

Just after some advice on a WHS box im going to be running. Essentially this will be used for streaming media to my HTPC and running backups from my PC and the Mrs' laptop. Possibly also for torrents. The aims on this one are silence and low power consumption.

Parts so far:

Zotac M-ITX 8200 mobo
AMD 4850e (will be clocked down to 2Ghz and undervolted)
2x1GB DDR667 RAM
1.5TB Seagate HDD (will be used for data backups being pulled from my HTPC once this is all done)

Things left to get:

2x2TB HDDS for media streaming to be run in RAID 0 or using WHS folder level duplication for redundancy.
Case
PSU
Passive CPU cooler
SSD boot drive

Now my main issues so far are:
1) which case will be best for my uses so far im tossing up between:

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=CA-186-LL&groupid=701&catid=7&subcat=187
and
CFI A7879 Mini-ITX NAS case (please google)

Second one comes with a PSU which is good (dont know how loud it is though) but doesnt allow more than 4 HDDs to be installed long term. Opinions?

2) What passive CPU cooler will keep the chip in good order in these cases (pretty small clearance).

3) If I go for the Lian Li case, would it be worth getting a passive PSU such as a Silverstone 300W Nightjar PSU

Advice greatly appreciated.

Cheers

Hawker

Destination · 8 Aug 2010 at 10:36

Which case do you mean, link doesn't work you copy-pasted it incorrectly.
SSD boot drive might not be a good idea for a server, it wastes lots of space.
WHS insists on a 160Gb boot drive, of which it reserves 60Gb for the boot partition and then allows the rest to become part of 'the pool'.
You can exclude the drive form the pool, but don't expect to throw in a very small boot drive and think WHS will allow you to install. There might be ways to 'hack' around this, but i haven't invetsigated them.
The WHS and Vail prereqs amounts may also be different, so worthshile investigating that.

1LANCS · 8 Aug 2010 at 10:40

What about the Fractal MiniITX NAS Case with 300W PSU
http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=CA-006-FD

Ok so it doesnt have hot swap hdd bays but it has space for 6x 3.5" hdds and 1x SSD with 7 sata power connectors on the PSU.

hawker1986 · 8 Aug 2010 at 11:21

Hikari Kisugi said:
Which case do you mean, link doesn't work you copy-pasted it incorrectly.
SSD boot drive might not be a good idea for a server, it wastes lots of space.
WHS insists on a 160Gb boot drive, of which it reserves 60Gb for the boot partition and then allows the rest to become part of 'the pool'.
You can exclude the drive form the pool, but don't expect to throw in a very small boot drive and think WHS will allow you to install. There might be ways to 'hack' around this, but i haven't invetsigated them.
The WHS and Vail prereqs amounts may also be different, so worthshile investigating that.

Sorry, link should be fixed now, its the Lian-Li Q08, I actually didnt realise that about the install process, thanks for highlighting it, In that case i may go with a 160-250gb 2.5" HDD instead of an SSD.

1LANCS said:
What about the Fractal MiniITX NAS Case with 300W PSU
http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=CA-006-FD

Ok so it doesnt have hot swap hdd bays but it has space for 6x 3.5" hdds and 1x SSD with 7 sata power connectors on the PSU.

Its a case I have looked into, ive heard the cooling is not very good though, have you had any experience with it and its running temps?

Hawker