Spec Me A Home Server

Minimoke

Minimoke

Minimoke

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Joined
27 Feb 2009
Posts
317
Hey everyone,
I know home servers are a bit of a no brainer when it comes to getting the bits to make them, but I thought I'd make a thread to hear your ideas anyway. It would be for all of the media and documents in the house; music, pictures, videos, and would basically be the central location for everything. I'd like to know what parts are known for their reliability and will keep cool, and what configuration I should use for it to be as safe as possible. I was thinking mirroring 2 TB drives and having an 80GB for the OS and the rest, is that all there is to it? Just wanted a few opinions :D

Cheers, Chris.
 
Hey there,
Well I've already got a case, PSU, MB, and a few old hard drives I could use, but they are only small and odd sizes. The MB has SATA, and I have a Sempron 2.2GHz going spare which I could use. What I'd really like to know is the best way to configure it. I've got a licence of XP Home I can use, but I'm aware that might not be very suitable for a server. So my budget will need to incorporate 2x 1TB hard drives, which I'm thinking of mirroring for redundency. But software wise, I'm pretty clueless. Any suggestions? Cheers, Chris.
 
Minimoke said:
Hey there,
Well I've already got a case, PSU, MB, and a few old hard drives I could use, but they are only small and odd sizes. The MB has SATA, and I have a Sempron 2.2GHz going spare which I could use. What I'd really like to know is the best way to configure it. I've got a licence of XP Home I can use, but I'm aware that might not be very suitable for a server. So my budget will need to incorporate 2x 1TB hard drives, which I'm thinking of mirroring for redundency. But software wise, I'm pretty clueless. Any suggestions? Cheers, Chris.
Click to expand...


Try Windows Home Server, approx £120, but it's a great product if you want true server functionality with backing up other PC's on your network etc.

There is a 120day trial version you can get hold of if you want to give it a whirl before commiting to purchase. Be aware though that for some daft reason MS don't allow you to enter a purchased licence code at the end of the period to keep it working, you have to do a re-install with the licenced version. I ordered my trial from the MS web site and they sent some disks out in about 7 days, but think there may also be a download trial as well.

As for your PC, WHS will run perfectly well on that. There's a good thread in the Windows Software part of this forum on WHS that you might want to have a read through.

Regards

Taff
 
Hey guys,
I've been looking at WHS, it seems like the most sensible idea. As for the motherboard, it's an Asus M2A-MX, which is the standard board that my local computer store use. When I worked there for work experience, I remember setting up RAID on those boards, just used a USB floppy drive and away I went. It should be fine in that sense. So you guys think that mirroring is the best idea for the drives? Oh, and I've got a stick of 1GB DDR2 RAM I can put in it somewhere. Cheers, Chris.
 
Exactly as Matthew says, no need for raid at all with WHS.

I've got 3 drives in mine, 500GB, 250GB and a 1TB.

When installed WHS set up 5 folder types for different files, you can then set up which folders you want WHS to duplicate, it then takes care of duplicating the files over the different drives. So no need to worry about raid.

Also with WHS you have the benefit of it looking after all the backups of any PCs on your network. So you can get rid of True Image as all your back ups are on the server. If one crashes out, you just put in a WHS recovery disk, it connects to the WHS and then rebuilds the PC for you.

Also WHS Service Pack 2 has been released today with a number of patch, one of which is to improve the media centre integration. I've just upraded mine but have yet to test out the new functionality.

Cheers

Taff
 
Hey everyone,
that's interesting, WHS sounds perfect for what I need. I've got 3 desktops in the house, and will probably be getting another one soon. Does it back up everything, as in the whole system drive and documents? I use an external drive for my documents, will it back that up as well? Would I only use one hard drive in the server? I should really read some reviews :P

Cheers, Chris.
 
Hi Chris,

When you have a PC connected to the server, it will appear in the Back Up tab of the server console.

To set up a back up you click on a configure backup for the PC you've selected. This will then scan the PC for all attached drives. It's up to you then to select what drive you want the WHS to back up. First time round it will do a full back up of the drives selected, then dependent on the back up schedule it will then do incremental back ups from there on. I haven't got any external storage on mine to test this out, but I think it just picks up any drives that are mapped on that computer, but may be mistaken on that on.

The other thing to note though is that if you have a WHS, you can then move all your documents onto that. You have two benefits then. One they can be accessed through any of the PC's connected to the WHS, and also you benefit form the internal back ups of WHS so that you don't lose your docs should your external storage go bang.

As for hard drives in the server I would suggest at least two to get you started as that then will allow you to benfit from the replication facilities that WHS has built in for suceuring any files that you put onto it. It will run with one, but then your limiting the capabilities that are built in.

Regards

Taff

Regards

Taff
 
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