'Spec me' a Windows Home Server PC

Clipsey

Clipsey

Clipsey

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Going to be building one for the house and so would like a few aspects considered:
Low power usage
Reasonably quiet (although not a necessity)
Tons of room (aiming for 6 SATA connections each with 2TB)
Cost (trying to keep it low)

Basically going to have this sitting in a spare room and will be connected to the router via ethernet, and then stream movies (mainly) and music to other PC's.
Don't have a budget, but let's aim low ;)
 
hiya, for my whs i went with atom 330 motherboard the reason is that i dont need any encoding, just simple file severing, tho the case i picked was a Fractal Design Define R2 Midi Tower Case due to the amount of harddrive bay, your spec all depends on what you want from it tho
 
Built mine with an Athlon X3 720, 2gb ram, overkill really, WHS don't require a huge spec of hardware.
I use my WDTV to stream movies from the WHS to my plasma. Your network quality is more important than your build spec tbh (unless you slap together a bag of bolts).
 
Clipsey said:
Tons of room (aiming for 6 SATA connections each with 2TB)
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:eek: 12TB of storage....Madness i tells ya! That's over 472 Bluray movies at full rip.
You cannot raid a WHS (well, its certainly not supported), but you can do folder duplication which mirrors your selected folders onto a separate disk in the array (so to speak).

But still....dude.....12TB....seriously!? :confused:
 
k.Jacko said:
Built mine with an Athlon X3 720, 2gb ram, overkill really, WHS don't require a huge spec of hardware.
I use my WDTV to stream movies from the WHS to my plasma. Your network quality is more important than your build spec tbh (unless you slap together a bag of bolts).
Click to expand...

This is basically what I will be doing. Streaming from one PC to my HTPC. I am using regular cat-5 at the moment and tested a DVD last night - worked perfectly. Tried a smaller BluRay and seemed fine. Will be testing a bigger one (46GB) later today - see how it holds up.

k.Jacko said:
But still....dude.....12TB....seriously!? :confused:
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Yeah it's these dam Blu Rays :D - I have nearly 4TB's stored up which has taken about a year or so. I want to kind of future proof myself for a few years you see. So a ton of storage will last a long time :)

Do I really need WHS come to think of it? Can I not just use Windows 7 network setup?
Thanks for the help and suggestions.
 
Clipsey said:
Do I really need WHS come to think of it? Can I not just use Windows 7 network setup?
Thanks for the help and suggestions.
Click to expand...

Personally i 'would' go the WHS route with that amount of storage, as wou want some resiliency.
Sure you could raid em up in Windows 7.....horses for courses i guess, although for me the stability of the WHS which is only asked to do so many things frees up your win7 pc.
I also use my WHS to connect to my home network from work. I can see if the bloody kids are skiving off school and using their pc's. Caught em a few times, and when they see a "WHY ARE YOU NOT AT SCHOOL?" message appear on their screens....they pap themselves :)
Seriously the WHS is good if you want to up/download files to from it whilst away. You can also control your other networks pc's from the console.
 
I'd also go for something like the system jbloggs has specified, anything more would be overkill. I am running my home server off of an Atom 330 system with a 6 port SATA card in it, and streaming H.264 encoded 1080p movies over the wired network is fine as long as I'm not doing any other file operations on the server. A Celeron E3200 is much more powerful than the Atom 330, and you'd be using the onboard SATA ports rather than having six drives running from a single 133MB/s slot, so you wouldn't experience this limitation.

The Asus P5QPL-AM is the cheapest in the G41/G31 chipset catagory and has four SATA ports onboard. The board has onboard graphics, leaving the PCI-E slot free for something like a four port Adaptec AAR-1430SA, and two PCI slots for a pair of cheap SATA controllers - OcUK do not seem to have any, but they are easy enough to find.

As for the OS, if you're not going to use the features of WHS, you could indeed use Windows 7, although an old copy of XP/Vista or even Linux would do fine too.
 
I think if you're using WHS I've always though the Atom motherboards are the best choice as WHS doesn't need much processing power at all when all you're doing is file sharing and torrenting, I have a 330 and it's never got above 30% CPU activity.
The only problem is that there aren't many SATA ports on the boards, this can be fixed by getting a PCI SATA controller card though.

Something like this will be great:
Intel D510MO or D945GCLF2
1Gb RAM
4 port SATA controller
Any case and PSU that will fit your drives.

All that should come too about $250 and use minimal power, just add the 2TB hard drives of your choice and a copy of WHS.
 
Sounds good then. Here's probably a noob question :)
If I leave the WHS running the whole time, can I access the hard drive from my HTPC like I would a normal hard drive connected to the HTPC? i.e. I would have my C: then all the other drives on the WHS E: F: etc or do you just get what is 'shared' like 'shared videos' ?
Could I rip a movie from my HTPC straight to a HD on the WHS pc?
 
Yeah, you have what are called "shares" which aren't listed as drives but more like network folders and you can acess them from any computer, HTPC, PS3, XBox or whatever you have on your network :)

The shares are just in the form \\SERVER_NAME\Videos for example

You can also access the shares by simply clicking the link on the desktop that the WHS connector software automatically installs on every PC. Windows Media Center also recognises all your shares too with no fussing around.
 
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Col_M said:
Windows Media Center also recognises all your shares too with no fussing around.
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THIS. This is what I am most interested in....I think :p
I just want everything to be stored on 1 PC and have access to it with ease. No messing around etc.
 
One more question guys, should I be thinking more into the PSU?
Having a 400w psu seems all ok, but what happens long in the future and I get all the HD's in place - like 6-8 of them, all 2TB a piece? Does this matter much?
 
Well HDDs use about 10-12W each when they're going full pelt, less when idle, and all the rest of the components use about 40W tops so even if you had 10 drives you'd only be using 160W :)
Just be sure to get a good quality PSU 80Plus certified and modular if possible.
 
If I was building one now I would build the machine so it can support the next version of whs, so your looking for at least a 2GHz x64 processor.
 
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