Windows Home Sever

Fatboyuk2

Fatboyuk2

Fatboyuk2

Associate
Joined
19 Dec 2009
Posts
240
Location
london
I want to bild a pc to use windows home server to tri it this it what i am thinking of geting to do it on what do you lot think ?

Microsoft Windows Home Server 32-Bit - OEM (CCQ-00061) £76.99
(:confused:
Asus M4A785TD-M Evo AMD 785G (Socket AM3) DDR3 microATX Motherboard £69.99

Hitachi Deskstar 7K1000.C 1TB SATA-II 32MB Cache - OEM x2 (IN Rade 0)
£133.98

AMD Athlon II X2 Dual Core 240 2.80GHz (Socket AM3) £46.99
(
Corsair Value Select 2GB (1x2GB) DDR3 PC3-10666C9 1333MHz Dual Channel Kit (VS2GB1333D3 G) ) £40.85

Tuniq Tower 120 Extreme Rev. C CPU Cooler (Socket LGA775/LGA1156/LGA1366/AM2/AM2+/AM3) £39.99

Corsair CX 400W ATX Power Supply (CMPSU-400CXUK) £38.99

Western Digital Caviar Blue 80GB SATA-II 8MB Cache - OEM for the os £30.98

CIT 1003 Gaming Case with Side Window - Black

Sony Optiarc DDU-1681S SATA DVD-ROM - Black (OEM) £11.99

Edimax Gigabit Ethernet PCI Adapter X2
£20.42
(
Total : £553.15
 
ok, i thought so. raid 0 is normally used more often in gaming computers because it helps with the overall speed of opening applications and booting windows.
 
Windows home server's main use is managing hard drives in a storage pool, the nice bit being that you can add to the storage pool as your storage needs grow. This can also be done on high end raid cards but at considerable cost.

Raid is not needed with a WHS machine (that has more than one drive) as it uses data replication. Much as on RAID 1 where your drives are mirrored, WHS allows you to mirror specific folders. So for example all of your home movies may be replicated (because you choose to store them just on the home server) but you may choose not to replicate your other home computer system backups as you already have two copies. This can save a considerable amount of space.

The other thing I note from your spec is that you were intending to use a small drive for the OS, in actual fact you really need to use the largest drive for the OS. This is because the OS drive contains a 20 gig partition for the actual OS, and then the remainder of the drive is used as a 'landing zone' for all date into the server, and is then moved off this drive to the other storage drives in slow time by the OS. The otehr quirk, which may have changed since I used this OS is that if you try to move a collection of files to the server that is larger than the 'landing zone' then it won't let you, which is a pain. Other Windows machine report the size of the 'landing zone' rather than the complete server storage size, which is very off, for example mine would say 6Tb of 680GB free ( as my server was based on 750GB drives).

If the landing zone is nearly full then write speeds go down to at least half what they should be, as the data is initially written to the landing zone, then read and written to the storage drive (s).

To tell the truth all of this is only a problem if you are copying big chunks of data, as I did when I first set my machine up, however in the end you may decide as I did to use vista/7 instead and use an additional raid 5 card when your storage demands require it. From your setup you would probably be better to use the 80GB drive an OS, (XP, Vista, 7, Linux) and then mirror your two storage drives as you suggest.

I hope that this helps
 
You might find This article helpful...also have a look Here

Raid is not needed with a WHS machine (that has more than one drive) as it uses data replication.
Click to expand...

So I would forget about using any form of RAID...also WHS manages the HDDs very well.
 
thank you for all you help but his brother (me) is takeing over and useing s2003 for his server WHS is ok but i jush dont like it and puting the ram up 2 4gb
 
Last edited:
What are you actually going to use the server for?

If it's just for home use then WHS is the perfect choice, you could even just use an Atom mITX board, I do and it's perfect!

Fair enough, if you want the machine to perform other tasks like be a router, firewall, web server, VOIP or a whole number of more demanding tasks then go for more power and more expensive enterprise OS but the majority of home users won't need that.
 
Pandobear said:
The other thing I note from your spec is that you were intending to use a small drive for the OS, in actual fact you really need to use the largest drive for the OS. This is because the OS drive contains a 20 gig partition for the actual OS, and then the remainder of the drive is used as a 'landing zone' for all date into the server, and is then moved off this drive to the other storage drives in slow time by the OS. The otehr quirk, which may have changed since I used this OS is that if you try to move a collection of files to the server that is larger than the 'landing zone' then it won't let you, which is a pain. Other Windows machine report the size of the 'landing zone' rather than the complete server storage size, which is very off, for example mine would say 6Tb of 680GB free ( as my server was based on 750GB drives).

If the landing zone is nearly full then write speeds go down to at least half what they should be, as the data is initially written to the landing zone, then read and written to the storage drive (s).
Click to expand...

This doesnt happen now. It was changed in the latest power pack update.

WHS is excellent as what it does.

Oh, Why SBS2003 and why 4Gb ram? As said before what are you using it for?
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom