TANKs Blog : building a Windows Home Server

Going to blog about something else for a while, this is a geek heavy blog so it probably won't interest most people.

THE PROBLEM
I like a lot of us i'm sure am starting to get a huge amount of digital content. Digital pictures, purchased or ripped music, pirated, download and ripped videos, lots of electronic documentation (i scan all my bills now instead of filing the paper). It's on a bunch of different computers, my wife has some of it, i have some of it on my laptop and some on my desktop, some are on a cheap YellowDisk NAS. So this year i want to get a better handle on that stuff. Plus i have a ton of movie DVDs and TV show DVDs that should be paying rent for the amount of space they take up and Audio CDs aren't much better, tons of those too. I'd like to convert all that to digital content so i can store the retail packages in a crate in the garage out of the way. My wife would also like to be able to easily publish pictures to the internet without storage restrictions, i'd like a more comprehensive backup solution and if i digitize all my media, i need a way to get it onto TV's. The answer? Windows Home Server, a product announced last year at CES and released in November. HP has a really slick designed one that's even pretty enough to have out and show but i don't want to dump $500 on something i could build for much less and it looks like i've got the hardware under control for $200 (though i have a lot of recycled parts i'm using where as the HP one is a good deal if you have nothing to start with).

THE SOLUTION



So to start off with FRYS had a combo deal for a 2 gig Core2 Duo intel processor (retail packaging too boot!) and ECS Motherboard. The mobo is really no frills but it has the basics, support for 4gb ram, 4usb ports, 2 SATA connectors hdd , 2 UMA/ATA hdd connectors, couple slots one of them PCI-E. SO it'll do the job, storage is my biggest consideration and having support for 4 UMA/ATA drives and 2 SATA drives gives me plenty of capacity choices. One funny thing is it has no built in video but it does have 6.1 surround sound audio .... just what you need in a server right? :lol: Windows home server is 'headless' meaning you don't actually configure/control it from the hardware, you install a client on the PCs in your house and manage it that way. SO the video card is really only needed if you're building one yourself to get it installed, then you can pull it out. So no video on the board isn't a problem at all. Anyway these two mandatory components for $88 i think is a good deal.




Next up i hit newegg.com to get the rest of the components. Missing are case, power supply and ram. I managed to pick up a coolermaster mid-tower, 1gb corsair matched pair 533mhz ram and a 450watt power supply for $106 shipped then there's a $25 mail in rebate on the coolermaster, so when all is said and done $81 bucks. So so far the tally is ~$170 to build the Windows Home server.

The coolermaster case is pretty cool, it has 5 exposed drive bays which will be perfect. Windows Home Server has a very cool NTFS based file system that supports hot swapping and dynamic resizing. So if i want to, i can buy a few hot swap bays for the drives for easy upgrading later or more than likely given my budget, i'll just mount them inside. But cool to have options and lots of capacity, not only is there 5 slots exposed but inside there's 4 more ! Anyway this stuff should get to me by friday.




Then lastly there's the hard drives which i'm recycling drives i already have. I got a YellowDisk NAS device about a year ago which has 5 256gb UMA drives in it in a raid 5 config. It runs a custom OS which does basic stuff but it's kind of jankey. Plus the company has gone out of business now so there's no chance of getting warranty service or support on it. Maxtor will warranty the drives directly so that's why i'm going to pull those drives out and put them in my Home Server.

So i have 5 250gb Maxtors and I have an 80gb SATA drive to use as the system drive. Probably more capacity than i need for a system drive but that's what i have laying around and it's new.

Array drives UMA/ATA
System drive, 80gb SATA

So this weekend i'll be putting this all together and firing it up. If it all goes quickly, i'll start doing some media to digital conversions as well. I should have 1.2 TB of data storage available. My only worry is if the 450watt power supply is going to cut the mustard or not. Game machines need bit power supplies because of the amps these really high end processors and multiple video cards draw. But the processing draw on this machine should be minimal, it's just voltage to run the drives that is going to be the most power draw.

Look forward to getting elbows deep this weekend. I haven't built a computer in probably 5 years so it'll be fun. More when it's all together.

This is phase one of a two system build out. Later, probably around summer i'll start to build a Home Theater PC which will either be based on XP Media Center or Vista Ultimate, which ever has a better multimedia UI and is easiest to use. This system i think is goign to probably cost me about 800 bucks to build, decent cases start at about 150-200 bucks, it's going to need lots of ram, lots of processing power, DVD, BluRay and HDDVD playback ability, good video card wiht both HDMI and component outputs, digital audio output and a DVR but i probably won't add that until last. So it's going to be expensive which is why i'm going to hold off for as long as i can so component prices drop :)