Home Server Build (56K Warning!)

[Mike 214]

This topic is more for the computer geeks amongst us

Ok so since my NAS died a few months ago, I've been contemplating building a replacement rather than going out and buying a another pre-built NAS device. Well the parts arrived yesterday and a few hours later I have my new home server completed.

The Parts

-along the top:

1x Corsair VX450 PSU

2x Western Digital Caviar Green 2TB Drives

1x Western Digital Caviar Blue 160GB Drive

6x 18" SATA cables

-along the bottom

1x Tuniq Tower 120 CPU Cooler

1x Intel Pentium D E6500 CPU

2x 2GB Crucial RAM

1x Asus P5QL-CM Motherboard

1x Icy Dock MB454SPFB Hot Swap hard drive bay

-and in the second picture

1x Cooler Master Elite 330 ATX Case

-E6500 and Tuniq installed onto motherboard

-Motherboard then installed into case

-After that point I kinda forgot about taking pictures step by step, so the next few pics show the remaining parts fully installed in the case

-A few beauty shots of the completed server

and yes, those bays are fully hot swappable, believe me I've tested it

-A few shots from within the Windows Home Server console, 3.7TB at my disposal

-Finally just a few screenshots of what I think is a major plus point for Windows Home Server, remote access. From the web you can not only access all of your shared folders, but also remote desktop ino any PC connected to the network, pretty cool I thought.

[Mini-Me 24]

And I don't even have a "modern" PC .

[Ziero 4]

Me either... But Mike, is the new server of yours going to be for HV or what is its purpose, if you don't mind me asking, ya know, in case I missed something somewhere...

[Ashley+ 0]

wow that is pretty ....btw whats a NAS ?

[♠Grim♂ Reaper 1666◙ 17]

mike pays for the server bttf hv is on

[Orgcon 11]

Ok Mike, what sort of price are we talking here?

Is it the kind that would make my bank manager laugh if I asked for a loan, or the lucky git that steals all the bids at the last minute on ebay kind?

Edited February 13, 2010 by Orgcon

[Mike 214]

@Ziero it's for my personal files e.g. music, videos etc that I have built up over the years.

@Ashley NAS = Network Attached Storage

@Orgcon I think it was about £810, but I did up the spec on quite a few parts, 2TB drives were almost £150 each, and the Icy Dock was around the £90 mark and that was just something which was more of a nice to have than something I really needed. If you are building one on a budget you can make a 3TB version for around £350 mark.

[Joe Statler 0]

Nice... Once I get myself a new desktop I plan to make this one into a seed-box/media server. Although it can only support pata drives, so I plan to buy 3 500GB HDD keep my 160GB one for the OS and most likely 2 or 3 external HDD in the future (if I can afford it).

Oh yea, I'll most likely have SETI@Home running on it too. Gotta do my part for the search of little green men.

Edited February 13, 2010 by Joe Statler

[Orgcon 11]

The're grey actually!

[♠Grim♂ Reaper 1666◙ 17]

i have a old computer sat in the dinning room (which is inaccesable due to 5 years of stuff thats been put in there) i could properly get that rigged up to be a backup server.

[Ziero 4]

I figured that aliens were really whatever color they wanted you to see them in... Kind of a chameleon type of deal, but like they read your mind and choose a color based on what they see in your mind, lol. That's quite a reach, isn't it? Whoa, and this is totally off topic.

On Topic:

@Mike: Oh I see. Don't mind me, it just seems that anytime I hear the word "Server" I think of HV, lol. Don't know why really.

[Kid Buu 0]

Isn't that heat sink a massive overkill for an E6500? I've got an E8500 with stock heat sink and it's temps are below 40 and about 50 under load which is fine.

I too am building a server but no where near as good as that...

Edited February 13, 2010 by Kid Buu

[Ronnyboy 2]

Can you turn any old computer into a server?

But very nice there Mike, she's a beast.

[Kid Buu 0]

Can you turn any old computer into a server?

But very nice there Mike, she's a beast.

Pretty much. I've got my old single 1.6ghz as my server atm. I've got a new motherboard coming so I can upgrade it to my old core 2 duo 2ghz and then new ram, a bigger hdd etc etc.

When I say "pretty much" I'm talking about a Linux server, I've got no idea what Windows Home Server needs.

Edited February 14, 2010 by Kid Buu

[Mike 214]

Isn't that heat sink a massive overkill for an E6500? I've got an E8500 with stock heat sink and it's temps are below 40 and about 50 under load which is fine.

I too am building a server but no where near as good as that...

It is overkill yes, but it plays into my whole idea for the server, I wanted something that would run cool and quiet, and be expandable. So the reason for using the Tuniq plays more into the cool and quiet part, if I'd have used the stock cooler that came with the cpu becuase of it only being an 80mm fan it would have run a lot louder.

Here are the specs for WHS if you are interested, I was trialling this out on a virtual machine for a while and even on a virtual machine it runs perfectly:

1.0 GHz Intel Pentium 3 (or equivalent) processor

512 MB RAM

80 GB internal hard drive as primary drive

100 Mbit/s wired Ethernet

There are Linux distros that do a similar function though, clarkconnect/clearOS (it's one of those, they changed the name on it recently) will perform a similar function to WHS, but on the whole I preferred WHS.

@Ronnyboy, yes you can, so long as it meets the requirements of A: the number of hard drives you want to install, and B: meets the minimum requirements of the OS you want to install on it.

[Ronnyboy 2]

Cool, I know it has a 500 GB HDD and will work with all of that. But will an extra USB one work as well? Or no?

[Mike 214]

You can add USB hard drives to the storage pool on Windows Home Server.

I'm not sure about Clark Connect/ClearOS as I didn't play around too much with it.

[Gunsnipe3795 0]

What's the RPM's on the hard drives, 5400, 7200 or 10,000 RPM? My laptop is the most powerful thing I got at home. Not as powerful as you're server but it's pretty powerful for a laptop. plannin on puttin 2 750GB, 7200RPM hard drives in them and raiding them to get 1.5TB in it and with the 8GB DDR2 RAM chips, she'll be hauling

[Mike 214]

All the drives are 5400rpm, since files are being transferred over the network anyway, 7200rpm drives are pointless for me. plus 5400's run cooler.

[Gunsnipe3795 0]

All the drives are 5400rpm, since files are being transferred over the network anyway, 7200rpm drives are pointless for me. plus 5400's run cooler.

yea 5400RPM's are ok, don't get me wrong they work fine for the basic needs; but 7200rpm drives do have a slight advantage over 5400, file transfer is faster with 7200rpm drives. nice server setup btw

[Kid Buu 0]

Faster for HDD to HDD for example but probably no difference using it networked

[Mini-Me 24]

Also not if you have 1Gbit/s fast LAN?