I guess you're right but I was thinking of using a CPU like an Intel E8400 which rules out the 740g/780g chipsets as they are only for AMD. I prefere having the SATA ports on the mobo as my current WHS machine seems to have issues with recognizing one of my PCI SATA cards at bootup which means that you can't do a reinstall. WHS did not want to recognize my Silicon Image SATA card upon install although I was able to install drivers after the install process was complete. My Promise SATA card seemed to work better from this perspective as it was recognized upon install.

I've got the hardware all set up for my WHS build using old parts from my last gaming machine. I just have yet to install WHS itself. I'm not going to bother until I have a good week or two to troubleshoot. I'm very excited to see how it will work to have centralized storage throughout the household along with automated backups and security.

My HTPC will never know what hit it...

Next month, I'll be in the market for 2x500GB HDDs to round out the storage as right now I'm only at 280GB total (plenty for everything except movies). I'm taking HDD donations if anyone is offering unused large capacity HDDs.

I’m working on the components choices for a WHS build, too. The server will be sitting on a credenza directly behind my office chair. I want it too look more like an appliance, rather than another mid-tower computer. Initially, I’ll use two drives, but want the ability to add one or two more. Also, because of its placement, it needs to quiet. Last, I want to keep it fairly low power, since it will be running 24/7. Here’s what I have in mind so far (prices are from Newegg):

Silverstone SUGO SG02B-F Case $69.99
SeaSonic S12 II SS-330GB Power Supply $48.99
GIGABYTE GA-MA74GM-S2 AM2+/AM2 AMD 740G Micro ATX AMD Mobo $54.99
AMD Athlon X2 4050e Brisbane 2.1GHz Socket AM2 45W CPU $55.99
SILVERSTONE NT07-AM2 80mm CPU Cooler $19.99
CORSAIR XMS2 2GB (2 x 1GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM (TWIN2X2048-6400) $38
Microsoft Windows Home Server 32 Bit 1 Pack (Power pack 1) - OEM $149.99
Western Digital Caviar GP WD7500AACS 750GB Hard Drives Qty=2 $199.98
Total (w/o tax &shipping) $637.92

Looking forward to the article and any comments regarding the above choices.

Regards, Scott

That Silverstone SUGO SG02B-F case takes only 2 3.5" drives. You could use the optical bays but low airflow is normal there, and this could mean higher temps. Not sure where else you could put more drives in there.

For a non-tower case that will take more than 2 HDD's I'd go with Silverstone's LC-17. It's big, and while not all that quiet out of the box, with a little work and a couple fan upgrades the noise can be tamed to well within reason. That's +$50. A Mini Ninja will easily handle the CPU cooling. +$20
As for HDD's, why not go for a pr of Western Digital Caviar Green WD10EACS? The gig per buck is a little lower, and you'll get 1/3 more storage from the same number of drives. +$60

Yeah, it would add a total of $130 to the build, but you've sort of painted yourself into a corner with the non-tower requirement. Larger HDD's are always worth considering, especially for a server. The Mini Ninja? Why the hell not?

Where can you get an LC17 for $50? The lowest I've seen is ~$115.

I'd either go with a mid-tower for increased HDD capacity or upgrade to a mobo that supports eSATA, as quality PCIe eSATA cards are pretty expensive still. And that's only if you're OK with adding external storage boxes.

I was trying to say +$50 over his budgeted case, which he had at $69.99. Sorry I wasn't clearer.

I've been considering a home server (or at least trying to fit one into the budget) and thought about the same thing (or at least using some Atom based HW). The issues I would have with this have to do with the fact that Intel has crippled the platform on which the Atom runs - only 2 SATA for a server will make it hard to store all the backups and media with redundancy, plus it has no gigabit Ethernet, meaning that backups could take a really long time. If Intel would let board manufactures implement a few more of he chipset's features and/or or a PCI-e 1x slot for a decent RAID card, the super low power consumption of the Atom system would make it ideal for this sort of application. Unfortunately, Intel has cut off half of the 945G's abilities when it is used for an Atom board, meaning it wouldn't have much use (at least to me) beyond a simple internet/word processing machine.

It does have Gigabet Ethernet, at least according to the Newegg listing here http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16856167032.
I was initially concerned about only having 2 SATAs, but my thought is this: start with a 1 TB drive now, in 3-6 months add a second TB drive for the redundancy and added space needs. In 3-6 more months, add a 1.5 or 2 TB drive (prices will be down by then) using an external drive, then remove one of the 1 TB drives. WHS will manage the addition of the additional drive, as well as manage the removal of a drive, so it shouldn't be a huge deal.

With the Wind only running $150, and running so quiet and low-powered, I think it could work fine.

But I honestly don't know much about the server aspect...I wouldn't run a Wind as my primary PC, nor would I set it up for my parents, but it could do the WHS environment pretty well, I'd think.

This is going to be an overkill build, but there's nothing truly wrong with that.

How about this Gigabyte or this Abit with an E5200 and a cheap vidcard? The E5200 will be plenty of CPU (unless you really need hardware virtualization) for 1/2 the E8400's price.

Ironically, Yamawho, your system in your .SIG is pretty close to my WHS system (I have a pair of 500GB SATA and a pair of 250GB PATA on a 3Ware controller). The D201GLY2 is an excellent WHS platform. I'd switch to a D945GCLF2 if they had used a decent chipset, but as long as it is saddled with the i945G, I consider it crippled.

Longer term, an Atom board with a mobile chipset (if I can find one) with a GigE connection and a couple of 1TB or 1.5TB drives will be the core of my WHS system. I'll convert the D201GLY2 into a music server at that point.

-D

p.s. I've been using WHS since pre-Beta and aside from a couple of hiccups (e.g. the file corruption issue primarily), I've been very satisfied with it as a centralized backup solution as well as a file share.

Back to case options: COOLER MASTER Elite 340 looks like a good, inexpensive "tower" mATX option for WHS. Sold for $40 on the web, 120mm fan grills front/back, and the front area is perfect for Aphonos-style elastic cord suspension (or similar) of multiple HDDs.

If you value your data, STAY AWAY from the cheap Silicon Image SATA cards. They're known to corrupt your drives. Should you decide against that warning, www.mono-price.com has them for cheap.

Spend a few bucks and get a decent Marvell PCI or PCI-Express SATA controller.

There's nothing wrong with Silicon Image chips. They're well known for being fully functional, unlike some 'alternatives'. The drivers may be very unpleasant if they're written anything like WHS. Marvell chips are certainly not what most people would call decent.

Ok, maybe I'm wrong. It's just that I've had bad experiences in the past with a few deployed linux servers utilizing silicon image sata chipsets. I'm sure things could've changed since then, but I'm still skeptical of their budget sata ICs / drivers.

References:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=si ... h&aq=f&oq=
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_Im ... uct_alerts

But I may be using my WHS box as a Sage Media server (note that you can run the Sage PVR software on WHS, unlike Windows/Vista Media Center) so I will need more horsepower there, particularly if I want to transcode H.264 files using Placeshifter which isn't possible now but may be in the future. Spending an extra $100 in CPU is perhaps a good hedge on what you may want to do in the future.

I wasn't aware of those issues with sata_sil devices, apparently. Probably because I don't have one. sata_sil24 supported devices (most modern ones) are however highly recommended due to a fully featured driver (suspend, hotplug, command and FIS port multiplier support..).

Silicon Image chipsets are behind almost every port multiplier equipped device, fyi.

@Monkeh16:

Yeah, I built a few home NAS servers for friends using the sil port multipliers from Addonics. Great little buggers. Bit steep @ $85/ea. though. Only thing I haven't done was tried polling SMART queries from individual drives with it.


http://www.addonics.com/products/host_c ... sapm-e.asp

I have had a WHS for about 6 months and couldn't be happier. It installed with more ease than a standard Windows install, the server was instantly recognized by the other computers on my home network, and moving files back and forth or playing media off of it is a breeze. I love the website access and use it enough to warrant an upgrade to Roadrunner Turbo (quadrupled the speed I could download files from the server). I also found that the backup process for my networked PC's was quick and efficient. I was afraid the server would make whole copies but it only notes the changes from the previous backup and thus saves a lot of space.

Now, on to things I would like to see in SPCR's article. A comparison of hardware to find what gives you the most bang for the buck while balancing energy efficiency and speed. I used an old computer for my WHS build and now have a closet that doubles as a Sauna. In searching for motherboards, I have trouble finding one that would make an ideal home server board. I would like an energy efficient board with onboard video, gigabit onboard nic and lots of SATA connections. How powerful of a processor is really needed for a setup like this? Is it worth it to max out the RAM for faster transfers? Are onboard NIC's up to the task for maximum transfer rates? What are the available add-ins? I see that HP provides an Itunes and temperature monitoring add-in. Is there a way to get these for the homebrew job?

I look forward to the article.

SMART should work just fine over them. If you think that's steep, try the £76.99, or around $134, they cost over here.

@brownkc:
picoLCD's are useful if you need a temperature display on the front of the machine.

http://www.mini-box.com/s.nl/sc.8/category.490/.f

Seems very expensive for a character display.

Pretty much the same as me.
I'm using an old Dell SC430 server with D935 CPU and 2Tb of storage over 3 drives. It was perfect as a heater during winter but with summer almost here and a scary power bill, it's time for a change.
I've tried the 'lights out' add-in which is fine but I recently had backup failures, drives going missing etc which required a re-install and am not sure if they are related to the add-in but will leave it a while before I try it again.
Bring it on Mike!

I'd like to see what other progs you can run on the server. I haven't looked into this myself yet, cause once I start researching, my sleep pattern goes out the window...

But, can it replace my current internet machne, in that it can download from torrent, newsgroup, ed2k, and run mirc?

And can it use (tight)vnc instead of ms own remote thingy (which I've never got working, prolly for lack of trying, cause tightvnc just works) ?


cause I imagine the OS is a bit optimized to run on lesser hardware?

I second this notion - there doesn't seem to be an ideal mobo for WHS with lots of SATA, onboard basic video, and Gigabit LAN. You don't need much else for WHS so it seems a waste to pay for other features. But I guess the homebrew WHS market is very small.

I can answer that

I recently got an Abit 780g based board. The 740g and 690g are pretty similar, the main difference being that the 780g has better on-board graphics which is deal for a media centre.

Anyway, six SATA ports, gigabit NIC and four RAM sockets. X2 4200 CPU. 35W at idle with no tweaks or undervolting

I can get 60MB/sec file transfers over gigabit with a bit of tweaking and jumbo frames, or close to theoretical maximum in artificial tests.

How much RAM you want depends on what you are doing with the system. RAM doesn't add much to power draw, and 2GB sticks are very cheap now. 2GB is enough for virtually anything I think.

CPU wise the cheapest £15 Sempron will be fine, and is also very low power. I only got a better one because I want to use the system as a media centre and with TrueCrypt as well.

Best of all, these boards are very cheap and easy to get. Micro ATX form factor too, and usually a 16x PCI-e and 1x PCI-e slot with two PCI slots for good expandability.

I got a cheap low-watt single-core Athlon; an LE-1640 I think it was.
Seemed like a good idea until I tried doing an on-demand Avast virus scan, at which point the server became completely unresponsive for a couple of hours.

Now I don't know for certain, but assume I'd have had less of a problem with a multi-core CPU and am currently eyeing the 9350e.

Apart from that, I couldn't be happier with my WHS. It's built on a 780g board in an Antec Solo, and is quiet enough to drown in the ambient noise in my apartment.

That's more to do with Avast than anything. AVG and AntiVir are both a lot better, and I run regular scans with both on a Via C7 based system without problems.

Dual core helps, of course, and an X2 4200 is under £30.

I used WHS for a period of about 4 months...I built a machine specifically for it. But I found it very slow with disk duplication, and unable to do some of the more trying tasks; ie.
-Media re-encoding and distribution for DivX Connected;
-Media uploading for Mycast Orb;

Alongside that, I didn't need its extensive shared folders and multiple accounts setup, and yet when I did set up special permissions for SSH SFTP transfers, these permissions were cleared every time I restarted.

So for now, I am trialing a downloaded and cracked no-activation copy of Server 2008. I find it very impressive.

===That said, I can go into more detail about the computer I built the WHS box in.

Antec NSK1380 u-atx case
Asus P5E-VM HDMI motherboard
Intel Core 2 Duo E4300
Scythe Ninja
2Gb RAM
1x 1Tb Samsung F1
extra 10/100/1000 NIC
220W Dell power brick with minibox PW-200-V converter
No keyboard, mouse, monitor, or optical drive

===

For cooling, a single Yate Loon 120mm case fan, with the Ninja running passive.

Fan idles at 60% (about 6V)
Ambient temperature: about 20-22 degrees C
Temperatures as measured in speedfan, on idle / light work:
CPU: 27 degrees C
system: 38-ish
Hard drive: 34-ish

normally it stays in my closet but since I have been testing Server08 on it, it's on a chair next to my main computer. And it is extremely quiet. I can hear the electrical hum of my main computer that is a meter away, under a table, louder than I can hear the WHS box that is 2 feet away.

are you using any special built in software for server 2008, or just your own ways of keeping things organised?

I'm a bit of a control freak, so tend to keep doing things the (hard) manual way, backups (if any), sharing things, organising things etc.
If those things can be done reliably and fully customizable, I might xfer.

Tried Server2008, it looked like vista, and had the same UAC shit and since I was only playing with it for a short time got impatient and chucked it again.