A Silentium Windows Home Server

sanse · Post by **sanse** » Sun Mar 15, 2009 2:05 am

My Windows Home Server was built in an Arctic Cooling Silentium T2 case [ SPCR-review: http://www.silentpcreview.com/article216-page1.html ] based on a full ATX-mobo by Asus. All parts left over from the first edition [ viewtopic.php?t=29112 ] of my Ultimate Amplifier PC [ viewtopic.php?t=47722 ]. At the moment I'm running this machine with an evaluation copy of WHS PP1.

Here are the specs:

Arctic Cooling Silentium T2; 350w Seasonic PSU; Asus A8N-SLI Premium; AMD 4000+; Scythe Ninja Mini; Geil 2Gb pc3200c2; WD GP 500gb; 2*WD GP 1Tb; Asus 6200LE; Arctic Cooling 2*80mm rear-fans; Arctic Cooling 2*80mm front-fans; Sharkoon 140mm mobo-fan; Coolermaster 80mm CPU-fan; mCubed T-Balancer SL-4 + miniNG; Windows Home Server Power Pack 1; WHS Toolkit; Lightsout Power Management

The 2 1Gb Western Digital Caviar Green storage drives are mounted in the top front of the case with Nexus disk-silencers-coolers. The 500Gb Western Digital Caviar Green system drive is mounted in the suspended aluminum harddisk-cage of the AC-case just behind the Seasonic PSU.

The 80mm case-out fans in the back and the 80mm PSU-fans in the front are controlled by a mCubed miniNG fan-controller. The 80mm CPU-fan on top of the Ninja Mini and the 140mm mobo-fan are controlled by the Qfan-controller of the motherboard.

The temperatures and rpm's are:

idle at 19C:
â—‹ case top: 31C;
â—‹ case out: 28C;
â—‹ psu in: 41C;
â—‹ storage disks: 34C;
â—‹ system disk: 35C;
â—‹ motherboard: 34C;
â—‹ CPU: 38C;
â—‹ GPU: 43C;
â—‹ cpu-fan: 727rpm;
â—‹ mobo-fan: 508rpm;
â—‹ case-out fans: 35% of 1800max = 630rpm;
â—‹ psu-in fans: 35% of 1800max = 630rpm;

after backup session at 20C:
â—‹ case top: 34C;
â—‹ case out: 31C;
â—‹ psu in: 45C;
â—‹ storage disks: 38C;
â—‹ system disk: 37C;
â—‹ motherboard: 36C;
â—‹ CPU: 41C;
â—‹ GPU: 46C;
â—‹ cpu-fan: 898rpm;
â—‹ mobo-fan: 541rpm;
â—‹ case-out fans: 35% of 1800max = 630rpm;
â—‹ psu-in fans: 35% of 1800max = 630rpm;

The machine resides in a corner of the livingroom and is exceptionally quiet. With the Lightsout Power Management add-in the server wakes itself at 22:30H in the evening and then makes a backup of the Ultimate Amplifier PC. After the backup the UAPC hibernates itself and then when the server sees it has no more clients to serve it hibernates itself too with the aid of the Lightsout Power Management add-in. A wealth of information about WHS and add-ins can be found at: [ http://www.wegotserved.co.uk/ ]

The on-site backup is fully automated this way.

A few pictures:

T-Balancer SL-4 by which the miniNG can be configured through software.

miniNG controller. At the right the suspended box of the Silentium T2 with the WHS system disk.

80mm rear case-fans with an analog temp-sensor on the left one.

Analog temp-sensors on one of the heatsinks of the Seasonic PSU.

T-Balancer SL-4 in a former floppy-housing and the 5.25 inch bays for the storage disks.

A 1Tb Western Digital Caviar Green storage disk with Nexus HDD-cooler/silencer.

The 2 1Tb storage disks mounted with Nexus HDD-cooler/silencers.

Scythe Ninja Mini with a Coolermaster 80mm fan blowing up.

The 2 1Tb storage disks seen from the rear. At the left a filtered intake.

bozar · Post by **bozar** » Sun Mar 15, 2009 4:28 am

Nice build with adequete cable management. It looks like you lack of some fans blowing the warm air out of the case though.

sanse · Post by **sanse** » Sun Mar 15, 2009 4:52 am

bozar wrote:Nice build with adequete cable management. It looks like you lack of some fans blowing the warm air out of the case though.

thanks.

in fact there are 4 80mm fans extracting air from the machine; the equivalent of 2 120mm fans.

there are 2 fans in the rear top of the case and 2 on top of the PSU in the front of the case. the arctic cooling silentium t2 has a non-atx non-standard air-flow. the 2 fans on top of the psu push air through the psu and out of the case through the bottom. where you normally expect a 120mm fan in the back it now gives a filtered intake. this is also the reason the 80mm cpu-fan is blowing up. the spcr-review as mentioned in my post gives more details.

bozar · Post by **bozar** » Sun Mar 15, 2009 8:43 am

Ohh, they looked so small. Thought they where 40 mm fans

.

sanse · Post by **sanse** » Sun Mar 15, 2009 9:53 am

bozar wrote:Ohh, they looked so small. Thought they where 40 mm fans .

ok, i've added some more text to make the post more clear.

MHVishal · Post by **MHVishal** » Wed Mar 18, 2009 10:56 pm

Hi,
Personally,I just have astandard tower running XP as a server.It doesn't need to be anything fancy.and you could probably get away with something fairly horrible like a 452 with 64 MB of RAM if you really wanted to.
As far as things you can run on it my server urns apache for HTTP/PHP is very high server MYSQL for a database All of which are free.
Another gaming of PC or anything else you'd use a desktop for.

AS far cases go, which is an "Arctic cooling silentium T1"

sanse · Post by **sanse** » Thu Mar 19, 2009 12:29 am

MHVishal wrote:Hi,
Personally,I just have astandard tower running XP as a server.It doesn't need to be anything fancy.and you could probably get away with something fairly horrible like a 452 with 64 MB of RAM if you really wanted to.
As far as things you can run on it my server urns apache for HTTP/PHP is very high server MYSQL for a database All of which are free.
Another gaming of PC or anything else you'd use a desktop for.

AS far cases go, which is an "Arctic cooling silentium T1"

i think you are completely missing the point about the 'intelligent' backup functionality of windows home server.

on the site of microsoft a set of technical briefs can be downloaded describing the functionality of windows home server:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/deta ... n#Overview

especially the documents Windows Home Server Technical Brief for Drive Extender and Windows Home Server Technical Brief for Home Computer Backup and Restore are interesting related to this.