SEE UPDATE BELOW.

So, Friday evening, the UPS man brought my pile of parts from Newegg and I began assembling my new file server. I could have just used my old hardware, except for the fact that the old hardware is not going to work with the new 2.0 release of Windows Home Server due to not having enough RAM and more importantly, only having a 32-bit processor. RAM, I could fix possibly, but not the CPU problem.

I bought really cheap stuff, because WHS just doesn’t require that much, and I also wanted low power. So, I got a really power frugal, single core AMD Sempron, a couple of gig of RAM, a cheap ATX case and motherboard, and a SATA 750 Gig hard drive (the 1TB drives are still not getting good reviews, so I’m waiting on those.) I originally was going to get 2 of these drives and just sync, like I did on the old server. However, I decided to save some money and use the two PATA drives (500 Gig each) out of the old server as the backup drives.

I also pulled a power supply out of one of my old PCs I had lying around. Unfortunately, that PS was too old. It was 20 pin and I needed a newer 24 pin. Fortunately, I had one of those in another old box (and it is a fairly new PS with good efficiency and hybrid modular outputs, sweeeet!).

The initial building of the box went well, and other than the fact that the Phoenix BIOS writer couldn’t spell device correctly, I was pretty well pleased with everything. I didn’t initially install the PATA drives, just the SATA, but it was working fine. I had decided I would have no optical drives in the server, so I took my external, USB case that I had a CD ROM drive in, pulled that out, and threw in an old Sony DVD/ROM/Burner. This will be handy, as I can use it on my NetBook as well, and there’s no optical drive in the server sucking power and restricting airflow.

Speaking of airflow, the case fan was quite loud. I ran the box for awhile without that fan plugged in, and while I think it would have been just fine that way, I decided I should really plug it back in. I also had an issue when I installed the WHS software. It couldn’t recognize the Realtek onboard network chip. Fortunately, I had an old 3Com card in another box (this is why I don’t throw this old stuff out folks). I popped that card in, added the two PATA drives, and reconnected the case fan. I also configured the BIOS to enable smart fan control. This had the effect of reducing the CPU and case fan to half their previous RPM, and made the noise accetable, though it is still louder than the old Dell GX260 that I was using as a server (I had specifically bought a refurb GX260 because it was quiet). I still may unplug the case fan if the noise is too high. The drives will be spun down most of the time, there’s not video processing going on, and with the single, low power core, it just doesn’t need much cooling. This will be even more true when I put it on the floor of the downstairs level of my house which is a good 10 degrees cooler than anywhere else in the house.

After putting the 3Com card in, my server got onto the network with no problems. I validated the OS, and then started the updates. This part took awhile. They’ve made a lot of updates since the RTM of WHS. Also, got tons of patches for Windows Server 2003, upon which WHS is built. I enabled remote connections to the box, so I can run it headless, and yet still get to the innards of the OS if (well, when) I need to. Adding the PATA drives required installing a third party partition manager since the drives were in a FreeBSD native format that no one else supports.

Hardware list:

Rosewill R102-P-BK 120mm Fan MicroATX Mid Tower Computer Case – Retail

BIOSTAR MCP6P M2+ 6.X AM3/AM2+/AM2 NVIDIA GeForce 6150 / nForce 430 Micro ATX AMD Motherboard – Retail

Western Digital Caviar Black WD7501AALS 750GB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5″ Hard Drive -Bare Drive

AMD Sempron 140 Sargas 2.7GHz Socket AM3 45W Single-Core Processor Model SDX140HBGQBOX – Retail

Crucial Vostro 2GB 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 800 (PC2 6400) Desktop Memory Model CTVOS2GBD2S806C – Retail

For the above components, I paid $224 delivered. Then, from my old computers, I scavenged these parts:

2 x Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 ST3500630A 500GB 7200 RPM 16MB Cache IDE Ultra ATA100 3.5″ Hard Drive (Perpendicular recording) -Bare Drive (Discontinued, but I paid $119 each on 11/28/2007).

Antec NeoPower 550 550W ATX12V SLI Certified CrossFire Ready Active PFC Power Supply – Retail (Discontinued, but paid $69.99 on 8/26/2008)

3Com 100/10 PCI Ethernet card. No idea what I paid or when I bought it.

So, that’s the hardware. Reusing parts saved me a good bit. I could have saved more if I had just wanted 1 Gig of DDR2-400 RAM instead of the 2 Gig of DDR2-800 and if i had just used my old drives.

Software:

The setup of the software was very easy. It took quite a learning curve to get the old FreeNAS box set up, and upgrading was also a pain. While WHS, out of the box, is much more limited than FreeNAS, it does come with a https web server that is very easy to set up so you can remotely access your files. It was also easy to set up a remote backup of my PC’s OS partition. While I don’t have SSH/FTP access to the WHS box, the web interface will do most of what I really need, which is allow me to access my data from anywhere. There are also plugins that extend its abilities, and some of these are free. In addition, I am sure I could just administer the box as a 2003 Server and change some things around if I needed to. (And indeed, I already did custom power settings to make the drives spin down after 10 minutes of inactivity.)

While I love to hate Microsoft, the experience of getting this box up and running was very easy compared to FreeNAS. I love my old FreeNAS box and hated to give it up, but it was just going to be too much of a hassle to upgrade it (and hope the upgrade fixed my problems with it.) Maybe one day, someone in the open source community will get it right, but so far, I haven’t found a solution as easy to set up as Microsoft (and I’ve tried several, from Ubuntu server to OpenFiler.)

UPDATE: Almost one year later, I would like to update my experiences. After having problems with the Windows Home Server domain service, I was unable to connect to my machine over the Internet. After reading about the new version of WHS and seeing that it was having important features removed, and vendors have pulled out of supporting it, I decided to abandon the OS and instead, go with Windows Server 2008 R2.  I am able to access it easily through DynDNS and also it will allow me to set up IIS, SQL Server and Sharepoint. I might even set up Exchange. MS is just not putting money into WHS. It was a good idea, but the industry seems to regard it as a dying product. To beef up my box, I replaced the Sempron with a Triple core Athlon II X3 450 Processor (3.2 GHz) and added 4 more gig of RAM bringing the total to 6 gig. I also put a total of 4 half terabyte drives into it, with 3 of them in a RAID 5 (software) configuration.

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