Windows Home Server

[paulkpetersen]

I am in the process of building a Windows Home Server machine and setting it up on my network. It will handle backups and be the shared drive for all my computers. Has anyone either bought the HP home server or built one? Mine will have 4 500gb drives.

[lkeeney]

I just set up a H.P. home server, and so far I like it. I only have two 500GB drives and have them almost filled up with my images from the past 6 years. I have been using a Yellow Machine which is a network RAID 5 1TB drive system. I now have all my photos on two different network drive systems.

I like the fact the H.P. server has a gigabit network interface.

[paulkpetersen]

did you buy one or build one? I am waiting for the delivery of my third hard drive and then I will install the software and set it up. can you log on to yours over the internet? does that work well?

[W.Smith]

Apple's 'Time Capsule' – upto 4x 1TB, and superfast 802.11n – works out of the box....

[lkeeney]

Originally Posted by paulkpetersen

did you buy one or build one? I am waiting for the delivery of my third hard drive and then I will install the software and set it up. can you log on to yours over the internet? does that work well?

I purchased the H.P. Media Smart Server with two 500GB drives.

I haven't set it up yet for use over the internet as I don't really have a need for this feature. I originally thought I would like this feature as I sometimes do some web design while I am on the road, and it would be nice to have access to files on my main computer, but I think I am going to use this server just for my photos.

[jfrancho]

That's a lot of money and hardware for essentially 1 TB of storage.

[paulkpetersen]

I bought a case, AMD Athlon 64 X2 3600 and a GIGABYTE GA-M61PM-S2 motherboard. 1Gb of ram and 3-500 gb Hitachi drives. I am about to load windows home server on it and fire it up!

From what I have heard it is very stable and really a terrific solution to backup and storage.

Thought about buying the HP system but that seemed too easy! I had three Hard Drives that I bought and had no place for them.

[paulkpetersen]

Home server does more than just backup. You can connect to your files from anywhere, it backs up 10 or less computers every night, with addins you can even use it as a mail server. It is actually pretty cool.

[jfrancho]

I have all of that for the cost of my Seagate ES series drives, except the mail server, and I wouldn't want that anyway. It sounds like a cool toy though.

[lkeeney]

Originally Posted by jfrancho

That's a lot of money and hardware for essentially 1 TB of storage.

I'm not sure is you were responding to my post or that of W. Smith, but I paid about $750 for the server. A couple of years ago, I paid about $1250 for a 1TB Yellow Machine which is still working great. The Yellow machine has RAID 5, and the H.P. Server has some sort of proprietary redundancy.

My computer building days are over. I get too frustrated with all the little problems that come up.

[JDArt]

Originally Posted by paulkpetersen

I am in the process of building a Windows Home Server machine and setting it up on my network. It will handle backups and be the shared drive for all my computers. Has anyone either bought the HP home server or built one? Mine will have 4 500gb drives.

I have set up two Windows Home Server machines.

Some lessons:

• Definitely use your largest hard drive as the first drive in the machine. I suggest a 1 terabyte drive. 20 gigs of the first drive will be partitioned off for the OS.
• While WHS works great as a backup machine and for remotely accessing your PCs, I have found that if you use it for network storage as well, it will slow down terribly, giving lots of "balancing storage" messages, with the hard drives churning almost constantly.

[notsotechie]

I'm Just in the process of building mine but for some reason I don't know if window home server preferr pentium processor as Im usng an AMD 3500 but could be the mainboard having a major glitch.
when it time to reboot it seem its not their.ARRRGGGHH.
So this is the fourth time I try getting the WHS installed. I think WHS dosent like Raid 0 set up so having whs on 160 gig then 2X 80 raid 0 the will hook up 2 X 250 raid 0 anothe 2 X 250 raid 0 as the 250 are no the same drive they have to be exactly the same groan. wIll let you know how the out come is.
I wish I could do raid 5 but unfortnatly the mainboard don't just 0 or 1 or 0+1

[paulkpetersen]

WHS will not work on a computer set up in raid. It has it's own propritary system of using the drive. Turn raid off at the bios and it will work fine.

[notsotechie]

well it worked will see how long it last so soon I gotta run around install the window home server connection and start backing.
Ps it worked raid o 2 x 80 2x 250 2x 250
so a total of 1.2 Terabyte I hope there is enough room.
the way I did it enable it after the install then wish me luck on this dangerous endevour.
Thanks paulkpetersen will keep that in mind if it bugs up if I have to do it over well that will teach me a lesson.
trial and error is the best way but fusterating.

[brian.austin]

RAID 0 is striping so you have NO redundancy at all. One drive goes down and the whole storage system is toast. Make sure your backups are current. The more drives you have, the more likely it is that one will fail.

Hardware RAID cards will work fine in just about any operating system because they present a single volume to the OS. The card itself takes care of RAID chores. You can add additional drivers and/or software to manage the RAID at the OS level but this can also be done at the RAID BIOS level without accessing the operating system.

I tend to discourage people against using software RAID unless there is simply no other choice.

[jfrancho]

I'm using hardware RAID 1 and it works great. Fast drives help with the write times, though its a little slower than if there was no redundancy.