Welcome to Brendon Davis
The place where I’m in charge
My WHS
I’m a big fan of the Home Server product and have been using it since it was released as a public beta. Having both a MCE and WHS box at home, on most of the time does use a fair amount of power. I saw an article at HomeServerHacks that showed the building of a low power 11TByte server and got to thinking.
My initial intention was to build a tiny 11W Pico home server, but the system drive only supported IDE and adding my external drives for storage via USB would have been slow and wasted power savings by running multiple power packs. The Eee Box from asus was also a good option but again didn’t support any internal expandability past the internal 2.5″ SATA disk.
When my old trusty ASUS P4 motherboard running the WHS failed I knew it was time to take the leap. I found getting some of the components recommended by HSH in Australia proved interesting, I ended up using BITS and Megabuy online stores to get some equivalent parts. As such, I am now running my Home Server on:
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Total power at idle = 72W |
I am REALLY happy with the box, The duel core Atom runs both the WHS and MS Virtual Server 2005 R2. I have enough RAM to run a VM I can remote into when I want to do testing from the house. At some stage in the future, I would like to get the APEVIA X-QPACK2-GN/500 green micro ATX case. Unfortunately it is not shipped to Australia and I can’t justify $100 shipping.
I’m not a big fan or running 1000 add-in’s for the sake of it. The few that I have found useful in administering my server are:
- Windows Home Server Disk Management Add-in
- Windows Home Server Toolkit
- Event Viewer Add-In for Windows Home Server
NOTES:
Motherboard – If you are purchasing an Atom board, stick with Intel. I used a Gigabyte board for a friends PC and had no end of issues….
RAM – The Atom boards are REALLY particular with what RAM is supported, check compatibility lists when choosing your RAM.
PCI SATA Card – The Atom board comes with 2 onboard SATA ports and only a single PCI slot. I chose this card as it provides 3 internal SATA and 1 external eSATA ports. It supports hot adding and removal of drives and is compatible with SATA port multipliers.
HDD Caddy – Most small form factor cases come with a maximum of 2x 5.25″ drives. This limited me to the 3 disk tray option and as the raid card supports 3 internal ports, it worked out well. My system disk comes off the onboard port for performance and as it doesn’t support hot plugging anyway.
802.11n Wireless – Wireless isn’t officially supported on WHS but as we are renting and can’t run CAT5 around the house, 11n works better than my current 10/100 switch. It also lets me conceal the servers & router in cupboards to hide cables and noise.
For more information on Windows Home Server, have a read through my posts at http://brendon.davis.to/whs.