Andrew Grant

According to statistics one in five PCs will suffer a fatal hard drive failure in their lifetime. Last week our Media Center was one of them.

Fortunately it was the disk containing the OS and not the larger disk that holds all of our media. And while it did take 6-7 hours to reinstall and set everything up again, it would have been far more painful had it been my main PC or my girlfriend’s laptop. With those machines there’s also a pretty good chance we’d have lost something more important than just our TV recording schedule.

Before now my backup strategy was to keep mirrored copies of important files on seperate computers via FolderShare. This prevented us from losing our documents, photos or music, but it didn’t guard against disk failure or an accidental overwrite. I thought it best to take the Media Center failure as a warning shot from fate and move to a better backup strategy.

Enter Windows Home Server.

I received an invite to the Windows Home Server beta a few weeks ago so now seemed like the perfect time to try it out. My aim was to build a WHS machine that would run nightly backups of our three machines, and act as a centralized storage location for all of our media and some large datasets that I use for work.

Over the next week or so I’m going to write about actually setting up and configuring the machine, using it to backup our PCs (including my girlfriends Mac), and integrating the shared media with our Media Center PC.

However this first post is about choosing the best hardware configuration for Windows Home Server, something I spent considerable time researching.

The budget I set my girlfriend set was $600 all-in, which allowing for tax and shipping left $525 for actual components. This is more than I expect many prebuilt machines will retail for when Windows Home Server is released, but I was aiming for a spec quite a bit higher than the entry-level requirements.

There were a few factors to consider when building our Windows Home Server. Firstly our media library is around 200GB, 50GB of which are photos and music we’d hate to lose. The combined disk sizes of the machines we’ll be backing up is another 200GB. Our server is going to be on 24/7 so energy consumption is something to consider, and while it’s going to live in a cupboard in the office/guest-bedroom it still needs to be relatively quiet.

With all this in mind here are the parts I chose, followed by the thought process behind each.

• AMD Athlon 64 X2 3600+ “Brisbane” ($89.00)
• GIGABYTE GA-M61PM-S2 Motherboard ($69.99)
• 1GB A-DATA DDR2 800 RAM ($68.99)
• LITE-ON IDE DVD-ROM Drive ($17.99)
• Rosewill R6421-P ATX Mid-Tower Case ($15.99)
• SeaSonic 330W Power Supply ($69.99)
• 2 x Seagate Barracuda 400GB 7200RPM SATA Hard Drives ($199.98)

 Total: $521.93 before tax and storage.

 

AMD Athlon 64 X2 3600+ “Brisbane”

For a server power and heat are important considerations, and in my opinion AMD chips have a better price/performance/heat ratio than their Intel equivalents. After some research I decided upon an Athlon 64 X2 3600+ from the ”Brisbane” family. This is a dual-core 65nm chip with a max power rating of 65 Watts.

I did consider a chip from the ”Lima” family, which are single-core versions with a higher clock speed and lower power consumption, but the difference was less than $10 and in a server I’d prefer two slower cores than a single fast one.

GIGABYTE GA-M61PM-S2

For WHS I wanted a motherboard with integrated graphics and Gigabit LAN. It also needed to be Socket AM2 for my Athlon, and support DDR800 dual channel memory.

For once I wasn’t concerned about the number of PCI/PCI-E slots, but I did want support for at least four SATA drives. I’d be starting with two HDDs so I wanted a degree of upgradability without the need for an additional controller card.

Putting these requirements into newegg’s Power Search, the result was the GIGABYTE GA-M61PM-S2. It was the cheapest, had a lot of good comments, and I’ve never had a bad experience with a Gigabyte board so I popped it in the cart and moved on.

1GB A-DATA DDR2 800 RAM

The minimum requirement for WHS is 512MB RAM, but 1GB is a better amount if you’re going to be streaming data or using indexing. I also wanted two sticks for Dual Channel performance and the difference between 2×256 and 2×512 was only $30.

LITE-ON IDE DVD-ROM Drive

The easiest choice of all since the only reason I need a DVD-ROM is to install Windows Home Server DVD and drivers. I picked the cheapest I could find, making sure it was IDE so as to not use one of my four SATA slots.

Rosewill R6421-P ATX Mid-Tower Case

It’s ironic that I spent the most time choosing the case since it’s going to be sitting in a cupboard. I’d have loved a shuttle-sized server, but with the amount of storage I expect to use I decided upon a Mid-Tower with room for at least four internal 3.5″ drives. I ignored cases that came with a Power Supply. They can look like a great deal but the PSU’s are invariably low quality and noisy.

The Rosewill was one of the cheaper cases I saw. It looked good and had some very positive buyer feedback so I took a $15 dollar gamble which definitely paid off.

SeaSonic 330W Power Supply

At $70 the SeaSonic isn’t cheap for a 330W PSU, it is however utterly silent.

I bought the same unit when building my Media Center and was very happy with it. The first time I switched it on I actually started to check whether it was plugged in – it’s that quiet.

2 x Seagate Barracuda 400GB 7200RPM SATA Hard Drives

I decided early on that I would settle on specs for the server then spend the rest of my budget on the two biggest HDDs I could afford.

Because I wanted to use WHS’s data replication feature I needed two disks roughly equivalent in size. Two 500GB drives would have put me over budget so I went for the next size down, 400GB.

With one drive being used for data replication, 400GB may seem a little tight to store 200GB of media files and backup 200GB of data from other PCs. However, WHS employs “Single Instance Storage” for backups where identical clusters on a drive are only stored once. Not only does this massively reduce the amount of space needed to backup a machine, but additional backups require radically less space.

 

Potential Savings

If my budget had been lower there’s a few changes I’d have made. First to go would have been the SeaSonic power supply, for $25 you can get a great, though not silent, 350/400W PSU.

Moving to 512MB of RAM would have saved about $30, and a mid-spec Semperon a further $40. Buying a motherboard from a less well known manufacturer, or with less SATA connectors, could have saved another $30.

Moving to two 320GB or 250GB drives would have saved around $40 and $60 respectively. I could also have bought a single HDD and used any external drives I might have lying around.

Finally there’s the DVD-ROM. Since the only need for this is to install Windows Home Server I could have used the drive from my main machine temporarily to save another $18.

 Summary

It’s clear that for as little as $400 you can build a perfectly capable Windows Home Server with dual drives – and of course this can be reduced further if you have unused hardware to begin with.

Everyone’s needs are different though. While these specs are great for me your needs may be slightly different. What would you change, and why?