A few weeks ago, I blogged about the hardware I was using for the Windows Home Server beta. A few of you have mentioned what hardware you’re using… how about everyone else? Are you re-using components from around the house (Frankenservers) or buying new? Are you using multiple hard drives for folder duplication, or just a single large drive?
And where are you locating these machines? One more piece of hardware to fit into the house - another set of fans making a racket? Have you hidden the server away somewhere? In a cupboard/closet? In the basement or garage? Let us know what your kit looks like - feel free to get in touch and send some pics through and maybe we’ll get a flickr feed going on the site.
February 25th, 2007 at 3:31 pm
I repurposed my Sony Vaio RG210G
3 Ghz Pentium D900 series
1 GB Ram
Two 150 GB HDD
it is in the basement.
February 25th, 2007 at 5:02 pm
I went for a nice little Asus Silver & White T3-M2NC51PV case which seems to be very quite.
Currently got a single SATA disk but the case has an ESATA slot.
February 25th, 2007 at 11:59 pm
I have built an Intel Celeron 2.6, 1GB, Intel motherboard, Geforce 5700, with a single SATA 160GB HD. This system is actually going to relative in the next few weeks so I need to find another machine to make a home server. I am looking in building some cool, quiet, and with lots of hard disks.
February 26th, 2007 at 11:34 am
My home server is powered by a 2.8GHz Pentium 4 HT on an ASUS P4P800-MX motherboard, 1GB RAM, 2x 80GB Seagate SATA hard drives (No RAID), CD Writer and a DVD Reader, small cheap case, 400w PSU and some nice quiet fans.
Because I run an Active Directory at home, I have created a test network consisting of 2 PII Compaq Deskpros, an old PII Toshiba notebook and a P3 Dell notebook. The clients all run XP SP2, with the Compaqs connecting by ethernet, the laptops by WiFi.
It’s all kept in a small (but ventilated)cupboard and I view the clients by using NetSupport Manager.
All in all, a humble but capable setup.
February 27th, 2007 at 8:42 am
Frankenmachine, an old Dell 8200 series with P4 1.9, added 2×250 IDE (Samsung Spinpoint - nice and quiet), upgraded the RAM to 1Gb and I needed a new PSU as well so I went for a Tagan (again nice and quiet).
As I live open plan it needs to be even quiter so I’m going to buy a Lian-Li V1100 case shortly. (Aluminium goodness).
February 27th, 2007 at 8:18 pm
“The beast” came today — brand new Dell Dimension E521 with a Sempron 3400 processor and 512 MB ram. It also came with a 160 GB hard drive. The testing plan is to install WHS on it as is and use it for a short time (ie a week or so). I then plan to slap in two more drives, like both 500 GB. It was a bit of an impluse buy as the Frankenmachine I had originally planned to draft into service came up short on botting from DVD. That put me in a situation where I needed almost a whole new system.
Once I get the two other hard drives it will be time to think about a ram upgrade and looking at how it handles adding external storage. I also forsee a “drive failure” in the near future for my box. I wonder how it will handle that
March 1st, 2007 at 1:14 pm
Frankenmachine also - an old Compaq iPaq desktop (nice small form factor). Had to buy a multibay DVD drive for installation and upgrade the memory to 512Mb and hard drive (Western Digital) to 120Gb. It’s just a P3 500Mhz (a bit low I know), but WHS installed first shot and it’s currently running just fine. Located in spare bedroom - can hear a low hum coming from it once in a while!
March 1st, 2007 at 2:30 pm
Presently running at just about min spec using an old Fujitsu Scenic 1GHz PIII with 512 MB RAM and 2x 40GB hard drives.
I’ve had a problem updating the BIOS to recognise larger drives so am going to be swapping it for a virtually identical machine but will be putting a 200GB drive in.
March 2nd, 2007 at 11:26 am
Frankenmaschinen!!
Old Winfast K7 Motherboard with Nforce2 Chipset.
CPU: 1.3GHz Athlon Socket A
RAM: 1GB of 333 RAM
Disks: 1x Seagate 120GB SATA, 1 X Seagate 320GB SATA
GRaphics: Leadtek 5700 (I Think)
This was a bit of a pig to get going at first, as the drivers for win2k3 don’t exist, but by fiddling with XP drivers it is finally all there!
The performance is pretty good, and the install is stable. I like the software and I’m making some suggestions as to added features.
March 4th, 2007 at 10:08 am
Frankenmachine upgraded for server purposes. Cheapo case with good ventilation, pair of 120mm fans and air duct for Arctic Cooling 64 CPU cooler. Asus A8V Deluxe Mobo with Athlon 64 3500+ CPU. 1GB of RAM. EVGA 6600 video card. Sony DVD-ROM drive. 450W PSU. 3 WD HDD’s (320GB main and two 250GB drives; all IDE). Hardware upgrade finished today, will crank the beast up tomorrow and load software. Anxious to try it out with WHS on my home network. Currently have one laptop and one desktop running wirelessly, and 6 wired desktops (variety of OS’s, including one Win98).
March 4th, 2007 at 10:42 pm
Another Frankenmachine. Socket A 1.3GHz. Pcchips board, with VT8235 Southbridge. 1 GB PC2100 RAM (Single strip). Noname 400watt PSU. DVD player. ATI 9200 GPU. 80mm modified blower at the back.
I have a couple of 120mm fans which I might fit if case temperature becomes an issue. All these parts were sitting in various boxes around the house.
I purchased a SATA controller card and two WD 500GB HDD to throw into the setup.
The server will link the other four computers in the house, three XP Home and one MCE2005 media computer. Three wired and one wireless.
The setup should be capable of operating as a server because I did a similar experiment using Linux a couple of years ago.
March 5th, 2007 at 10:53 am
Now on a lookout for a nice gigabit router as most of the PC’s that i connect to WHS are cabled up apart from the laptop which is wireless.
Any suggestions ?
March 9th, 2007 at 4:08 pm
I opted to build a “new” Frankenserver for testing WHS. It’s running an Athlon 64 X2 5200+ on an Abits KN9 mobo with 1GB Corsair DDR2 800 RAM, twin 500GB Seagate Barracuda SATA drives, and onboard Gb ethernet. I also reused a Lite-on DVD drive and an ATI Radeon X300 PCIe video card that I’d ripped out of another PC when I did some pre-Vista upgrades on it last year. I plugged this stuff into a sick XION II X101 mid tower case w/450W PSU (that I didn’t really need, but liked the cool green lights - oooh shiny).
All in all, a pretty good test server for under 8 Benjamins. The case has plenty of room for expansion (I have 2 SATA channels, 3 IDE channels, 2 USB2 headers, and 9 drive bays that are currently unused). I figure that if WHS doesn’t work out for me I will at least have a pretty good start on a nice workstation box.
BTW - WHS server installation was flawless and I currently have 3 XP clients and 2 Vista clients connected.
March 13th, 2007 at 7:18 pm
I have a Dell 4100 Brick my work was going to trash w/ a failing Hdd.
P3 @ 1 Ghz w/ 512MB memory.
It now has 320GB & 80GB WD Hdds & a CDRW/DVD Reader.
Resting in the corner of my home office purring away rather quietly.
The 4x (so far) i’ve installed WHS the time varies (to install & hit the desktop) from 1:10 to 1:05 (Hr:Min).
I have had no problems either installing the OS its just the Remote Access that doesn’t work for me.
September 1st, 2007 at 8:58 am
I am using an old HP 2.8 ghz Celeron w/512 megs. I had to install a video card to get enough memory for the install to work. It let me scrape by with 504, the built in video card would not release this memory when it was disabled. There is also (1) 80gig hd & (1) 200 gig. So far I have added all the add on’s that you can download and it is running great. It backs up 5 machines every night. Added a personal web page, photo page, I really like this product.
So far I have tested a full restore of a machine that WHS had backed up, went just great. I have also loaded a Battlefield 2 server and call of duty 2 server also, with no ill effects. However with this slow machine only 3 people could play on it at the same time.
Con’s:
I believe that the web application is very limited in what you can do. To really work with it you have to use the remote desktop feature.
Remote access through the web to your desktops is not supported on Windows Home editions even the Ultimate one.
September 15th, 2007 at 6:19 pm
Waiting for WHS… still in backorder
Server setup:
Gigabyte G33M-DS2R Motherboard
Intel Core2Duo E6750 Processor
3×400GB Samsung Spinpoint T166 HDD (SATA2)
1×200GB Western Digital (IDE)
2×1024MB Corsair Ram (DDR2-6400)
Antec Truepower Trio 430 Watt with internal fancontrol-thingie
And it’s in a bigass Chieftec case from the mesh-series
(the biggest one :P)
3×92mm fans for the HDD’s and 2×120 mm at the back. The front has holes everywhere
If only that friggin dvd would be here
September 15th, 2007 at 8:08 pm
Wow - that’s one high spec server! You’d get away with less memory and a slower processor, but I reckon you’re a speed demon!
October 4th, 2007 at 6:30 pm
Reloaded my old server with WHS
AMD Athlon 64 X2 dual core 3800+
Asus M2N32 Motherboard
Thermaltake Xaser Armor case with 2 additional Icages.
Enermax 620 Watt power supply
1 Gig of Kingston DDR2 RAM
Asus GeForce 7300GS video card
LG DVD writter
Promise ATA133 controller card (older ide drives)
1 500 Gig Western Digital SATA Drive for the OS
1 320 Gig Seagate SATA
4 300 Gig Seagate SATA
4 200 Gig Western Digital IDE
Just over 2.5 TB total. Backing up six systems.
November 21st, 2007 at 4:08 pm
I have a Dell Precision 530 with Dual 2.8-GHz Xeon, 1GB RDRAM running 2 (73GB SCSI) at RAID 1 and 2 external 500GB USB Drives. ATI Video w.128MB RAM. A DVD ROM Drive. I chose the 530 because I can fit an internal DLT7000 tape drive to add an extra level of backup in case any of the drives fails. I have an automated weekly tape backup I’m looking to add two 80GB internal IDE drives as I have nothing else better to do with them.
I have a Vista Ultimate desktop and XP Pro laptop as clients
November 23rd, 2007 at 10:26 pm
I’ve got an old Voodoo rig based on the ASUS A8V Deluxe board with 2Gb RAM, but I can’t install WHS on it, I keep running into the same error relating to the SATA drivers.
Anyone with an A8V??? What drivers did you use?
December 5th, 2007 at 3:41 pm
I have a HP Prolient ML115 Opteron II 1.8ghz Processor 1gb Ram. Was £214 new and HP had an offer on where they gave you a full rebate on SBS 2003 R2. Bargain!!! Full exchange server for just over £200.
January 14th, 2008 at 12:57 am
Im using an A8N-SLI mother board with 512mb pc3500 memory and an AMD Athlon 64 3200 processor at 2 GHz. Ive loaded into it three 80Gb, one 200Gb, and one 250Gb hard drives. The case is a 19 inch 4U rackmount server case. I realize that a case of this size is overkill but the case is located in the basemnet in a rackmount that serves all of my audio video and telephone hardware. plus it can be upgrade with very little effort and expension capabilities. it is a truly headless system. ive incorporated a 300 watt power supply and a UPS to maintain power. Currently i am running 3 XP machines and 3 Vista machines with little to no hassle.
January 17th, 2008 at 2:52 pm
Frankenserver
P4 478 Chip
Gigabyte GA-8S650GXM
1Gb memory
250 Gb Samsung Spinpoint IDE
Lite-On 90W PSU
Runs at 69W at idle, 135W when working, but the PSU seems to cope
Tried underclocking but made no difference to power consumption. Can’t change the Vcore, Bios won’t allow.
February 8th, 2008 at 12:21 pm
I have an old DELL Poweredge 600SC 512mb ram 1.6 Celeron 1x 120gb ATA and 2 x 250gb SATA drives
Has all my music and my photos on it. I have disabled my case fans and keep it in my garage (which is nice and cold) and it runs like a charm. Just going to upgrade my switch from 100TX to 1000TX to improve streaming to my media centre.
March 10th, 2008 at 5:22 pm
Im using:
CoolerMaster Cosmos case
Antec EarthPower 500w PSU
ASUS P5E-VM DO mobo
Intel E4500 chip
2gig Ram (wanting for running add-ins)
2-500gig WD Green HDD