We Got Served

We know that many WGS readers have built their own home servers – some re-purposing old components to create a “Frankenbuild” home server, and others going out there to purchase new components for a brand new system build. It’s a great project to work on, and loads of fun thinking about the right mix of components to use for the build.

A number of websites have run articles featuring ways to build the cheapest, and greenest home servers – we thought it would be fun to pull together a guide on building a hardcore, maxed out home server, that would blow everything else away in terms of power.

We invited Intel’s Stephen Murtha to pull together a maxed-out home server spec for us. Stephen works in Intel’s Storage Platform team, focusing on consumer platforms such as Windows Home Server as well as participating actively in the DLNA – so high performance is close to his heart.

Not only has Stephen pulled together the spec, he went out, got the components and built the home server too, so without further ado, over to Stephen who’ll walk us through building a killer Windows home server system.

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Home Servers are an interesting product category; ask 10 people “What’s a Home Server” and you’ll probably get 10 different answers. Many will respond positively to an OEM product like the HP MediaSmart Home Server. Others will be happy installing the software on an older system which isn’t being used for anything else (although many quickly discover how much disk size, performance, and interconnect technology has changed in just the last couple of years). Still others will want to make their own. Several articles have been published (here, here, here, and here) describing how to put together your own Home Server creating a product comparable to the OEM products.

I’m going to take a different approach and show you how to put together a top-of-the-line WHS system; Core 2 Quad Intel CPU, iStarUSA mid-tower case with 4 SATA hot-swap drives, etc. In the end I have a system that will do file I/O, backups, media streaming, BitTorrent, all while running WHS Disk Extender and other services.

Step 1: Choosing the Parts

If you’ve thought about building a Home Server the first thing you find is that there are precious few Home Server computer cases out there, at least not something like the HP MediaSmart Home Server. Chenbro has their Chenbro ES34069 product, but it is designed for a mini-ITX motherboard which would rule out my Core 2 Quad. Fortunately I found the iStarUSA S-Storm series which includes the S-9-H34 model. It is a Mid-Tower design with a 4 drive SATA cage inserted into 3 of the 5.25” external drive bays. It has room for an appropriately selected power supply, DVD burner, etc. and looked like just the thing. If you really want to scale up, or potentially use this to back up data in a small business, the S-Storm case supports iStarUSA’s dual redundant power supply in a PS/2 size. One of the disappointments of the iStarUSA case was that it didn’t come with the 80 mm rear exhaust fan, which I ended up having to get separately once the parts came and I discovered the lack of a fan.

Next I looked for an Intel motherboard to go with the Core 2 Quad processor. I selected the DQ35JO motherboard. Among the reasons for my selection is the support for 6 SATA ports (including one eSATA), a DVI (so I can connect it to my DVI KVM switch), and Gigabit LAN. I selected the Q6600 a 2.4 GHz CPU with 8MB of L2 Cache and 1066 MHz FSB speed. Finally, I selected 2 GB of DDR PC2 5300 memory.

I wanted my case to neat and orderly, so I’m partial to modular power supplies, although they tend to be a little pricier than non-modular designs. The SATA cage has two 4-pin Molex power connectors and 2 SATA power connectors. Populating either set provides sufficient power for all 4 drives which further reduces clutter.

After selecting the chassis, CPU, motherboard, and Power Supply, what was left was to select the DVD drive and hard disks. I wasn’t terribly interested in a DVD writer, but ended up selecting a DVD burner based on price and availability. I selected a PATA (IDE) DVD burner, but after going through the installation, wished I has gotten a SATA DVD (see more detailed comments below). I finished off by selecting 2 500 GB WD5000AAKS SATA hard drives. These are SATAII (3 Gb/s) 7200 RPM drives with 16 MB of local cache memory.

Step 2: Purchasing the Parts

I got my components from New Egg based on their wide product selection and the fact they were one of the first to provide the Reseller version of Windows Home Server. Below is my shopping list with the New Egg part number for reference.

Once the parts arrived, it was time to put the system together.

Step 3: Assembling the Home Server

Assembling the system was fairly straightforward. I first assembled the motherboard. The Core 2 Quad processor was inserted into the Socket 775 and the heatsink installed as shown below.

Next the DDR2 memory DIMM modules were installed into their sockets. Many Intel motherboards support Active Management Technology or AMT which assists in the management of the system over the network. Windows Home Server does not support this, but I figured I should configure my system so that it was available if supported in the future. One of the requirements is that memory Channel 0 Socket 0 be populated, so I made sure the 2 DDR2 modules were installed in the correct sockets as shown below.

Once the CPU and memory was installed on the motherboard, I screwed it onto the standoffs and installed the EMI panel on the rear of the case. Next I connected the chassis cables for USB connectors, audio, reset, power on, etc. With the motherboard installation completed, I turned my attention to the DVD drive and power supply.

The iStarUSA case utilizes a “compression slider” to lock in the 5.25” and 3.5” externally accessible drives. I simply slid the DVD drive into the 5.25” bay, positioned the face of the drive flush with the front of the case, and slide the slider forward as shown below, and the drive was locked tightly in place.

Next it was time to hook up the power supply. Once the power supply case was secured in the chassis I was able to connect the motherboard power connectors and the ground wire. Next I utilized one of the modular SATA power cables to power the SATA hot swap cage. Finally I used a modular 4 pin Molex connector to hook up power to the DVD drive.

The final assembly step was to hook up the data cables for the SATA and DVD drives. As I mentioned previously I ordered a PATA DVD drive, and the 40 connector ribbon cable was a little difficult to route easily. In 20/20 hindsight I wished I’d gone with a SATA DVD drive (such as this one); it would have made the cabling easier.

Hooking up the SATA cables from the motherboard to the SATA cage was the last step. The 4 SATA connections are aligned along the outer edge of the cage and made routing the data cables fairly easy. I found that using 12” SATA cables eliminated the need to route any excess cable length and made tying them into a bundle fairly easy.

Step 4: Installing Windows Home Server

Once the hardware was all in place, the next step was to install the Windows Home Server OS. There have been several tutorials that run through the detailed steps of installing the Reseller Version of Windows Home Server, so I won’t repeat these steps here. However, the motherboard will require a set of drivers to be installed, so we’ll focus on these steps as you go through the installation process.

I put the installation disk into the DVD drive and rebooted the server. The WHS installation does some “pre-installation” work, then transitions into a more standard “Windows Server” installation. One of the initial steps is to create the System and Data volumes on the first HDD in your system. After the initial load of the installation files you’ll see the following screen showing the available drives, and you’ll notice the button to load additional storage drivers. You’ll need to load the storage drivers (IASTOR.SYS and IAAHCI.SYS) which come on the floppy disc in the box with the motherboard. You can insert the floppy into a floppy drive installed in the system, or use an external USB floppy drive connected to a USB port.

Click on the “Load drivers….” button and select the location of the drivers. Once you’ve located them load them one at a time (for some reason WHS doesn’t allow multi-select for the driver loading…) as shown below.

That’s all that is out of the ordinary until you finish installing WHS. When you are done with the installation you will find that WHS couldn’t find drivers for several hardware components, including the network driver so you won’t be connected to the Internet and won’t be able to download updates or activate your software.

Right-click on My Computer and open the Device Manager to update the drivers. You’ll see the screen below listing the devices which need updated drivers. Insert the Driver CD which came with the motherboard and update each driver by selecting the appropriate driver from the Drivers\Software\Drivers folders on the CD. Start with the “Chipset_INF” folder which will get the core motherboard drivers loaded, and then work on the LAN and Video driver. There are 64-bit and 32-bit video drivers included on the CD so make sure you install the 32-bit XP video driver (Version 14.29.2.4837).

When you’ve completed updating the drivers you’ll be looking at a Device Manager screen with no question marks. You’re now ready to download any updates from the Microsoft Update Service and activate your copy of Windows Home Server.

Well, that’s about it. I’ve got a powerful WHS installation with a SATA cage that will easily let me expand as I need more storage. My quad-core CPU and motherboard will ensure I’ve got all the horsepower I need to run any interesting add-in I find as well as handle any updates to Windows Home Server which come along from Microsoft.

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A big thanks from us at WGS to Stephen for pulling together the specification and walkthrough guide – let us know how this compares to your self-build, and if yours is pimped out even more than Stephen’s, then tell us how (and indeed, why?”)