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Windows Home Server Build question

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phillyman36

Golden Member
I brought a Dune media player and should have it by end of this week or early next week. I just downloaded the Windows home server trail. i am going to buy a cheap psu and video card to test out the WHS build. my parts are listed

Asus p5q-e, Q9450, 3gigs of ram, wd 750gig hard drive and a coolermaster haf 932.

I am going to buy a cheap psu and video card just to test it out.

My question is from the research ive been doing i have to go to the intel website to get the chipset drivers. What do i do for the video card and lan drivers? Also does the server have to be directly attached to the router or can it be attached to a giga switch?

Im am trying to do as much as i can to increase my network skills but the more i read the more questions i start having.

Thanks for any info
 
Questions are good, means your trekking into territory you haven't been, learning something new.

I assume you're using the p5q-e onboard NIC? If so, you can get the drivers off of ASUS's website.

Depending on your video card, you can get your drivers from one of two places. NVIDIA.com, or ATI.com. Depending on the version of WHS, you'll probably get basic/generic NIC, and video card drivers installed.
 
Hmm.. Q9450, 3gigs of ram,is a Overkill for WHS.

Cheap PSU is the last thing to use in server that is usually On 24/7.

I do Not know what you plan to store on the server, but 750GB might be too small, especially if you are going to use Redundancy storage.

To get Giga Network the server and the Networked computers need Giga NIC. They all must be plugged into Giga Switch.

Can be Giga switch of a Router that is Giga capable or an independent Giga switch.
 
I guess I should post mine:

Old ASUS A7N8X @ 1 gig of RAM with a AMD Athlon Barton 2500+ (1.83 ghz)
80gig boot disk and 3 1TB WD black drives.
Videocard is some ultra old passively cooled Gainward nvidia card. IT doesn't matter because once your installed there is no good reason to leave a head on it.

You don't need a lot of power for what WHS does. That quad will go mostly wasted. Even my machine is considered overkill but I happened to have all that except the 1TB disks in the "spares" bin so I used it. I might convert it to an Atom later but it annoys me that the RAM stick costs more than the entire board and proc at the moment.

Also WHS is not really the server I would be testing my skills on. It is a very neutered version of SBS2003, joining it to a domain / promoting it to a DC will cause it to shutdown due to "EULA violations" etc.

However I do think it is great for home use. I already deal with servers and Enterprise solutions all day at work. I like the plug it and forget it of WHS for the house.
 
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Hey thanks everyone for the responses. I thought it would be overkill with those parts but that's what i have sitting around not in use. From what i gathered i can add more drives latter to increase the pool size. once i get all the parts i just want to see if it can stream my blu ray movies and dvd movies to 2 media players without any problems. I don't think i will have it run 24/7.

At what point would one pick a Nas device vs a windows home server?

i have 2 needs
1) Stream movies to 2 media players (wired)
2) Access my files from another computer(not in my network but another location) when i'm at work or at a friends house
 
NAS for home: Only when low power is a concern.

WHS:
For any task where you need CPU horse power. Such as Windows media doing transcoding as it feeds over to your xbox etc.
For any task where you want mirror based redundancy on a 'per share' instance
For what is proving to be a very effective automatic backup solution that uses Single Instance Storage reducing the backup sizes a ton.
For when you want remote access to files.

Yes I am aware that some NAS's can do the above but so far the WHS has been painless.
 
I would like to not have the electric bill go up a noticeable amount so i would like low power. I'm not sure if a Nas can stream hd content to 2 media players(Dune Base media player) at the same time. Ill test this and see how it works. Once again I appreciate all the information everyone has given me.
 
Well to be honest then, a quad is definitely not the best choice... Streaming will be be mostly disk limited, followed by Network. If your planning to stream high def over wireless I would rethink it. You should be able to at least use speedstep on the quad to lower power but speedstep and quads is not the most efficient. They improved it in nehalem because the cores are not clock synced anymore.

Most highdef stuff is a couple of megabytes a second if it is mostly uncompressed. Most smaller NAS's can do it. The 2 units at the same time however would make me wonder, mostly because some NAS's do great on sequential but are poor at random.
 
imagoon said:
Well to be honest then, a quad is definitely not the best choice... Streaming will be be mostly disk limited, followed by Network. If your planning to stream high def over wireless I would rethink it. You should be able to at least use speedstep on the quad to lower power but speedstep and quads is not the most efficient. They improved it in nehalem because the cores are not clock synced anymore.

Most highdef stuff is a couple of megabytes a second if it is mostly uncompressed. Most smaller NAS's can do it. The 2 units at the same time however would make me wonder, mostly because some NAS's do great on sequential but are poor at random.
Click to expand...

I would have it wired. Would definitely not try to do it wireless.
 
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