Windows Home Server build

[BD2003]

Originally posted by: Madwand1

Originally posted by: RebateMonger
Anyway, I'm impressed that WHS can transfer files as quickly as it does. I was under the impression that the Drive Extender technology was more limiting than it is. It appears to be keeping up nicely. Maybe there were some speed improvements with Power Pack 1 of WHS?

Recent drives are faster. With some effort and sacrifice, I think that Vista / 2008 to WHS transfers could exceed 100 MB/s -- I do that at present from Vista to 2003.

You running faster than gigabit ethernet or something? Theoretical max should be 100mb, realistically, 60-70mb/sec is the highest I've ever seen.

 

[Madwand1]

Originally posted by: BD2003
You running faster than gigabit ethernet or something? Theoretical max should be 100mb, realistically, 60-70mb/sec is the highest I've ever seen.

Double-check your theory.

 

[RebateMonger]

Originally posted by: ViRGE
This speeds it up since you're no longer (usually) trying to write files to the same drive the OS is running off of and because now the drive extender isn't constantly tying up 2+ drives trying to bounce files off of the primary drive.

I was glad that Microsoft spent the time last year going over the Drive Extender technology with a fine-toothed comb. Although those early file corruption issues were troubling, I feel alot more confident about the technology now.

 

[JackMDS]

Originally posted by: BD2003You running faster than gigabit ethernet or something? Theoretical max should be 100mb, realistically, 60-70mb/sec is the highest I've ever seen.

Actully theoretical should be 125MB/sec.,

However No matter how hard I tried with regular hardware, I never topped sustained 56MB/sec. from server out, and 48Mb/sec. on peer-to-peer.

 

[RebateMonger]

Originally posted by: JackMDS
However No matter how hard I tried with regular hardware, I never topped sustained 56MB/sec. from server out, and 48Mb/sec. on peer-to-peer.

I don't rememeber who it was, but a Forum member was quoting 80 MB/s transfers a while back. I'm pretty sure he/she was using hgiher end gear. I'm mostly stuck with Realtek controllers and DLink's cheapest switches for my personal use. . (Though Realtek's 1 Gigabit controllers are apparently pretty good).

 

[JackMDS]

Originally posted by: RebateMonger

Originally posted by: JackMDS
I don't rememeber who it was, but a Forum member was quoting 80 MB/s transfers a while back. I'm pretty sure he/she was using hgiher end gear. I'm mostly stuck with Realtek controllers and DLink's cheapest switches for my personal use. . (Though Realtek's 1 Gigabit controllers are apparently pretty good).

Yeah I remeber it too. I actually tried to duplictae it and could get the same result.

LOL I decided to try to Google for for the term.

best giga network transfer

Just to get my own page.

 

[Madwand1]

Originally posted by: RebateMonger
I don't rememeber who it was, but a Forum member was quoting 80 MB/s transfers a while back. I'm pretty sure he/she was using hgiher end gear. I'm mostly stuck with Realtek controllers and DLink's cheapest switches for my personal use. . (Though Realtek's 1 Gigabit controllers are apparently pretty good).

80 MB/s is so 2006. I've been hitting around 115 MB/s since 2007 (at end):

http://www.tomshardware.com/fo...page-21405_42_100.html

I've also done this with consumer hardware and OS's, including inexpensive D-Link switches. The key in my case has been Vista as the client for its large buffers, and an OS later than XP-32 on the receiving end (e.g. 2003, XP-64, Vista). Vista to Vista, I've also seen very fast pulls (> 100 MB/s), which I haven't seen under other configuration. All this refers to Windows file transfers. FTP is a different situation as you can avoid Windows OS/tuning issues with third-party implementations. Some *nix-based OS's have also been producing nice Windows file transfer numbers lately, but I'm not up the relevant details at present.

 

[IndyJaws]

As the OP, I want to thank RebateMonger and JackMDS for their testing of the various configurations. It was incredibly informative. It looks like another 1/2 gig - 1 gig RAM plus a gigabit NIC will be my best bang for the buck. I'm building the server over the weekend. I'll make sure to post my results. Thanks to everyone who jumped in on the thread!!!

 

[BD2003]

Originally posted by: Madwand1

Originally posted by: RebateMonger
I don't rememeber who it was, but a Forum member was quoting 80 MB/s transfers a while back. I'm pretty sure he/she was using hgiher end gear. I'm mostly stuck with Realtek controllers and DLink's cheapest switches for my personal use. . (Though Realtek's 1 Gigabit controllers are apparently pretty good).

80 MB/s is so 2006. I've been hitting around 115 MB/s since 2007 (at end):

http://www.tomshardware.com/fo...page-21405_42_100.html

I've also done this with consumer hardware and OS's, including inexpensive D-Link switches. The key in my case has been Vista as the client for its large buffers, and an OS later than XP-32 on the receiving end (e.g. 2003, XP-64, Vista). Vista to Vista, I've also seen very fast pulls (> 100 MB/s), which I haven't seen under other configuration. All this refers to Windows file transfers. FTP is a different situation as you can avoid Windows OS/tuning issues with third-party implementations. Some *nix-based OS's have also been producing nice Windows file transfer numbers lately, but I'm not up the relevant details at present.

Illl take your word on it....at 70mb/s, I'm more likely limited by the HDD than by the network. HD tune seems to top out at 70mb for my drive.

 

[BD2003]

Originally posted by: IndyJaws
As the OP, I want to thank RebateMonger and JackMDS for their testing of the various configurations. It was incredibly informative. It looks like another 1/2 gig - 1 gig RAM plus a gigabit NIC will be my best bang for the buck. I'm building the server over the weekend. I'll make sure to post my results. Thanks to everyone who jumped in on the thread!!!

Yep, good call. Dont skimp on the RAM, and gigabit is an absolute necessity. Keep in mind that once you have the server, youre probably going to want to do more with it than just share files, and transfer rate isnt the be all end all of server performance.

I'm not sure if you've used WHS before, but my best advice is to be very patient the first day or two. Especially if you have more than one drive, and if you start sending dozens of gigabytes to it from the start. It's going to want to balance all the storage, index for search, catalog for media sharing, and do initial backups....all at the same time, which is incredibly inefficient and hard on HDDs. Your HDDs will be crunching for hours, and transfer rates may be very slow for a few hours, so give it some time to settle down before you pass judgement on it.

A few other pointers for performance:

Try and set it up in AHCI mode, so you can take advantage of NCQ. You might need F6 drivers, but dont be surprised if you find it completely impossible to set up unless you fall back to IDE emulation mode. WHS is very picky about AHCI.

Make sure VSS is turned off. If youre installing WHS with PP1 (as you should be), it should be off by default, but double check (google it).

Dont forget the intel .inf drivers.

Make sure you turn on jumbo frames if youre using gigabit. You'll probably need to log on to the server and set it up from the NIC adapter settings.

 

[RebateMonger]

Originally posted by: BD2003
A few other pointers for performance:

Ah. You put a lot more effort into it than I do. I just set mine up in IDE emulation mode if that's an option, install WHS, and forget about it. They work just fine for me. Normally you only do a ton of file transfers when you first build the box and then only transfer a handful of files at a time. Since the box isn't doing anything but WHS, it doesn't bother me if it's busy for a while with new files.

Actually, until a week ago, all my WHS boxes were using 100 Mbps connections. In fact, NONE of my PCs were on gigabit networks until late last year. The only time it was noticeable was when I had to copy my Terabyte of data from the WHS box to another box for backups before I re-installed WHS.

Or if you have an office or home with ten PCs, it may not finish all the first-time backups of all the PCs in the time window you've given it. But WHS will finish the remaining machines the next night. After the intial backups, a typical office PC only takes five minutes or so to do an updated backup each night.

 

[BD2003]

Originally posted by: RebateMonger

Originally posted by: BD2003
A few other pointers for performance:

Ah. You put a lot more effort into it than I do. I just set mine up in IDE emulation mode if that's an option, install WHS, and forget about it. They work just fine for me. Normally you only do a ton of file transfers when you first build the box and then only transfer a handful of files at a time. Since the box isn't doing anything but WHS, it doesn't bother me if it's busy for a while with new files.

Actually, until a week ago, all my WHS boxes were using 100 Mbps connections. In fact, NONE of my PCs were on gigabit networks until late last year. The only time it was noticeable was when I had to copy my Terabyte of data from the WHS box to another box for backups before I re-installed WHS.

Or if you have an office or home with ten PCs, it may not finish all the first-time backups of all the PCs in the time window you've given it. But WHS will finish the remaining machines the next night. After the intial backups, a typical office PC only takes five minutes or so to do an updated backup each night.

Well, I figure if I'm going to go bother having a server for my home, I may as well go all the way. I've only got two other desktops and a laptop connected to it, but the key is that there's very little stored on the actual desktops themselves. I use it as primary storage for just about everything, so having a proper gigabit connection really helps, although once you've got everything on there, you can get by with 100mb/s for the most part.

 

[Madwand1]

Originally posted by: BD2003
Illl take your word on it....at 70mb/s, I'm more likely limited by the HDD than by the network. HD tune seems to top out at 70mb for my drive.

You're right -- of course you'd be limited by the HD speeds. But you can get faster drives these days, and there's always RAID. Here's the log of a 117 MB/s transfer of a 10 GB file I just ran, from Vista to WHS, on-board RAID to on-board RAID:

M:\test\test0>robocopy . \\whs\f\test\test0\ 10.gb /IS

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
ROBOCOPY :: Robust File Copy for Windows

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Started : Thu Feb 26 00:26:58 2009

Source : M:\test\test0
Dest : \\whs\f\test\test0

Files : 10.gb

Options : /COPYAT /IS /R:1000000 /W:30

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

1 M:\test\test0
100% New File 9.3 g 10.gb

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Total Copied Skipped Mismatch FAILED Extras
Dirs : 1 0 1 0 0 0
Files : 1 1 0 0 0 0
Bytes : 9.313 g 9.313 g 0 0 0 0
Times : 0:01:25 0:01:25 0:00:00 0:00:00

Speed : 117194824 Bytes/sec.
Speed : 6705.941 MegaBytes/min.

Ended : Thu Feb 26 00:28:23 2009

Of course, in practice you won't notice the difference between 100 MB/s and 70 MB/s nearly as much as you would 100 Mb/s and 70 MB/s.

 

[IndyJaws]

Thought I'd give everyone an update on what I ended up doing...

First of all, I was blown away by the willingness of everyone to not only give me advice, but to run benchmarks as well. It really should be stickied for anyone wanting to do a WHS build.

Here's the final results:

1) Originally, I tried to keep the original motherboard and processor. From everything I heard, the processor was more than capable. The main question was the lack of gigabit ethernet and only 2 SATA headers.

2) Found a 512MB DIMM around the house to bring up the total system RAM to 1 GB.

3) Bought a gigabit NIC. Not a problem, system recognized and was happy.

4) Unfortunately, no amount of luck/prayer/drivers (not necessarily in that order) would make the native SATA work. Regardless of what I would try, I always ran into a WHS error that it found no drives to install.

5) No problem, I bought a SATA controller card. All was good, and it found the drives.

6) Thanks to my wife (who was tired of the whole process), I realized that I spent about $60 between the NIC and controller card, just to make an old system work.

7) Went to Frys, bought an E5200/Biostar mobo combo for $99 and 2 GB RAM for $20. Returned the NIC and controller and ended up spending $60 after the returns.

8) Used original Antec case and PSU (thanks to Antec for quickly answering my question whether a Micro ATX would fit the case - it did).

9) New build booted on first attempt (yes, I reversed the HDD LED and Reset headers, but it still worked).

10) Install went flawless. No add-ons, plenty of memory, good processor. All 3 home computers were backed up the first night. Very happy new server owner.

Bottom line...buy WHS, use somewhat modern HW, have at least 2 HD (for duplication), use gigabit ethernet.

Now, if I can just figure out why remote control of my home PC won't work at work but will work other places (has to be stupid work firewall), I'll be a happy guy.

Thanks to everyone for your help! I'm happy to help anyone else that is building a new WHS.

Indy