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Decided to possibly build a new rig for WHS keeping in mind that I eventually want it to do the storing and streaming of my recorded tv as well as other media. I wanted to keep it as cheap as possible whilst having enough grunt to do the job. Here's what I've come up with.
Case (small size lots of drive bays, good cooling, houses my current WHS rig) $75
Foxconn TLM-968 ATX MidiTower Case, Black, 300W ATX12V power supply, 10 Drive Bays: External: 2 x 5.25", 2x 3.5", Internal: 4 x 3.5" , 2 x front USB, 1 x Audio, 1 x Mic, Suitable for Micro ATX Motherboards
Motherboard (mATX, GB LAN, 4xSATA2 1xPATA) $80
ASUS P5GZ-MX Specs here
CPU $138
Intel 4300 Core2Duo, 800FSB to match motherboard
RAM $80
2x1GB DDR2 533 to match motherboard
HDD $158 each
2xSamsung 500GB 7200 16MB (more later )
DVD ROM
Old drive I already have
All up cost around $690
Any thoughts?
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My 3 PC 's specs are listed here.
More pictures and details will be added eventually.
Last edited by Mysteron; 13th June 2007 at 10:55 PM.
Reason: Prices reduced
Have you thought about something like this ?. Does not have all the bells and whistles but does get a good rap, they seem to sell out as soon as they arrive...
Actually I did look at these a while back when they were first around in the US but not in Aus. They looked great however they were quite expensive before you added the drives. Other drawbacks were the print server (if it's like other d-link print servers) does not give driver status messages so you never know if ink is low or has run out, paper out etc. The biggie for me is that when WHS backs up drives on multiple computers, as I have, it doesn't duplicate files that exist on all the computers ie OS files are copied once and referenced other times. This potentially saves heaps of space. Expandability is also an issue as my rig could hold 6HDD's easily.
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My 3 PC 's specs are listed here.
More pictures and details will be added eventually.
The 2x1GB RAM surely wont be necessary. I'd say 1gb can handle anything you can throw at it. As you may have discovered from the other threads, it seems the HP mediasmart server is shipping with 512MB. I use 1GB and havent had any problems....
The E4300 is the dual core 1.8GHz... Id say any dual core cpu will be more than adequate... The HP pre config is rolling out with a sempron 1.8GHz.
You could even trim it back a bit ... and put the cash into your drives and the oem OS
also, if you are waiting to play with the betas, wait for the release candidate 1(RC1) due soonish at MS Connect. It is upgradable directly to teh RTM version, whereas the previous betas/CTP are NOT!
The 2x1GB RAM surely wont be necessary. I'd say 1gb can handle anything you can throw at it. As you may have discovered from the other threads, it seems the HP mediasmart server is shipping with 512MB. I use 1GB and havent had any problems....
You're probably right about the memory. My WHS beta rig only uses 512 and works fine, but I figure at $40 per Gig what the hell.
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The E4300 is the dual core 1.8GHz... Id say any dual core cpu will be more than adequate... The HP pre config is rolling out with a sempron 1.8GHz.
True again, currently using a 2.4G Pentium.
I just prefer Intel to AMD and I'm not keen on the C2D's below the 4300 as they only have 1G cache between the cores and they're only fractionally cheaper.
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also, if you are waiting to play with the betas, wait for the release candidate 1(RC1) due soonish at MS Connect. It is upgradable directly to teh RTM version, whereas the previous betas/CTP are NOT!
Yes I'm waiting to upgrade to the RC and already have my data backed up ready to reinstall. I think WHS is the best thing to come along in a while and when it's streaming and recording all my TV it will be extra sweet.
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My 3 PC 's specs are listed here.
More pictures and details will be added eventually.
The only extra I'd suggest is to use a separate (smaller) HDD as your system drive keeping it apart from all that lovely 1TB of storage space.
Mike I thought I read somewhere that in WHS the main drive was best being the biggest drive rather than the smallest. No idea why this is so but sure I read it in the docs somewhere.
My beta rig had a 250 G as it's main drive but after it screwed up (electrical brownout down the street screwed the OS) I put in a 500G drive as main the drive. I believe whatever drive is in gets partitioned by the install for the OS anyway.
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My 3 PC 's specs are listed here.
More pictures and details will be added eventually.
Mike I thought I read somewhere that in WHS the main drive was best being the biggest drive rather than the smallest. No idea why this is so but sure I read it in the docs somewhere.
I hadn't read that, and since you and Richard have seen it, it's clearly out there.
I can't understand why that would be the preferred option - I was just applying conventional wisdom, but I guess there must be a good reason for it - I'd like to know more if anybody can find out why
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The statement above is false.
I can't understand why that would be the preferred option
I know in earlier builds you needed to use the largest drive as the primary.
WHS would calculate free space based on the available space on the partition of the main drive in the storage pool. If you tried copying data to the system that exceeded that free space WHS would throw up an error even though your pool might be significantly larger.
I'm not sure if this issue has been addressed yet or if it's just a 'feature'.
The recommendation to use your largest drive as the system drive is because of limitations in Drive Extender, the technology that manages the storage pool. The free space on the primary data partition (D: ) is the limit to how much data you can copy to WHS in one shot.
So if you have only an 80 GB drive as your system drive, you will have slightly less than 70 GB of space. A copy of more than that at one time will fail.
Backups can easily be larger than the available space, and (because DE uses a lazy move strategy to get the files off of the primary data partition) just copying a lot of files to WHS at once, even in several shots, could eventually cause the drive to temporarily become full.
Ken Warren.
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Richard Miller MCE MVP 2006
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