New WHS

[ryan93]

Hey

I've decided im going to go ahead with my WHS, i've got my hands on a box which ill use, pretty cheap barebones type thing.

Celeron 3.0 Ghz
Gigabyte GA8I945GMF
1gb Ram
Hdd Drives

200gb Sata 2 WD (OS)

500gb Sata 2 WD

750gb Sata 2 WD

120gb Pata Segate

and hopefully more (maybe another 500gb)

The case only has a 300w PSU atm but will upgrade that to a 500w (will that be enough)

Networking: the computer has onboard GLAN and i was thinkin that 4 streaming data to my Mediacentre that i would run Glan through the house, i already have Cat 5e cabling throughout the house but will buy a gigabit switch.

There are a few things id like to know though;
how will it work streaming all of my tv shows through Glan to Tv Library addon and movies to My Movies will there be a noticeable difference in load times/ browsing?
Will these specs be fine for WHS?
Is there anything else i need to get it up and running?

Thanks
Ryan

[Matt]

Hi Ryan,

That spec looks good!!

I stream all my media from my WHS box to both VMC and an Xbox360 without any issues at all. I doubt you'll notice much difference between having the content locally or accessing it over the LAN.

Give the 300W power supply a go, perhaps a little on the low end, but it may work just fine if it's a decent build.

Otherwise everything else looks good.

Couple of other things you may want to look at, Avast have a plugin that allows you to manage your A/V for you network centrally from the WMC console, so far this seems pretty solid. I'm also a fan of uTorrent on WHS, I used to run it from my main desktop, having it on the server and accessing it via a browser is much easier.

Another nice looking plugin is Whiist, allows the easy creation of websites so you can host all sorts of goodies from your WHS box.
Cheers,

Matt.

[ryan93]

Hey

Thanks alot, ill defenitly go ahead with this now, maybe be a while still coz im goin on holidays soon. But defenitly going to.

So yeh thanks alot for your help and suggestions

ryan

[darkmachin]

Hey Ryan,

Specs sound good although digging around the MS WHS forums reveals that in situations similar to yours, the MS staff recommend that you use the 500gb drive as the OS one. This seems to go against intuition as I would always be tempted to put the OS on the smaller drives, assuming the others are for storage.

Apparently this has to do with thefact that WHS copies any incoming files to the OS drive first, before balancing (read duplicating) the data across the storage drives. As this balancing process can take a long time under certain situations, such as large transfers, a smaller OS drive begins to bottleneck performance, or something like that.

But otherwise sounds nice, i hope to make one myself in the next month