WHS build - comments welcome

[Fritzz]

Hey guys, new to the WHS front. Been doing a lot of reading and think I might have my solution, but happy to hear from the [H] members.

First off here's what I am looking to get out of my WHS.
-Backup of the home PCs
-Central location for all my media(Movies, music, etc.) with redundancy or files for protection of course.
-Stream Movies, etc to other PCs and my PS3
-Platform to rip movies so my main machine is not stuck encoding
-Will be using Tversity and mkv2vob
-Want atleast 5.1 audio when available from my streamed files

Trying to be as frugal as I can, but don't want so skimp on a few features.

Case - Lian Li LAN Cool (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16811112191)
PSU - Corsair 400W (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817139008)
CPU - Intel E5200 (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819116072)
RAM - Crucial 2x1gb (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820148163)
HDD - WD Caviar Green 1TB (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136317)
OS - WHS 32bit (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16832116550)
MOBO - Asus P5QL Pro (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813131329)

That's what I will be getting to start off with. Have a 250GB and 500GB HDD sitting in my main machine that I can easily move into the WHS for the primary drive.

Future upgrades will be:
-More HDDs of course
-Hot swappable 3-5.25" to 5-3.5" drive bays
-BluRay reader, or maybe a writer(but I figure with the cheap price of external HDDs what's the point of burning stuff to a BR)

So what do you guys think?
I know the mobo is a bit much, but I want to have the option for audio to my home theater if I want, and most cheaper boards only have 4 sata ports, so that would mean a sata card in the future. Guess it could mean that anyways depending on how big I go.
Also debating on stepping up to the 1.5GB drives since they seem to be only about $40 more per drive. Eventually I want to be able to put a BR disk in it, and let it run in the background making a copy on the HDD so it can be streamed to my PS3 later, will also archive my regular DVD collection too.

Feel free to chime in, would like to hear what you guys have to think.

Thanks

[coo-coo-clocker]

Looks very beefy! I'm building the same kind of server right now. One thing to be mindful of is that WHS is really Server2K3 and all of your drivers and software will need to run on that. Even things we take for granted like mobo driver files typically don't ship with support for server o/s's, and you will have to go out find suitable drivers and install them yourself.

Is your network wired or wireless? If you plan to stream HD, you may be disappointed with wireless - especially if it isn't the latest/greatest/fastest (from what I've read - I cannot speak from experience on this as my network is wired).

For streaming to your PS3, check into PS3MS (http://code.google.com/p/ps3mediaserver/), it's one very cool peice of software; better than TVeristy.

[[LYL]Homer]

No video card. I'd look for a mobo with built-in video and 6 SATA ports, possibly mATX.

[nitrobass24]

Couple of comments:
If you doing HD wireless just wont cut it. I thought I could do it with some of the newer Wireless N, but I just ended up spending money and being dissappointed.
If you dont have a wired network already chances are that everywhere you are going to have coax.
In this case you can get a couple of ActionTec MI424WR, these can be had on ebay for $20 ea, and are way undervalued piece of networking equipment. They can be setup to use MoCa, and get 125mbps over RG6 Coax. Easily enought for streaming 1080p content.
I dont have these, cause I already had Cat5 in my house for the telephone system so I used those. Criccio uses these in his setup so hopefully he can chime in with some personal experience.

On the Server Side:
Get a mobo with onboard video...theres no need to complicate things with a GPU
Use PS3MS, its simply the best right now for streaming to a PS3.
Everything else looks fine.

[Fritzz]

Yeah guess I totally spaced the video card, was really wanting to find something with a digital audio out, but I guess that's what they make sound cards for.

For about the same price looks like I can get This (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813131353) or This (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813131332) which should do the trick nicely.

Network will be wired for the most part minus the laptop, but that's my wife's so not that worried about it. Will more than likely pickup a gigabit switch for everthing else, and then run my wireless router into that.

Have heard some things about the gigabit switches, like that they will run at the slowest connection speed of what is connected to it. Is this true? Or is there a better way to connect my machines with a gigabite connection, but still keep my wireless connection?

Thanks for the input guys, exactly what I was hoping for. [H] never let's me down.

[Shane_c82]

Have heard some things about the gigabit switches, like that they will run at the slowest connection speed of what is connected to it. Is this true? Or is there a better way to connect my machines with a gigabite connection, but still keep my wireless connection?


I've been looking for a gigabit switch too and from my understanding most current models don't have a problem with that. They handle a mix of 1000/100 connections just fine. Newegg reviews might say otherwise but I would put that on user error.

I'm looking at the Netgear and DLink 8 port gigabit switches.

[Fritzz]

Well got a few pieces of my WHS purchased. Now for a few more questions.

I bought a WD Green 1TB Drive, by the time this whole thing is done and together I will have another one. My question is does it matter what size HD do I put my OS on? I have a choice between a 250GB, 500GB, and I guess I could do one of the TB, but doesn't seem logical to do that. I have been doing some reading about the WHS OS needing a "Landing Zone" and then will distribute the data over the drives, but I was wanting to confirm this, since I have read in the later updates of WHS you can make any drive the "Landing Zone".

So if I go with the smaller 250GB as the OS, and put the 2 x 1TB drives into my storage array, that would leave me with a total of 1TB of storage space, using the other TB drive for redundancy?

If I start to fill up the TB drive now while it's in my promary machine when I put it into my WHS will it be able to be opened with all the data on it?

Been trying to do as much research as possible, thanks for all the input.

[MrMitch]

So if I go with the smaller 250GB as the OS, and put the 2 x 1TB drives into my storage array, that would leave me with a total of 1TB of storage space, using the other TB drive for redundancy?

The ideal setup for WHS nowdays is 1 OS drive and 2 same sized pool drives. If you are going to have 3 drives right away, you can use the smallest drive as the OS drive. A big OS drive is nice because of future expandability, I.e. as you grow your server it makes sense to replace the smallest drives first, but if they are the system drive you can't. But the landing zone deal is a dead issues nowdays.

If I start to fill up the TB drive now while it's in my promary machine when I put it into my WHS will it be able to be opened with all the data on it?



If you put data on a disk, then move that disk fo WHS, you can copy the data off it and add it to the storage pool, however a drive WILL be formated when you add it to the data pool. So you would have to copy data off that drive to WHS before you could add it to the pool.

[Fritzz]

If you put data on a disk, then move that disk fo WHS, you can copy the data off it and add it to the storage pool, however a drive WILL be formated when you add it to the data pool. So you would have to copy data off that drive to WHS before you could add it to the pool.


So if I am understanding this, I can take my TB drive, put data on it, when the WHS is complete, add my other TB drive to the pool, which will be empty. Then add in my TB drive that has the data transfer the data to the TB drive already in the pool, format and add the new TB drive to the pool, and then let WHS take care of the rest?

Hope I got that right. The less data transfering I have to do the better.

****Edit: Yeah just read what you put in there about 5 times in a row, and sounds like it's exactly what I would need to do. Thanks!!