Gaming on WHS?

C

computerpro3

LightningRod
Joined
Mar 29, 2003
Messages
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So I'm thinking of making a WHS box as I'm going to be soon overfilling my HTPC's capacity. It would be really nice to have the WHS functionality for backups, throw 20TB or so in there and just not worry about space.

That got me wondering though - if I'm going to make another rig, I might as well make it gaming capable as well. Specifically I'm wondering about eyefinity and crossfire. Will WHS be able to run 2 5850's in crossfire with eyefinity? Is the driver support there for games and gaming hardware? I have some gaming periphals like a Fanatec racing wheel that aren't quite mainstream, and I have to wonder if I'm going to keep running into "This driver was not designed for this version of windows" errors and stuff like that.

Basically, the rig would only be used for gaming and WHS.

Thanks, I appreciate it.
 
I've never heard of it being done yet... but it's based on server 2003... so see if your stuff is compatible with that...
 
If you do this, virtualize WHS. Period. WHS as a gaming platform is just a bad idea. I tried it one night and it was a PITA. WHS works great in a VM.

Plus, you really want Win 7 for gaming anyway.

Oh, and the big issue, of course, is that games/ video card drivers tend to be things that are not the most stable in the world. What this means is you risk having a game BSOD your machine and take down WHS, potentially causing data loss.
 
computerpro3 said:
That got me wondering though - if I'm going to make another rig, I might as well make it gaming capable as well.
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Why? WHS has nothing to do with gaming. Think stability, low power, low heat, and reliability not swiss army computer.
 
It basically sounds like you're building a gaming pc with '20tb' of space instead of WHS doing what it's supposed to, serve data for clients. Really wouldn't try gaming if WHS is the primary goal of that server.

I agree with the other others, if your game crashes and it brings the machine down it wouldn't be ideal for WHS. Concern is stability and (generally) a gaming pc doesn't fit that area. People tend to OC, run faster and hotter video while push their game machine hardware just that much more.
 
I don't know why I didn't think of this earlier, but I think I'm going to dual boot. I will have a windows 7 install that is nothing except games, and when I'm done gaming, I will boot back into WHS.

The reason is that I want both a WHS rig and gaming rig, but only have money to build one. Since I'm going to be getting a powerful psu, motherboard, case, etc for the WHS box, it makes more sense to throw in $400 more and have a top of the line gaming rig instead of building an entire separate machine. I only game a few times a week, so I can't justify an entire separate gaming rig, but I will use the WHS everyday. Dual booting works since when I'm gaming, I won't need access to the WHS. I would mainly be using the WHS for backups and serving up disc images and media to my HTPC and laptop and doing automated backup. I'm not doing anything mission critical, so it doesn't matter if I have a few hours of downtime while I'm gaming.

Plus, if I get a BSOD while gaming, it shouldn't affect the integrity of the WHS install if it's on a different drive.
 
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computerpro3 said:
I don't know why I didn't think of this earlier, but I think I'm going to dual boot. I will have a windows 7 install that is nothing except games, and when I'm done gaming, I will boot back into WHS.

The reason is that I want both a WHS rig and gaming rig, but only have money to build one. Since I'm going to be getting a powerful psu, motherboard, case, etc for the WHS box, it makes more sense to throw in $400 more and have a top of the line gaming rig instead of building an entire separate machine. I only game a few times a week, so I can't justify an entire separate gaming rig, but I will use the WHS everyday. Dual booting works since when I'm gaming, I won't need access to the WHS. I would mainly be using the WHS for backups and serving up disc images and media to my HTPC and laptop and doing automated backup. I'm not doing anything mission critical, so it doesn't matter if I have a few hours of downtime while I'm gaming.

Plus, if I get a BSOD while gaming, it shouldn't affect the integrity of the WHS install if it's on a different drive.
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The problem with dual booting is you're still going to have two gaming cards and a gaming-class CPU cooking in there 24/7. Make sure you install an add-on like Lights-Out to put the system to sleep at night.
 
aldamon said:
The problem with dual booting is you're still going to have two gaming cards and a gaming-class CPU cooking in there 24/7. Make sure you install an add-on like Lights-Out to put the system to sleep at night.
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Nothing a Corsair H50 and cards pumping the heat out the back won't take care of. It's going to be well ventilated and air conditioned 24/7.
 
This sounds like it won't end up being a good WHS or gaming rig. You're talking about 20tb, Eyefinity, and dual 5850's but you can't afford something like $400 worth of overlap in parts?

Everything will be offline when you're gaming. Plus, your gaming rig as part of the WHS box means it won't ever get backed up.

Joseph-Ducreux-Acquire-funds-build-2-boxes.jpg
 
computerpro3 said:
Nothing a Corsair H50 and cards pumping the heat out the back won't take care of. It's going to be well ventilated and air conditioned 24/7.
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I was thinking more about power consumption. And if you're even water cooling, the previous post makes even more sense. Good grief man.
 
aldamon said:
I was thinking more about power consumption. And if you're even water cooling, the previous post makes even more sense. Good grief man.
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Don't care about electricity and the H50 is not watercooling. I get free (or nearly free) access to basically unlimited used 1TB drives, so the drives are not a concern for cost. I would save a good $600-700 doing it via overlapping machines.
 
computerpro3 said:
I would save a good $600-700 doing it via overlapping machines.
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You can build a WHS machine for a fraction of that so I don't see how that's remotely possible. Post your ideas and see if the folks here can help you build two machines instead of one. Something seems to be haywire.
 
You can build the core of a WHS machine for about $100-$150 (depending on whether you need a case/PSU - you already said drives are free), so it really makes little sense to try to double-task a single machine as both gaming/WHS.
 
How is it that possible to do it that cheap? The cases alone I'm seeing are at least that much, plus another 100-150 for the psu! I'd really like 20 drive capacity. I could deal with 12 though, because then I can do 20TB raid 6 array. Hotswap would be nice, but not 100% necessary. I don't want this to be some chinsy ass setup - I want it to last for a long time.

The reason I would save that much is because I wouldn't need 2 cases ($150 savings), 2 power supplies ($150 savings, 2 processors ($75-100 savings), 2 motherboards ($100 savings), and double the ram ($100 savings).
 
wow, for a guy with a $150+ keyboard in his sig youre sure out to save a few pennies. I dont think this will be a good idea but I will be quick to redirect you to this thread when you do it anyway and it ends up being a nightmare :D
 
The original question was if WHS makes a good gaming OS. Clearly not.

The next question is whether it would be a good idea to cram things and dual boot. To that, there is fairly universal opinion that it is not a good idea. I would also offer that a lot of people offering opinions on this thread have experience with WHS, large storage systems, and having multiple systems. Feel free to disregard the advice though. You may be the 0.01% of the population that this is a good idea for.
 
I was hoping you guys wouldn't try to talk him out of it.

I'd kinda like to see what happens. :D
 
Okay, thanks for the input. I'm stubborn so I like to ask a lot of questions, but I'll bow to your experience. The gaming machine can wait; I'll just build a really good WHS box first.

Case will be a Norco for sure; debating between a $299 shipped 4020 or spending another $100 for the new 24 bay one.

Also, what would you guys suggest for a raid card? I'm thinking of doing Raid 6, and from what I've been reading it's really worth it to spend the cash on a hardware raid card due to write speed or something?
 
If you go 20-bay, think about the RPC-4220 instead of the RPC-4020. I have both, and doing it again I would probably have two RPC-4220's (was trying to save money when I purchased the first).

Hardware raid (assuming you want to run it under WHS) Areca 16xx (or new 18xx series) or Adaptec 5 series.

That being said, if you are just streaming meadia over 1-2 GigE NICs, you don't need the speed of raid 6 and can just use drive extender.
 
What is your reason for wanting to use RAID in the WHS? Are you concerned about availability, speed, protecting against drive failures, or all of the above? The reason I ask is because WHS doesn't officially support RAID and you might not need it. The benefit of not needing RAID is that you can use a cheaper HBA card (~$100) instead of a good hardware RAID card (~$400), leaving you some extra money to use elsewhere (like a good backup solution if you don't already have one). RAID is not a backup.

List the reasons that you are thinking of going with RAID, or tell us some of the things you are trying to address by doing so.
 
Why do you need raid? ;)

Save the money and start up a gaming rig/real backup fund.


EDIT : Leagle - touche~
 
Do you actually need whs?

Server 2008 / 2008 R2 can game properly (some say better) and function as a server (minus backups and software jbod)

However server 2008/r2 will require a hardware raid card, which will run $1000+ for 24 ports.
 
Why did i just get a picture of your computer melting while you gaming.

Swiss knife of computers? I would say so. Go with the overall idea of just creating a WHS. It will make your life much easier in the long run.

Have you thought about buying some parts used on [H} in the used forums? I basically built my WHS on her for under 300 including snagging a couple of 2TB hd's
 
I basically built my WHS on her for under 300 including snagging a couple of 2TB hd's
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The problem with that is the OP wants 20TB of disk space on WHS.
 
drescherjm said:
The problem with that is the OP wants 20TB of disk space on WHS.
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I will probably start with 10-12TB as I get used 1TB drives for free (or pennies on the dollar). I will definitely move to 2TB drives in time though.

My reasons for wanting RAID is primarily to help ensure protection from loss. I understand that RAID is not backup; however, it is simply impossible (to my knowledge) to cost effectively backup 10-20TB of data. The things that absolutely cannot get lost are already backed up on a 2TB external drive as well as on a dropbox professional account, so I'm not concerned about documents and such.

But how can you backup a 3TB lossless classical music collection that took years to build? How can you backup 10TB of painstakingly ripped bluray iso's? As I said, to my knowledge you can't - and while raid 6 is not a silver bullet, it does increase the chance of keeping your data safe. Especially when the rig will be on a 2200VA Smart UPS.

Performance is nice, but it's secondary. I want to be able to saturate a gigabit connection, but I suspect even mediocre software arrays will be able to do that. I saw some people claiming 90mbps write on even ICHR-10, so I would be okay with that.

Is there something out there besides raid that I should be looking at? I really don't fancy the idea of spending $400 on a raid card (and by the way, wouldn't I need multiple for 20 drives?), but I will save up for it if necessary. I will be building the box in stages anyway.
 
Performance is nice, but it's secondary. I want to be able to saturate a gigabit connection, but I suspect even mediocre software arrays will be able to do that. I saw some people claiming 90mbps write on even ICHR-10, so I would be okay with that.
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Saturating a GigE connection isn't going to happen, TCPIP will not allow it to happen. If you used multiple NICs in a Team you could do a full gig+ of traffic, but then you just move your bottleneck from the network to another part of your system, not to mention needing a switch that could support LACP.

Is there something out there besides raid that I should be looking at? I really don't fancy the idea of spending $400 on a raid card (and by the way, wouldn't I need multiple for 20 drives?), but I will save up for it if necessary. I will be building the box in stages anyway.
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For 20+TB I would not look at anything other then RAID, not to mention that if you are looking at a large array Even using RAID 5 or 6 you would need at least one hot spare, so that technically means that in a box with 20 1TB drives you will have a maximum of 18TB of usable space after you account for the space lost to your parody drive and hot spare. Also remember that unless you plan to build multiple arrays or a JBOD you have to use disks all of the same size (you can use different sizes, however larger drives, will only be as large as the smallest drive in the array). You don't need to buy multiple RAID controllers, however you can buy one controller and then get expander cards.

Personally if I had to build a system like you want to setup I would build a gaming rig to all the specs you want for your gaming rig, use windows 7 pro or ultimate, throw a Intel Pro 1000/GT Dual port NIC and get yourself a iSCSI SAN. This way you have all your gaming abilities and normal PC abilities but can also stream to your other PCs / Consoles / etc. The upside of this is that you can take your PC with you to say a LAN and not worry about the fact that you are lugging a 4U server chassis.
 
computerpro3 said:
But how can you backup a 3TB lossless classical music collection that took years to build? How can you backup 10TB of painstakingly ripped bluray iso's? As I said, to my knowledge you can't - and while raid 6 is not a silver bullet, it does increase the chance of keeping your data safe. Especially when the rig will be on a 2200VA Smart UPS. .
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There is a way to backup all that data: Create a second server to backup that data. You could also make your own DAS Enclosure:
http://www.servethehome.com/sas-expanders-build-jbod-das-enclosure-save-iteration-2/

Hook up the DAS to your WHS setup and there you go. Use the duplication feature.

computerpro3 said:
Is there something out there besides raid that I should be looking at? I really don't fancy the idea of spending $400 on a raid card (and by the way, wouldn't I need multiple for 20 drives?), but I will save up for it if necessary. I will be building the box in stages anyway.
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You can use the HP SAS Expander + RAID card to get multiple ports:
http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1484614
 
Saturating a GigE connection isn't going to happen, TCPIP will not allow it to happen.
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You can get really close. With an Intel NIC at work I get over 97% utilization for file transfers from my i7 box to 5 year old linux servers utilizing linux software raid. And that is with no jumbo frames and a 48 port gigabit switch involved.
 
I shoulda known cause I buy all mine as refurbs.

I just had the batteries die on one of mine so I'm getting this unit delivered today.
 
Old Hippie said:
You have an $1,100.00 UPS?

That outta take care of those brown outs! :)
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Got it for free too! The place where I work has a 3 year replacement cycle on ALL of their hardware, regardless of whether or not it works. The employees can get it free or buy it for pennies on the dollar. Got new batteries for it and it's as good as new.
 
computerpro3 said:
But how can you backup a 3TB lossless classical music collection that took years to build? How can you backup 10TB of painstakingly ripped bluray iso's? As I said, to my knowledge you can't -
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Like Danny said, you build a second server. I know you are probably thinking, "I came here looking to build one super machine and now they want me to build three machines!" I assure you that it isn't as bad as it sounds, especially if you can get the hard drives super cheap.

Backing up is all about redundancy and risk mitigation. If you follow through with your current plan, then you are the mercy of your RAID controller because its failure would result in a data loss. You need some redundancy and the most cost effective way to get it is to build a small secondary back up server. You and I actually have very similar needs for backing up, so let me describe my situation to you and see if it is helpful or at least gives you some ideas.

My main fileserver in the house runs WHS. That machine stores and serves terabytes of movies, songs, documents, pictures and everything else. I spent hours (days?) ripping my DVD collection and getting it just right, so while I have a backup of all of my movies, I don't want to lose the time it would take to rebuild what I have. You and I are similar in that respect, but I will tell you that many people disagree with us and think that having the DVD is all the back up you need. To each his own. I don't use the duplication feature on WHS because this server also runs SageTV and there can be wonkiness when WHS tries to balance drives while streaming files (no losses, just bad performance). I also don't use RAID because it isn't supported by WHS and isn't really necessary for my situation. As a result, I have no inherent redundancy so far and would lose everything if any one of a million things happened to this server.

The way I dealt with this was to build a freeNAS server that does nothing but back up the WHS. freeNAS is very light weight and easy to use. It doesn't even have a hard drive for the OS because it happily runs off of a 1GB USB drive. The CPU, power supply, mobo, ram are all recycled from old machines. a Pentium 4 with 256MB of RAM is more than you actually need, so this is a very cheap machine to build except for the drives. The only other thing that might cost some money is a decent sized case to hold all your drives. I use 4 to 3 SATA backplanes to fit more drives in my case. Also, I always upgrade my freeNAS drives first with larger capacity drives and then reuse the smaller drives in the WHS box. That means that the freeNAS server never needs quite as many physical drives as the WHS machine. I use lower power "green" drives because they are cooler and speed doesn't matter at all on this machine. And because speed doesn't matter, you can use cheap pci/pcie SATA cards when you run out of onboard SATA ports. So every night at 4am, SyncToy (running on WHS) launches, checks the WHS server for changes, then backs up any new files to the freeNAS machine.

If my WHS server blows up, I can repair/replace/rebuild and then tell SyncToy to mirror everything from freeNAS back to the new WHS. I've had to do that before and it works great.

While my system give me a level of redundancy, it still isn't perfect because both machines would be lost if my house burned down. If that happens, I'll have bigger things to worry about than my movie collection, but I wouldn't want to lose the pictures of my kids, tax documents, etc. To solve that particular issue, I use CrashPlan to backup about 100GB of critical stuff to a hard drive sitting at a friends house in another state. CrashPlan does its thing every night without any hassle and has been rock solid in the couple of years I have been using it. If I had 3TB of critical data, I would build another small system, install CrashPlan, and keep it at a friend's house.

So that's my system. You storage needs are initially greater than mine, but I think the same philosophy should apply. Hardware fails. Never trust any single piece of hardware with your only copy of an important file. Thinking about your house catching on fire may seem extreme, but it happens every single day to people that didn't think it would happen to them. It takes a little planning and some upfront expense, but it is worth it.
 
Turning on folder duplication seems like an easier way to go than building a second server, I know the PSU could blow out but it probably won't take out drives.

None of this addresses a virus, theft, fire/water damage either.

I personally go with duplicating folders of stuff that is important and rotating external 2.5" drives off-site that I backup weekly. We also have some important photos and stuff that we have on one of the client PC's that backs up to Mozy.
 
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