If you could do it over... What would you choose for WHS?

DiscreteMeat

Limp Gawd
Joined
Sep 4, 2009
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This is just my round-about way of asking what are some of the better motherboards to build a WHS on? I have an Athlon X2 BE-2350 and I don't know what to go with since I never built a WHS before. So I thought I'd ask you guys for some help and suggestions to see what you're using. TIA. :)
 
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I love my EX495! But to build your own any low power dual core setup will work. Make sure to get a motherboard and enclosure that will support lots of hard drives. You'll probably be glad to have esata down the road as well. If you plan on copying up large files then more RAM will help.
 
I have not built a WHS myself either (EX470 owner), but I have seen that motherboard before. That board seems decent for WHS, although personally I would want to go with a smaller, micro-ITX or similar board for increased power savings. Unfortunately there is no e-SATA built into the M4A785-M, but you can always add a PCI/PCI-e RAID card with that capability.

Hope this helps.

-Cool-
 
There are boards that have five SATA ports and one e-SATA that are micro-ATX such as the ASUS M3A78-EM. Also, it states in the specs that it supports ECC Un-buffered memory and my Athlon X2 BE-2350 is listed in the supported CPU list. So that looks like a good WHS motherboard for me, yes?

I take it you're saying it would be wise to forgo a SATA port for an e-SATA port (i.e 5 SATA + 1 eSATA > 6 SATA + 0 eSATA) so it's equipped to be able to add a SANS DIGITAL TR8M-B 8 Bay Enclosure without having to install addition add-on cards, correct? That enclosure would work with WHS via eSATA if I needed to add more storage?
 
8 SATA ports on my LanParty NF4 SLI-DR. Gotta love re-using your old gaming rig from 5 years ago as a server.
 
Would the ASUS M4A785-M be good to build a WHS around?

I have this board in my WHS and it seems decent so far. I had some issues with BIOS corruption due to bad RAM but the board seems more stable after flashing to the latest BIOS.

Asus support is pretty lame though. Mine didn't come with an I/O shield in the box, and they won't send me one...they told me to buy one from their parts store.
 
I/O shields are all a standard size anyway, so I don't know why they just done attach them permanently to the board.
 
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