Windows Home Server: Suitable for HTPC?

S

S-B

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Dec 30, 2006
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Bleh, I had started to write something here, but it got overly complicated. Starting from scratch! This post overlaps the HTPC and storage forums, but it's more of a storage question.

I have many HDDs that I want to use for storage. Currently, they're in my main PC, I want to move them to the HTPC to make a low-power media center / storage server. It would serve as my media player in the living room and moderate gaming machine. Now, the only REAL problem I have is that all of my hard drives have their own drive letters. So, things are organized like this:

E:\Films\...\
E:\TV Shows\...\
F:\Films\...\
F:\TV Shows\...\
and so forth.

This becomes a little irritating after a while. So, I would like to consolidate everything onto one drive letter. I am not concerned about speed (9 MBps [70 Mbps] read/write is all I need).
  • There's JBOD, but one failure destroys the array.
  • Then there's RAID 5, which gives redundancy, but at the cost of one HDD, and I will have to switch all of my drives to the same size (can't mix my 500GBs with my 750GBs or upcoming 1TBs), and rebuilding a 5TB+ array would take FOREVER.
  • Now, I see there's Windows Home Server (WHS), which has a sort of unified storage system. It provides folder data backup, so I can backup particular files instead of everything. This gets me some redundancy and it does what I need for storage, as I can use any hard drives and add them into the array.

    However, I'm concerned about the OS itself. It's based on Server 2003, which means drivers may be incompatible and/or scarce. This only becomes a problem for gaming -- will it support DirectX 10? How is it feature-wise compared to Vista or XP Pro?

That's my issue in a nutshell. Any suggestions on what I should do?
 
xp has the option (not sure about vista) of mounting harddrives into folders have a look at that in disk management that could sort your problem.

i face the same problem but i'm in the proces of writing some custom software to handle this
 
I would think when you look over what WHS is designed for, you'd see being used as a media server is pretty much the reason it exists. While it's intended to be a data storage and file server (technically), the ability to use it for an HTPC or HTPC-like purposes is well within the capabilities.

So, to answer the OP's basic question in the topic itself:

Yes.

As for driver issues, there aren't any that I'm aware of. XP 32 bit drivers work perfectly under 2K3 (I run 2K3 x64 myself as a workstation OS), and if you do encounter something that won't let you install them (because you're using the Setup.exe installer) you can almost always get around that little issue by doing a manual driver installation (using Device Manager and manually browsing for the driver .inf file(s)).
 
i run WHS here in my basement for my media needs.I stream HD movies and tv shows from the server to my tivo HD box.i have 1.5TB of space in the it and it backups up all my machines in the house
I haven't had any driver issues at all but then again i dont use it to game,i run it as a pure server and also run Vmware on it for learning some flavors of unix as well
I'd suggest you run it as a server and get a separate machine for gaming
Just my 2 cents
 
had similar issues with this
then i moved to linux
so no problem with this anymore
for using data i use index ( simply saying ls all dirs in drive and "ln -s" or "mount --bind" them to index dir )
for filling its the same as usual :)

anyway
its simpler to setup game/movie rig and fileserv ;)
with gbit lan you'll have no need for big drives in primary rigs :p
 
I use mine the same as Nukleuz. My first ever server and im pleased I can share things with my wife and learn something new.
 
I've got a similar setup too, PVR in the living room and WHS streaming to it. The drives (at least the ones you specify) are all in one large pool and shares are created from the available space. I'm currently running 1 OS drive plus 9 storage drives in the pool in my WHS box.

You may want to check this thread out:
http://www.hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1262238&highlight=windows+home+server

....and here: http://forums.microsoft.com/windowshomeserver/default.aspx?siteid=50
Post in the official forums if you want some in-depth answers before pulling the trigger.
 
I've been thinking about throwing together a pc with WHS 2003 on it. I was wondering what kind of minimum stats are required for it to run. I do plan on streaming 720p videos over the home network.

I was planning on building a new pc for myself and use my old one as the server.

AMD athlon 64 3400+
2.46 Ghz, 1.50-2 gb ram

Also for WHS can you add random size HDD's and it will add them together no problem.
320 + 500+ 750 = ~1.5 tb give or take the formatting...
 
There is no such thing as WHS 2003. There's only Windows Home Server (WHS) or Windows Server 2003.

Anyway, yes you can add different sized drives in WHS. That's one of the main key features of WHS.

And read this review for an idea of what kind of hardware is needed:
http://arstechnica.com/reviews/os/Windows-Home-Server-the-Ars-Technica-review.ars/5

I'm pretty sure any other question you may have about WHS can be answered in the links that [LYL]Homer linked to.
 
Thanks for clearing up the confusion between WHS and WS2003. I'll be sure to check out those links when I get home from work tonight.
 
[LYL]Homer;1032493020 said:
I've got a similar setup too, PVR in the living room and WHS streaming to it. The drives (at least the ones you specify) are all in one large pool and shares are created from the available space. I'm currently running 1 OS drive plus 9 storage drives in the pool in my WHS box.

You may want to check this thread out:
http://www.hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1262238&highlight=windows+home+server

....and here: http://forums.microsoft.com/windowshomeserver/default.aspx?siteid=50
Post in the official forums if you want some in-depth answers before pulling the trigger.
Click to expand...

Perfect, those links REALLY helped! It looks like WHS will not be the solution for me. Due to it being based on the NT 5.0 architecture, it doesn't support DX10. It is also not meant to serve as a dual-purpose OS to function as both a storage server and HTPC. So, I'm probably looking at Vista now, I might be able to score a copy of Server 2008 from a colleague, if that is more suited to my needs (see below).

So, tell me, is there any way to get those storage functions from WHS in Vista or Server 2008? Honestly, that is the only part of WHS that I am interested in. I need a JBOD-like solution that does not carry the risks of losing the entire array, where everything is stored on a single "virtual drive", if you will. Any suggestions?
 
S-B, are two separate boxes out of the question? Your initial description really points to two different types of setup. WHS does what it does great - managing disks, backups of other pc's on your network, etc. Trying to mix function into one box may cost you as much as 2 separate dedicated ones.

Superchicken - I upgraded my initial build of WHS and haven't noticed much of a difference. Older hardware really is fine.

old:
A64/3200+
2gb ram
Biostar 6100-M9

new
E6600 @ 3ghz
2gb RAM
Gigabyte GA-G33M-DS2R

I've used the same 2 SATA cards (cheapie 2 port and 4 port) in each setup and they are probably my bottleneck, but there are no streaming performance issues.
 
Well, I set up a network in my place, and I've got several PCs running. Right now, they all connect to my PC to grab media. My PC is also hooked up to the TV, so that's how we watch movies up on there.

However, I'm moving into a bigger house next month, and my PC will be too far to control the TV. So, I want to put a HTPC in the living room to handle media playback. However, the files would still be on my computer. To fix that problem, I could turn my HTPC into a storage server as well. All it would need is a bigger case and a multi-port SATA card.

I do have parts lying around that I could use to build another box as a storage server (as you are suggesting), but I am wondering if it is possible to do this using only the HTPC. My way would use less power, less space, and it would avoid the slight hassle of streaming to the HTPC (all files would be local to it). My other PCs still need to be able to access the media from the HTPC, though.

In short, I want to do this:
HTPC / media server -> router -> other PCs
(I know how to do this already, I'm just wondering if there is a way to get those nifty WHS features, most importantly "drive letter-less" storage a la JBOD.)

instead of:
Main PC / media server -> router -> HTPC / other PCs

Your suggestion involves two computers handling the tasks of HTPC and server. That's pretty much the way I have it now, except the server doubles as my work, gaming and personal media system (I actually prefer to watch movies on my GDM-FW900 + headphones over the bigger LCD in the living room).
 
Build a seperate box. You can't add the Media Center functionality built into WHS. Or get yourself a drobo and just plug it into your HTPC.

I do have a HTPC that I store absolutely no data on. It's all on my server. I store everything on it, pictures, music, files, etc. And it backs up all the PC's in my house so if my HTPC should die I don't have to reconfigure a new setup. I can do a bare metal restore in under an hour and be up and running again, which is nice.
 
Sounds like I don't really have much choice. I'll probably end up building a server system within the upcoming weeks.

In the mean time, is there any way to virtually span directories/drives?

Say I have the following on two physical disks:

D:\Music\...
E:\Music\...

Is there any way to "merge" the contents of those directories virtually? I would like to be able to access all of the files in both of those directories from a single "virtual directory", like:
F:\Music\

So, for example, if I have:
D:\Music\Led Zeppelin\
E:\Music\AC-DC\

I would like to be able to go to F:\Music\ and see both AC-DC and Led Zeppelin subdirectories. Is this possible under XP? I have found out about NTFS junction points, they're kind of like symlinks. The only problem is they don't seem to support multiple folders. So, I can link F:\Music\ to D:\Music\, but I cannot link E:\Music\ at the same time -- apparently this may be supported under Vista, if I am reading the documentation right, but I want to keep using XP.
 
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