Almost 9TB of WHS goodness

[kleinma]

Just added another 2TB drive tonight to my Windows Home Server, just a bit shy of 9TB total.

I now need to cycle out drives because I am out of physical space and SATA ports Although a PCIe SATA card and some external bay adapters could fix that

The little guy in the array is a raptor 10K rpm which is the OS partition.

[Nightwalker83]

How much porn can one guy watch, honestly? (Not enough! )

[dilettante]

Sure glad I didn't say it.

[kleinma]

Not one byte of porn on it.

[kregg]

That is so cool! I want to do something like that with my desktop computer one day, when I can afford PC upgrades.

[kleinma]

I use it for a central repository in my house for movies, recorded tv, home videos and pictures, music, files, and PC backups. I can stream the media to any of my computers on the network as well as my 2 TVs via XBOX 360 as a media center extender.

I have a movie collection ripped from my dvd collection of just about 1000 movies, since I am too lazy to actually take a dvd out of its case and put it in a dvd drive (or usually it is just i am not that commited to watching the entire thing, negating the effort involved in putting a dvd in) so this works rather well. It also supports remote access.

The PC backup feature allows you to boot a PC from a CD and restore your computer over the network to working order in the case where you need to replace a hard drive or your system gets horribly screwed up.

[dilettante]

I'm sure the "porn" comment was just a joke.

http://homeservershow.com/ covers this topic completely enough for my needs. The topic is interesting enough, but nothing I'd invest much time or money into since it can't make me any money and doesn't seem to impress the opposite sex.

Not to sound mercenary, but times are tough these days for lots of us.

[kleinma]

my girlfriend doesn't seem to have a problem with all her music, shows, and movies being accessible from any connected device in the house.

And it can actually make you money when your buddies and various other people you know think it is "sooo cool" and offer to pay you to get them a similar configuration.

[dilettante]

We're just jealous!

Geeze... even buying those 1000-odd movie DVDs must average out between $10K and $15K somewhere, hmm? And how long does it take to rip all of those, then store and index them on the server?

Do you back up the server to LTO tape or what?

[dilettante]

BTW: What's a ballpark price for one of these? Say a decent box with maybe half of the storage you have there, plus OS and any misc. software? Assume labor is free.

Just curious.

These things would need a good network card, obviously good HD support, but I can't imagine you need a vast amount of RAM or a high end overclocked 4-core CPU. I'd think good cooling is always important but do these boxes generally try to power-manage themselves effectively? Out of 24 hours the box might be idle... from 70% to 85% of the time?

Is wireless effective or do you have to run a lot of cable around the house for good results?

[kleinma]

the system requirements for a windows home server box (and what you will find buying one retail) are surprisingly low. I believe the HP WHS retail setups are actually celeron D CPUs with maybe a gig of ram.

I built my own, so I went in more of a future proof direction (because there is a new WHS version out soon based on Server 2008) and have 4GB ram, Core2 Duo CPU, etc..

The NIC is just the onboard gigabit nic, and I do have a gigabit switch and router in my network setup.

Storage is not as cheap as I wish it was, but 2TB WD drives are about $180 which is not a big deal considering I remember 50MB drives costing more than that (of course drive size and file sizes have expanded hand in hand)

I don't know the exact amount I have spent on it, but I would say its somewhere in the realm of 1500 bucks. Mostly paid for fixing computers which I do on the side. Some of the drives in the server were actually pulled out of my old computer which saved me a few bucks.

When I built the server I made sure to get a motherboard that had lots of SATA ports, a case that could fit lots of drives, and had good cooling. This thing is on 24x7 and doesn't get hot, doesn't skip a beat when both xboxes and a computer are streaming content.

The ONLY thing I tried to do with this and was unsuccessful, was trying to run a virtual PC image on the actual server to avoid having to always have my main computer on to facilitate the media center connection between the home server and my xbox units. It worked, but not very well. In the end I settled for a tradeoff of using my main PC as the connecter, but letting it go to sleep when not in use, since the xboxes will actually wake the PC up to connect when needed.

This is the case I got:
http://www.nzxt.com/products/tempest/

[MaximilianMayrhofer]

Why virtualise? Why not just download and install media center on your server directly?

[KiwiDexter]

Just added another 2TB drive tonight to my Windows Home Server, just a bit shy of 9TB total.

I now need to cycle out drives because I am out of physical space and SATA ports Although a PCIe SATA card and some external bay adapters could fix that

The little guy in the array is a raptor 10K rpm which is the OS partition.

Dude that rocks, extremely jealous

Could I store some, uhm, artistic pictures on there

[kleinma]

Why virtualise? Why not just download and install media center on your server directly?

I don't know what "media center 2009" is exactly, but media center has never been a downloadable component from Microsoft, nor has it ever been supported on a server OS, so that software is likely not legit, and I would be scared to install it from a virus standpoint let alone a legal standpoint.

[wild_bill]

Not one byte of porn on it.

I wonder what a single byte of porn would look like, 01000101 is pretty kinky I guess.

[kleinma]

10101010 would be my guess

[dilettante]

I wonder what a single byte of porn would look like, 01000101 is pretty kinky I guess.

Funny!

[ProphetBeal]

Nice setup!! I recently bought a stand alone Thecus NAS and have begun the daunting task of move my DVDs over to it. To keep costs down I went the Thecus route as opposed to a WHS, although I'm sure you system as a lot more expansion options than mine. BTW, I'm using Twonky Media Server to server up everything across my network.

[szlamany]

The square root of 01000101 is 00001000 something...

[ntg]

I've made a similar configuration for my network. Two 750gb drives, two 1.5tb drives and two 250gb drives for the system. A lot of ripped DVD content and music in there but no streaming. In addition to storage, I mostly use it as a VM server (Win2K3, Core Duo, 4GB RAM) and it turns out I can comfortably keep two VMs up at all times.

I found it necessary put disks in three pairs of RAID-1 configurations since I've put everything on that box, including backups, and a hard disk failure would ruin my day in a nasty way. I initially had a RAID-5 configuration but it was slow on disk writes.

I put this together back in mid-2007 and was naive enough to think that it would last for 5 years. Commodity x64 boxes released in 2009 completely ruined my illusions. We got a new workstation box at work, quad core, 12 GB ram, 4 x 1tb disks on a RAID 10 configuration and that thing has the performance of a darn server, all that for a retail price of €800. I have to upgrade.

Just curious kleinma, what motherboard do you have? When I got my box, I tried looking for 8 SATA ports but there wasn't anything available.

[kleinma]

Off the top of my head I can't remember which model, but it is a gigabyte board.

If you go to a site like newegg.com, you can search for boards based on such specs like number of ports.

Of course you could always add a SATA card to a PCIe slot, and then it really is just a matter of physical space in the case.

[ntg]

If you go to a site like newegg.com, you can search for boards based on such specs like number of ports.

A little too far from Greece unfortunately. Outside of EU (taxes come into play) and if you have any h/w problem other than a DOA item it's going to take ages to resolve. Great online store though.

[Lord Orwell]

i haven't filled up one terabyte yet!

[kregg]

I haven't got any money yet.

I would like to try something similar at home, but mainly for HTPC. Then over time, I would make more use of it, such as local network backup (Dropbox nowadays just doesn't cut it anymore) and general storage.

Of course, on Linux though. I just love an impossible challenge...

[kleinma]

I am somewhat near capacity on my 9TB (have about 1.5TB left).

Network backup on it works great if you run Windows, I am sure it would work with linux too, just not as seamless.

I just built a new home PC, and it was nice that other than the apps I needed to install, there was literally no data migration to do because it all sits on the server. Since Win7 has libraries, I just link my home server libraries with the appropriate user folders (like pics, music, docs, etc..) and I am good to go.

Specs on the new build are:

Intel Core i7 930 (currently overclocked to 3.5Ghz)
Corsair H50 enclosed CPU water cooler (keeping my temps super low)
6GB DDR3 triple channel ram
Intel 80GB G2 SSD (primary)
WD 1TB 7200RPM (secondary)
ATI HD5870 1GB

The thing really flies. Built for under 1500. Blows the pants off any system you can go buy, even if that system costs 3K.

[ntg]

At that rate, you've got another 10 months worth of storage left.

Maybe you could consider increasing your storage?

[kleinma]

I think 32TB is a Windows Home Server storage limit until the next version is released.

With my actual case I have for my home server, I can fit 8 drives, so I could go to 16TB with 2TB drives before I have to start doing something like using rails and installing drives in the 5.25" bays. There are 3 of those free. However I have slowed down a lot at taking up space on the server now that my entire DVD collection has been ripped in.

It is going to be a project to actually install the new version of home server when it comes out, since there is NO upgrade path from V1 to V2, and on top of that, there is no way to preserve data.

I thought it out, and I think my best bet is to unhook all existing drives, and add a new 2TB drive and install the new WHS OS on that. Once that is done, disconnect that drive and connect the originals and boot the OLD OS. Copy data off the old server drives to an external (will take several iterations of this) and 1 by 1 remove drives from the storage pool of the old server, and add them to the new server.

It is going to be a slight pain in the butt, however once I get the method down, it shouldn't be all that difficult.

[baja_yu]

Specs on the new build are:

Intel Core i7 930 (currently overclocked to 3.5Ghz)
Corsair H50 enclosed CPU water cooler (keeping my temps super low)
6GB DDR3 triple channel ram
Intel 80GB G2 SSD (primary)
WD 1TB 7200RPM (secondary)
ATI HD5870 1GB

The thing really flies. Built for under 1500.

That is so sad. You could have bought a three times slower iMac with that kind of cash. Too bad you didn't ask for advice ahead of time, now you're stuck with that.

[bflosabre91]

That is so sad. You could have bought a three times slower iMac with that kind of cash. Too bad you didn't ask for advice ahead of time, now you're stuck with that.

but...he would get a shiney white case.....

@OP im jealous of your set up tho. Its pretty much exactly what i plan on doing at my house when school is over in December. i'm happy to hear WHS is working well cause that was what i planned on using as well.

[kleinma]

My advice, wait for the V2 of home server. It brings a LOT more to the table, and there is no upgrade path to go from V1 to V2, since V2 runs on Server 2008R2 (64 bit only) and current WHS is built on Server 2003 (x86).

V2 is currently in RC stage. It will probably be RTM sometime in the first Q 2011, but I have no real idea when it will come out.

I am a little disappointed, that it doesn't appear they will include Media Center functionality directly in the home server build, which means I still have to use both my home server AND my Win7 box to use my xbox 360 as a media extender on my big screen.

[bflosabre91]

interesting, thanks for the info. i was wondering if they were going to release another version of whs. thanks

[CVMichael]

I have 4 * 1TB hard drives, set up as 2 RAIDs (2 * 1TB each), so 2 TB of drive space in total. I also have some media on one of the drives that I play on my 50" screen TV through my PS3 (wireless connection)...

I don't see the need for more drive space for now...

[kleinma]

The reason I love the WHS in terms of a raid solution, is that you can set individual folders to be redundant, and the WHS just makes sure that data is on 2 physical drives in the system.

I don't need everything raided (as it would just require too much storage space) so I can just make the important stuff set to be backed up.

[CVMichael]

is that you can set individual folders to be redundant, and the WHS just makes sure that data is on 2 physical drives in the system.

Do you know if Windows 7 Pro has that feature ?

[kleinma]

Only WHS has it. It is part of the "Drive Extender" service that also allows multiple drives to work as a JBOD configuration. Essentially it is software raid. There is no actual RAID configuration on the disk controllers. WHS takes care of making 8 drives look like 1 big fat file share.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows...Drive_Extender

As for performance, there doesn't seem to be much (or any) slowdown that I notice. I mean maybe writes are slower to it that if you were writing directly to a drive, but it hasn't impacted anything for me. I do use a gigabit switch and made sure everything on my network is gigabit (except my xbox 360s) so network file xfers are pretty fast.

[Lord Orwell]

My advice, wait for the V2 of home server. It brings a LOT more to the table, and there is no upgrade path to go from V1 to V2, since V2 runs on Server 2008R2 (64 bit only) and current WHS is built on Server 2003 (x86).

V2 is currently in RC stage. It will probably be RTM sometime in the first Q 2011, but I have no real idea when it will come out.

I am a little disappointed, that it doesn't appear they will include Media Center functionality directly in the home server build, which means I still have to use both my home server AND my Win7 box to use my xbox 360 as a media extender on my big screen.

if you don't have any tuners, run the win7 in a vm. I have no idea if the vm would have access to tuners. I was actually looking into running home server inside a vm for my own usage since i have gobs of hard drives. However they are all small so my one drive is bigger than all the others combined. I haven't had any luck finding information on whether WHS will work in a vm and still do the hard drive thing. I would guess it would depend on the vm technology since some can be given exclusive access to a drive.

[FireXtol]

Argh! Matey, there be mounds of booty in ye dingy.

[kleinma]

if you don't have any tuners, run the win7 in a vm. I have no idea if the vm would have access to tuners. I was actually looking into running home server inside a vm for my own usage since i have gobs of hard drives. However they are all small so my one drive is bigger than all the others combined. I haven't had any luck finding information on whether WHS will work in a vm and still do the hard drive thing. I would guess it would depend on the vm technology since some can be given exclusive access to a drive.

I tried VMWare AND I tried virtual server from MS to run Win7 in a virtual on the box my homeserver is installed on. My homeserver hardware is certainly overkill based on the requirements for WHS, I have 4GB ram, a core2 duo CPU, and even a 10k RPM raptor HD as the main OS drive. However the VM thing just didn't work out. I got all kinds of lag and stutter when streaming content to my xbox, even though I had added a dedicated NIC for the VM in the home server. I tried all kinds of tweaks, but never had any luck with it.

Even running Win7 on my old laptop and having my xbox connect to that was a better experience than the VM.

As far as the other way around, and running the WHS in a VM ontop of WHS, it might work, but I would be nervous to use such an unsupported, untested method for 9TB of data that I really would have to lose.

I was really really hoping they were just going to bundle Windows Media Center into home server as a native app, so you could use extenders (like the 360) without needing to have a Win7 box in the chain, but they decided not to do that at this time, for whatever reason.

On the up side, I found that I can sleep my Win7 box, and the xbox 360 will wake it up to connect to it, so that can save on power, I don't need to have the win7 machine powered up 24/7. I can let it go to sleep and know I wont have to physically go wake it up to connect to it.

[InvisibleDuncan]

Just out of interest, what are the copyright implications of ripping your DVDs? I was under the impression that it's illegal, even if they're only for your own personal use.

It might only be the case here in the UK, I guess.

[kleinma]

I think it is technically legal to rip a DVD, however it is technically not legal to bypass CSS encryption (which is what most commercial DVDs use). None of the ripped DVDs are exposed to any sort of peer-to-peer sharing system, and I have the original dvds as well, so I don't think there is much issue there. These laws are there to prevent people from mass producing copies for profit. My system is to make it easier for me to not have to fumble around with discs.