Building A Home Server Part II
I was bored yesterday, so I spent some time buying components for my Home Server. I set myself a budget of £250 for the system and I ended up spending just over £130 which I’m very happy with. Here are the components I purchased:
Case: Foxconn TLM397 £28 (pictured above)
I went for this case as it had a lot of expansion slots (2x 5.25 External Bays, 2x 3.5 External Bays and 4x 3.5 Internal Bays) so there’s plenty of space for internal HDDs and external drives. It also has a 360W PSU which will be more than enough power as I won’t be running a graphics card. I didn’t need anything sexy as I’m going to stick the box behind my sofa. I just hope the fans are quiet…
Motherboard: Foxconn 6150BK8MC-KRSHN2 £60
I spent a bit more on the motherboard than I would have liked, but I was determined to get a micro ATX motherboard with Gigabit LAN for lots of streaming capacity and also one with 4 SATA II sockets. I also wanted a Socket 939 so I could use some of the ram in the study PC which has 4GB of RAM which is overkill.
CPU: AMD 64 x2 4200+ £45
After doing some reading on various Windows Home Server forums I decided to go for a dual core CPU as apparently the single core machines are ok for backup and file transfer, but struggle with streaming multiple HD graphics files. I went for the 4200+ as it was only £12 more than the 3800+. It’s the same CPU as I have in my main machine (HTPC has a 4600+) so I know it’s more than powerful enough.
Memory: 2×1GB DDR400 Free
Will take 2GB out of my main PC which doesn’t need 4GB anymore (I don’t think it ever did!)
HDD: 2×750 SATA II drives and 1TB Lacie External HDD - Free
‘Borrowing’ from HTPC. I have a 400GB in the study PC which is unused which will replace these drives. Hopefully the prices of 1TB drives will come down by the time I need one.
OS: Windows Home Server - Free
I’ll be starting with the 120 day demo. I’m hoping that I’ll be able to get a full version out of Microsoft for free.
Overall I’ve specified a very powerful machine, which will definitely last a very long time. It’s probably got too much power, but for only £130 I’m not going to lose any sleepless nights over the cost. I really think I’ve built a system for the future, that will power my home for at least 5 years, maybe even more.
The bits should all arrive this week so I’ll let you know in part III how I get on with the construction. Hopefully I’ll have everything working smoothly before I go to see my parents over Christmas, so that I can test out the remote access to the full.
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Comment by mosey on 5 January 2008:
Love you for this post!
I’ve never built a homeserver, but with a price under 150 I think I’m tempted! My cost will probably be a bit more, since I will actually have to purchase the hard drives in question as well as the RAM. Still, thank you for breaking down the prices and step-by-step, as this is the sort of content that is really lacking (particularly for those in the UK) on the web imho!
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Comment by Insomniac (Ian) on 6 December 2007:
Oops - when I said roughly double I meant to say they’ve roughly halved.
Comment by Insomniac (Ian) on 6 December 2007:
Thanx Smackall.
I know everyone’s tried hard to convert me to the likes of Naslite but I think I’ll be going down the XP route for the server - I’m a lot more familiar & confident handling XP & remote access.
By the way, my Gigabit Lan stuff arrived yesterday. Installation was a breeze & now PCs are communicating on the LAN at 1000 Gigabit utilising the new switch & CAT 6 cables. Did a few data transfer tests between PCs & looks as though file transfer speeds are roughly double to that of my previous 100 fast ethernet - would you say this is about right or do you suggest any tweaks for further speed improvement?
Comment by Smackall on 6 December 2007:
Firewal is the either a piece of software that is a part of the OS or a piece of hardware which protects your network from the public network. It denied requests for connection with any untrusted machine outside your network.
Hardware firewalls are better in some cases as they are hard to hack in. But software firewall often gets hacked as the environment they work can be easily changed.
An XP machine well updated with latest updated, and with Norton Antivirus updated daily should work good
Comment by (Ian) on 5 December 2007:
I know I said about winding this thread up but you’ve tempted me with another question - firewalls. I’ve never understood the difference between what I call a software firewall Vs a hardware firewall, ie. Linksys router & Windows or Norton’s firewall.
Can you explain this & do you believe I’ll be pretty well protected having net access via my firewall protected Linksy ASDL router & Norton installed on the file server’s OS disk?
Comment by Smackall on 5 December 2007:
not only resource hunger, but it’ll need a good firewall, anti virus, Etc to keep it safe. And it all about money now… if you wanna hold your mouse then go for xp but if you are not ok with spending this much for OS and its safety then you can go for NASlite of linux server.
Comment by Insomniac (Ian) on 5 December 2007:
Unless I’ve missed something I don’t see the point of mapping as I can create shortcuts on my desktop of shared files/folders residing on the LAN. Having said that it could be useful to see an entire drive.
Think I now understand why when I google I never see many results re disk management over a LAN as it looks to me that many non Windows OSs don’t have the same issues (like defragging) as Windows does. The reason defragging was an important issue for me is I do a lot of large file size video rendering which needs a well defragged drive.
I think to wind this up, if I’ve understood everything OK, then if I opt to go the Naslite route then I’ll have to get used to CLI but it would have the benefit of utilising an old Pentium 2 PC as it’s not resource hungry. Or I opt to go for the heavy weight XP with a GUI that I’m very familiar with but will probably need to upgrade to a better spec’d motherboard/CPU with more RAM.
I’m very grateful for all your input (& Everton), I’ve learned a lot about LANs & NAS over the past few days.
Not sure whether you celebrate Xmas but if you do, have a good one!
Grateful Ian