Windows Home Server, Part 1 The Build

After living the last year with my ZyXEL NSA-220 NAS, the time has come to move up to the next level. This unit is great. I have not had one issue with it. It has just sat there on my desk purring away, being backed up to every day.

The NAS is all well and good with its RAID 1 and largish capacity, but I need more control and more expandability.

Welcome to the world of Microsoft Home Server:

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/winfamily/windowshomeserver/default.mspx

So, as is customary in these circumstances, I have spent way too much time researching kit and confusing myself further.

I ruled out buying a commercial product (like the HP ex485 and ex487) since they don’t allow me to customise (read tinker) enough.

Also, I already had some serviceable parts lying around so I could save money by building my own.

After great deliberation, I narrowed down my required components to these:

Motherboard – M2N-VM HDMI -Something relatively cheap but reliable, low powered and able to work with the CPU I chose (see below). Asus have a good reputation price vs performance, especially in the mATX arena. . I wanted at least 4 SATA ports, onboard video and HDMI out (just in case this is a terrible disaster I can re-commission everything as a HTPC).

Processor - AMD Athlon X2 5050e - Needed something relatively cheap, low powered and reliable, noise is an issue, this box will be on 24/7 so the cpu has to be able to cope with this and not rack up a huge electricity bill.

Case – CoolerMaster Elite 340 – It had to me mATX form factor, it had to be able to cope with the current spec and be able to expand later as my needs grew, and it had to be a company I know. (And of course cheap! (ish)). The version I got also came with a CoolerMaster psu unit.

So that was it, all I needed to build

All parts were sourced from scan.co.uk – who, as always, gave a great, quick service.

Added to the above I already had 2x Samsung 750gb SATA drives, 2 x Kingston 1gb Ram sticks , and an external USB DVD drive to install the OS.

I put this all together this evening fired it up and it worked first time...woohoo.

Now I just have to wait for the postman to bring the software.

BTW, the cheapest place I could find to by the OS is Novatech.

I also have to decide how I am going to configure the drives; RAID or just let the OS decide, shall I put a smaller SATA drive in just for the OS or just the two 750gb and leave room for later expansion...

Decision, decisions...