As Konrad said above, low power usage in this role is a huge bonus for cash saving. And the performance for price on the dual-core Atom is fantastic value for the money (can pick the LittleFalls2 motherboard with dual-core Atom onboard for about £60 online). As for silent, the Atom doesn’t even ship with a heatsink with a fan, just a good old chunk of aluminium. Doesn’t get any more silent than a block of metal. Only noise on the thing is the chipset fan but that can be overcome by a big slow moving fan, and hard drive noise…but very little can be done about that. Overall, pretty silent, very similar in noise level to a Sky+ box.

MS has put a HARD requirement on the 512MB Ram and at least 65GB hard drive. The install FAILS if either of these is not met. So, beware your “Frankensystem” may not work if you go too cheap!

Next, a question… has anybody installed 3rd party Home Control Software on their WHS machine? I run HCA on an old W2K box, and WHS would be a great replacement for this… IF it runs HCA. I don’t need TWO home servers running 24/7.

Thanks and keep up the great work!

1) Have lots of space
2) Have data security (e.g. mirroring/striping)
3) Be Quiet
4) Be Heat Efficient
5) Be easy on the electricity bill

You setup only ticks some of the boxes. Firstly, the fact you have two harddrives is good as you can both provide am much space as you desire (limited by your wallet) and data mirroring which is essential in case on of the drives fails. However the final three points are not ticked.

The Pentium 820 uses the Netburst architecture and has a TDP (thermal design power) ~95 Watts under load. This means it will produce a very hot 95 watts of heat all on its own under load. Admittedly the server is not likely to be under load much but it still puts out a lot of heat and uses a lot of power (130 Watts JUST FOR THE CPU (load) http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/cpu/display/pentiumd-820_3.html) for the performance you get.

Fundamentally you do not need a powerful system to sit as a fileserver – the minimum spec according to Microsoft is a 1Ghz processor! The best idea would be to go for a very low power chip like a Cia C3 (20 Watts under load for the 1.3Ghz chip) http://www.via.com.tw/en/products/processors/c3/specs.jsp .

Decreasing the power that your machine sucks down has a knock on effect, lower heat will be produced and as such less cooling is required (or existing cooling can be undervolted to make it silent.) Also less power will be used which means it is cheaper to run (as a file server is usually used 24/7) and can save in the region of tens of pounds a year on your Electricity bill.

Sorry if this is a rant – not intended to be

Also if this barebones box doesn’t have a gigabit eathertnet adapter it might be worth getting gigabit eathernet adapters and a gigabit switch to speed things up.

I have some questions for you(anyone who knows the answers!):
If you install a WHS into your home network, can you remove it at any time without problems. Basically, is there any sort of dependency on WHS, which would be shown when it is removed?

Is it a viable option running WHS on a computer with the minimum requirements. I think I may be able to get one to the tune of about £50 if I get into the beta. 1GHZ Celeron, 512MB RAM… Worth it?

Keep up the blog, it’s awesome.
Mark

Hope I get into this beta because I hope to have a go at this before it’s only available on pre-built machines – I read about that being the case at about the time of CES, may be a complete myth but there you go!

Owing to financial circumstances (aka me being stingy), I’ll probably limit myself to a budget of about £60-£70. Very much not ideal but I know quite a few people with quite a few second hand parts who would bin perfectly reasonable stuff. I should get my own little “Frankenchine” up and running. That way if it all goes wrong or is underpowered I can put a Linux distro on it and hope for the best.

Cheers.

Thanks for the comments – really appreciate the feedback. I’m enjoying doing rhe blog – it’s fun to do, and even better when I see that someone’s actually reading it!

With regard to your question, my understanding is that WHS sits as any other node on your network – it’s the Connector software on your other computers which does the backup and monitoring, so as long as you remove the Connector software from all of your home computers, you should be fine (certainly in terms of the final release, haven’t tried it on Beta 2!)

I’m running with 512Mb and its absolutely fine – the minimum spec is the same as the recommended spec in the official Beta docs, so you’ll be fine. Minimum spec on the processor is a 1Ghz Pentium 3 – there’s a post on the beta forums (http://forums.microsoft.com/WindowsHomeServer/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=1219950&SiteID=50) from a guys who’s running a P3 system, and it appears fine. A 1 Ghz Celeron may be pushing it, though…

Check out what socket the motherboard you’re thinking of is running and you may be able to get a cheap P3/P4 off ebay and switch it over if the Celeron struggles….

Best of luck!
Terry