The guys over at Automated Home think along the same lines I do.
- Rackmount cases
- Windows Home Server (of course!)
- Asus motherboard
- Corsair PSU
You get the drift… They took their 4-year old media server and in their own words:
The machine has served us well, but nothing lasts forever and this week we pulled the old girl out of the rack for a heart transplant.
They went from a Windows XP based machine with IDE and USB drives (oh, my!)
to a Windows Home Server based machine with 1TB SATA drives.
This looks like a machine that I would build! It’s a real nice read on how to perform major surgery on an older media box. And enter the 21st century at the same time!
Enjoy!
Link: Upgraded Media Computer








27. October 2009 at 11:51 pm
Jim sounds like they just built a new unit. What remains of the old?
28. October 2009 at 1:57 am
The case may look new, but it is the old one with new backplanes in it.
I suppose you could pretty much say at that point that it is a new build…
28. October 2009 at 11:06 am
Yeh just finished reading, I've never considered rack mounts at all by they’ve piqued my interest (not that I’m ever goanna build one). Good read.
28. October 2009 at 11:56 am
Did any one read this part? "We retained the most modern of the IDE disks from the old server (400GB) and installed it in one of the internal bays in the case for use as the OS / Boot drive."
Why would you do that? Using an old drive is one thing, but using it as the primary drive? What gives…
28. October 2009 at 1:08 pm
It does seem rather strange considering one the factors they mentioned for the upgrade was due to IDE becoming expensive.
But it is soooo difficult to retire working HW, ya know?
28. October 2009 at 8:13 am
I don’t disagree, but using it as the main OS drive, rather than server backups???