The Home Server Show 64

Comments

1. JoseROrtiz says:

   November 13, 2009 at 2:00 am

   Great show. Thanks for addressing my CableCard question. My question about performance was actually in reference to the Digital Cable Advisor tool that MS released last week which enables CableCard on non-OEM systems. There are no hard requirements laid out anywhere but this Media Center update checks your system, and if it finds that it meets certain performance requirements, it enables CableCard tuners on the system. I was just curious if the advisor deemed the Q110 suitable for CableCard and enabled it though hearing that it is handling OTA HD just fine leaves me optimistic. At this point though, I’ve decided to wait for the Acer Revo 3600 with the dual core Atom for that extra processing power.

   Oh, btw…those quad-stream Ceton (pronounced “sē-tən” or seat-n) tuners are expected Q1 2010.

   Also, I got my Kill-A-Watt from Amazon for about $24 no tax, free shipping: http://bit.ly/3Httj2
2. Daleo1 says:

   November 13, 2009 at 10:57 am

   I am glad to hear more on CableCARD DCT tuner options and the Digital Cable Advisor. I think CableCARDS over the years have not had the best reputation (for good reason-support) so I hope Windows 7 listeners will now consider adding it to their list of media options.

   Great show. Looking forward to “someday”…

   Tim
3. Michael says:

   November 13, 2009 at 8:00 pm

   Thanks for mentioning my question. I had looked into other builds utilizing this case, and the 4220 (the upgraded model) and took some of the other people’s advice. I did not see the Andromedia at the time of my build. One thing it seems that we all are doing (we being the people who buy these monster cases) is to make custom power supply cables. The Andromedia has a picture of it, and basically the back plane uses 5 molex 4 pin power connectors that are really close together. The best way is to route a new cable with only about an inch between the connectors, and it fits perfectly.

   Has anyone actually built a WHS with a flash drive for the OS drive? I have some concerns with that. The first is the WHS is performing a lot of reads and writes to the OS drive for different things, and the flash drives defintely do have a life span with regards to that. I was wondering if a year or two down the road if it would start to degrade? Secondly, after PP1, I believe that the OS drive is no longer the dump spot for files, and that files go directly to the drive needed. I was just wondering how much actual benefit would come from this drive.

   Also, Contrary to popular belief, I’m not made of money and this server was an attempt at getting a long term solution that was the most cost effective. Come on, 300 bucks for a case like that is cheap. Some gaming cases cost near that much. I’d been saving for this beast for a little over a year, and my other home build server (using old parts and old drives) was starting to die. Looking back, I probably spent more than I wanted to mainly due to my inexperience and the dang RAID Card to get that many ports. Next build will defintely include a cheaper solution. The old machine had 15 drives hooked up to it, most of them IDE 200 GB drives, and like I said, it was starting to die, just because the hard drives were old. I wanted a box that I could expand easily when hard drives got bigger and cheaper. Like I said, I have 10 open bays, ready for more drives.

   My second one will be in a friend’s house (he’ll be paying for most of that one), and it will utilize the next version of WHS along with Live Mesh. Rumor has it that the new version will have an add-in for live mesh, and allow syncing (using P2P i believe) without using CrashPlan.
4. Michael says:

   November 13, 2009 at 8:00 pm

   Name:

   I’ve come up with a name for the beast. I’m calling it the Silent Slimmy (slim-e). The name is a two parter. The first part (silent) was from when I first powered on the machine, without the massive array of fans running, it was nearly silent. The only noise was from the power supply, and it was really quiet. The second part of the name comes from you guys, and the comment about the massive case with a slim DVD ROM drive.
5. Michael says:

   November 13, 2009 at 8:01 pm

   Hard drives:

   You guys were right, my hard drives are a collection of different sizes (which WHS is great for). Here’s a breakdown of my hard drives: OS drive is a 500 GB. Data drives include (1) 500GB, (2) 750GB, (2) 1TB, (4) 1.5 TB, and (1) 2TB. I try to buy the hard drives when they are on sale, and I like to get the deals that equate to about 8 cents per gb.
6. Michael says:

   November 13, 2009 at 8:02 pm

   Space Distribution:

   DVDs: 2.9 TB (Childrens and regular movies)
   Music: 769 GB
   Photos: 50 GB
   Software: 18 GB

   Yes, I’m a digital pack rat!

   Total space is 11.37 TB, 3.9 TB used and duplicated, and 3.5 TB free.
7. Michael says:

   November 13, 2009 at 8:03 pm

   Build Specifics for the Silent Slimmy:

   Here’s the main components that I used for my build.

   CPU – Intel Core 2 Duo E7400, 2.8GhZ
   Mobo – EVGA 113-YW-E115-TR LGA 755
   Power Supply – PC Power and Cooling Silencer 910W
   Ram – OCZ Platinum Edition, 8GB
   Raid Card – Highpoint RocketRAID 2340

   I know most of the parts aren’t the greatest, and some may be overkill, but I was not particular about the RAM or the Motherboard. The CPU was on sale and the Power supply was one of the best in it’s class (and powering 20 hard drives requires a GOOD power supply).
8. Michael says:

   November 13, 2009 at 8:05 pm

   Kill A Watt for the Silent Slimmy

   I plugged my Silent Slimmy into a Kill-A-Watt, and here are the numbers:

   Amps: 1.48
   Watts: 157
   VA: 170

   These are quick numbers, and I don’t have the KWH yet. Seems like it’s only using the power of two or three light bulbs (running 24/7)!
   The rig is running 11 hard drives right now.
9. Michael says:

   November 13, 2009 at 8:22 pm

   Again, thanks for mentioning my build, and you helped me find the Andromedia and the other 8 port sata card.
10. CookiePuss says:

    November 14, 2009 at 4:10 am

    Kill-a-watt is great. My current WHS build uses the following:

    CPU – Sempron 140 (Unlocked 2nd core) overclocked to 3.7ghz
    Mobo – Biostar TA790GX
    Drives – (6) 1.5TB Samsung Spinpoint 5400 (9tb total)
    RAM – 2GB Crucial DDR 1066

    With everything on idle kill-a-watt reads 60 watts, and 85 watts when in normal use.

    I am pretty happy with the results from the build, and at that speed with a 2nd core the server is extremely snappy.

    I thought the slow drives would also mean slow performance, but on my gigabit network, I am getting averages of 90-110MB transfer speeds with large files.

    Quite impressed with WHS at the moment.
11. Drashna (WGS) says:

    November 15, 2009 at 10:20 pm

    As for the tuner cards, they theoretically have shielding on the card. I know i have a big metal box around the input area on mine. And I personally don’t think it’s the computer, more of is a lack of quality of manufacturing…

    As for the restore issue, WHS backup is cluster based. So if the highest level cluster is past the size of that SSD, it won’t be able to restore to it.

    IPBoard is awesome, WGS has gotten a lot less spam since the 3.x upgrade, so if you do upgrade, I recommend that package (pricy though)

    And yes, I can confirm that Frys has a MSS.

    A good number of people do have problems with the DEMigragor.exe and Disk IO going through the roof and lagging out streaming. No idea what triggers it.

    Microsoft Security Essentials *will not* install on WHS.

    As for calander sharing, Outlook supports publishing calanders to WebDAV folders … or more specifically WebFolders4WHS folders! Or I think sharepoint can…

    As for A/V… is your computer connected to the internet in any way? Directly or indirectly? If yes, you should *always* install an A/V program. Period. Even if you transfer files to a disk and then to another computer, that’s still a risk. Again, you should *always* use A/V on *all* computers.
    Oh, it’s possible for a image to be modified mid transfer (man-in-middle attacks).

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   November 13, 2009 at 7:55 am

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