WHS (Windows Home Server) Help + Build

Hello Everyone,

So its finally time to make a backup of all of my photos that I've shot. This includes client work (wedding mostly) and personal photos. These photos are VERY important to me and I definitely don't want to lose anymore.

I tried relying on the drobo FS-2nd Gen and it failed on me. I had my 2009 photos copied to it and one day, they just disappeared from me. I've almost come to terms with it - however, it still haunts me.

Well that's the past (and I don't have anymore photos of the past) and its time to move on. I've decided to build a new windows home server - hopefully one that will last me a long time. It will have 13 2.0TB drives.

Here's the current part list:
(1) Antec 1200 V3 case
(1) AMD athlon II X2 250
(1) Asus M4A88T-M/USB3
(1) Kingston ValueRAM 2GB PC3-10600 DDR3 SDRAM
(1) Western Digital 500GB Caviar Black Drive (OS drive) Note: will probably increase to 1 TB.
(4) Western Digital WD20EARS 2.0TB Caviar Green Drives
(1) Corsair HX 650W PS
(1) Microsoft Windows Home Server OEM

My questions:
1) Thoughts on the build? It'll cost me about 1000 dollars for now. The main advantage of this computer is the fact that i can just keep adding drives to it as i please. It wont be running a RAID system because I am an idiot and don't know how to keep my stuff safe in case of a failure - However, it is guaranteed for a single drive failure - which i think is good enough for me.
2) Anyone run a home server? thoughts on the OS. Can i get a bootleg copy or am I better off with a Legit one?

Buy legit or use linux.
It occurred to me about 5 years ago that if something isn't worth paying for, then it's not worth using.
(After 20years of PC computing and 5 years of Mac, I started finding the $20 mac applications were a lot better than $40 pc shareware ever was)

You might be able to get a cheaper OEM copy if you buy it with all the hardware.

13x 2Tb drives? awesome capacity.
How exactly will you be covered for single drive failures without RAID??

How are you protecting against a fire or catastrophic electrical failure? I have coordinated repairs on servers where the powersupply failed and over-voltaged the entire drive array. No data retrieval was possible. Are you keeping a second copy somewhere else? (remember, it's only a backup if it's a 2nd copy)

With 13 drives, covering for a single failure isn't enough. If you bought them all at once then there's a good chance more than one will fail at once (possibly under the strain of a rebuild). You should be looking at RAID 6 (with a hot-spare if possible). Also, don't forget that RAID is NOT a form a backup. If you don't have a second copy somewhere off-site you're still looking at a potential data loss.

13 2TB drives without running RAID are you nuts? That is asking for some serious trouble. I have 12 1TB drives hooked up via SAS to my freenas box using an ARECA Controller running Raid 10. With this current setup i could loose up to 2 drives (depending which 2 though) without any dataloss.
The motherboard you have chosen only supports 6 SATA devices so even if you are not going to run a raid controller you are not going to have enough ports to power 13 harddrives. Even if you do decide to only run 6 drives you are going to killing your throughput if you run any raid levels other than raid 0 with the onboard controller. On top of that you will need a HEFTY power supply to power all those drives plus the other hardware you will be running.

You dont need windows home server... If your plans is just to store data on it run Freenas and or openfiler so you dont have to pay any extra money for licenses etc. Im using Freenas and have no issues. Setup ISCSI and you can even host your lightroom database on it as well so you could access your images from any computer (at the cost of speed though).

What are your plans? I could possibly recommend something that could suit your needs/budget.

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I didn't mention it earlier, but I use a combination of OpenFiler and NexentaStor at home (one box of each). The latter is a nice option as long as you stick below 18TB (the current limit of the free edition). There's no way I'd trust my data to Windows Home Server.

Here's a couple really bad cell photos of one of my boxes. They're a bit out of date, I've added a few SSDs to it since then (they sit in a bracket right above the PSU) and I replaced an 8-port SAS controller with a 16-port so I wouldn't have to use the onboard SATA.

Specs:

• SuperMicro X8SIL-F Motherboard
  
• Intel Xeon L3426
  
• 16GB DDR3 ECC
  
• (1) LSI 9201-16i
  
• (1) LSI 9211-8i
  
• (15) 2TB Western Digital "EARS"
  
• (1) Intel X25-M 160GB SSD (L2ARC)
  
• (1) Intel X25-E 32GB SSD (ZIL)

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@Jason: Looking very nice, what Sata backplanes are you using? i was looking at the 16i controller however, after my experience with Areca controllers at work i had to go with them. Soon as i installed the ARC-1680xi controller i saw a huge jump of performance from my old 3ware. What kind of performance you getting from the 16i?

rcfury wrote in post #12378120
@Jason: Looking very nice, what Sata backplanes are you using? i was looking at the 16i controller however, after my experience with Areca controllers at work i had to go with them. Soon as i installed the ARC-1680xi controller i saw a huge jump of performance from my old 3ware. What kind of performance you getting from the 16i?

I'm using (3) of the SuperMicro CSE-M35T-1 for the (15) 2TB drives. I replaced the banshee-like fans with some quieter ones. The originals were overkill since these are "green" drives and not 15K SAS.

http://www.supermicro.​com …mobilerack/CSE-M35T-1.cfm

In both the OpenFiler and NexentaStor systems I'm just using the SAS cards (OF has 2x 8i, NS has a 16i and an 8i) as HBAs and moving the redundancy to software, mdadm in the former (14x RAID 60 + hot spare) and zfs in the latter (3x RAID-Z1 + cold spare).

Bonnie++ reports sequential reads/writes at about 800MB/s locally (with a 32K block size) on the NS box. OpenFiler with mdadm does a bit better and just barely breaks 1GB/s. That's not too bad considering that these are 5400 RPM drives and not 7200 RPM.

I'm waiting on a pair of dual-port 10Gbe Intel NICs for the NexentaStor box so I can get that performance to my desktop. I'd love to be able to get rid of the RAID 1 in that box and just run with the SSDs as local storage.

If you're interested in an upgrade, or plan to build a new box, I've got an LSI 9280-24i4e with the BBU & CacheCade upgrade sitting here collecting dust. It's not cheap, but since I don't have any plans for it, I'd be willing to sell it at a decent discount off list just to recover some cash.