Happy days are on their way. Yesterday, Microsoft announced that Windows Home Server 2011 (codename Vail) had been released to manufacturing and should be available to the general public in early April. That means it is time to cash in the gadget fund and get the server ready to take it! This post concerns the hardware going in to the new server, and goes some way to explain why the darned thing is so flippin heavy. The image to the right is a reasonably high resolution shot of the inside of my new server. As you can see it’s pretty crammed in there containing a total of 6 hard drives for storage and all the relevant cables that go with it. Right… so what exactly is inside this case? Take a look at this image and then I’ll go in to more detail after (click to see full resolution):
You still here? Good… we’ll start with the basics. There’s the case that houses everything, this is the Compucase 4U chassis I’ve discussed before, it’s a very shallow case and can be rack mounted in the rack installed in the garage. This is a flexible and relatively large case, well ventilated and ideally suited for my purposes. In to the case I’ve loaded my Asus P5B motherboard, Intel Core 2 Duo processor, 4GB of RAM, Sony DVD-RW drive and GeForce 7600GS graphics card left over from my last desktop upgrade. Waste not want not… They are perfectly good components still and should be able to cope with the stresses of server life for many years (fingers are crossed here).
Now it gets fun, to keep it cool I opted for a high performance heatpipe cooler on the CPU. Okay, so this was partly because I broke the one already attached to the motherboard, but also because the stock cooler is just not that good and due to the number of components I’ve put in the chassis I decided to play it safe.
Power is provided by a 500W OCZ power supply. I’ve done a few calculations, and even given the number of hard drives and other expansion cards I plan to use, 500W should be plenty. It seems you only need more than that if you are running high performance graphics cards and they don’t really have a place in my plan for this machine.
The Silicon Image RAID controller is actually a RAID5 capable card. In its current configuration however it is just running RAID1 for the two Western Digital Caviar Green drives. For those unsure as to what this means, RAID1 simply mirrors the contents of one drive on to the other which essentially means that the system can carry on running even if one of the two disks fails. The final four drives, totalling 8TB, will be used in a software RAID5 array. This type of resiliency wastes less space than mirroring by using approximately 25% of the space for parity data, meaning I end up with 6TB of usable space whilst providing continuity (albeit with degradation in service) should one of those four disks fail.
Finally you may have noticed the KWorld TV Tuner. This is just for testing purposes at the moment, but the idea is that this machine shall also perform the role of a TV Server for the whole house. Once up and running, I’ll be replacing this standard definition Freeview tuner with a High Definition DVB-T2 card and two DVB-S/S2 cards for HD satellite. I’ve already managed to run an aerial cable to the garage from the loft, and two satellite feeds from the LNB on my dish in anticipation. That’s the plan anyway, but first I need an operating system and a migration plan for all my data so see you back here in a week or so?
You may have noticed that I’m revisiting a lot of old purchases lately… that’s because there aren’t any new ones. There’s a few gadgets / toys I’d like to get and review on here but this all takes time and money. So, I thought I would let my readership have visibility of my gadget fund as it grows so you know what is coming up and when to expect it!
