What is the best homeserver setup right now?

Just wondering. I've seen the HP MediaSmart server and i'm not really impressed. i know others have put 4 1TB drives into an old pc, hook it up to their router and leave it on all the time. both solutions work....

but I am asking the other pros on this board - what type of homeserver / media server setup are you running? which method is the most preferred? what products beside the hp mediasmart server are there?

i'd like to hear what others have to say about this... I personally just have external USB drives (one 750gb USB drive, two 320gb usb drives) and I backup my 'important data' onto them like once a month. it's a slow process copying over 30 gb of data or whatever once a month but it's not so bad - i typically start the copy and head to work/class. it's always done by the time i get back... im interested to hear other ideas people have.

the mediasmart setup from HP is like $300 and only stores 640gb.... i personally think getting a $400 base pc from hp and getting 2 or 3 1.5tb western digital drives from amazon seems like a better option.... it's more expensive but you get like 5x the space of the low-end mediasmart server from hp.

 

None so far... you can build your own...

Acer has a "ready to use Homeserver setup" you can buy...

 

I'm using an old Athlon XP box as a NAS and HTTP/FTP/torrent server.

Been running good old XP Pro for the two years that this thing has been operable, and I've never had any serious problems. Everything "just works" with XP, and it's more flexible than your run-of-the-mill NAS. I can probably claim 100% up time for the system save for the occasional dusting-out or power outage.

For something like a home server, I think it's really down to personal preference. I'm using XP just because it's familiar and I know how to make it do what I want it to do.

Nonetheless, if you need something more than basic storage, I also think the most affordable solution is to grab an old desktop and toss in a big HDD.

 

I built a small ITX setup with Atom 330/Intel 945, 2GB DDR, a single 1.5TB WD Green (another to be added later) and Windows Home Server. It's also a torrent box, media sharing, and file backup/share. Works pretty seamlessly, even the wife understands how to remote into it and she's not the most technical. All I know is that she loves the setup.

 

If I want to build a homeserver, where do I start? I know there is a lot of Info from Google but confusing

 

build your own is the way to go if your a power user or want to save money.

otherwise nothing wrong with the pre-builts.

I have seen come killer deals on 1.5 & 2TB drives of the late that would have been right at home in my server when I build it.

I have 5TB in my desktop so I need at least 10TB of backup space in my server :/

This list is old so the products I had placed on it are no longer on sale like they were then, but you can use it as a baseline in what kind of stuff to use for a DIY project:

http://secure.newegg.com/WishList/PublicWishDetail.aspx?WishListNumber=12123206

My goal was a case with good cooling that can hold atleeast 6 hard drives that was not huge or expensive.

A power supply that can easily power atleast 6 hard drives with good effienctcy and native atleast 6 SATA power cables.

A mobo with a IGP so its low power that has atleast 6 SATA ports

and 6 1.5 or 2.0TB HDD's

A low power cpu good for power / heat but still much stronger than those included with the prebuilts so it has the power to run addons and expansions without issues.

4GB of ram because RAM is cheap and again needed to run addons and things to WHS, the early pre-builts had to be "hacked" to do ram upgrades because they were too slow to run some stuff easy.

So my DIY project gives me these native advantages over the HP prebuilts.

> Cost almost the same
> Way more processing power so no issues with addons/expansions
> Can hold 6+ drives instead of only 4
> Upgradable

The only "con" is bigger case and a tad bit more energy use.

My Home Server goal is obviously powerfull, large capacity, and low energy use/cost.

 

The best part about the Media server is the software. Windows Home Server is the best combination of ease of use and flexibility in home servers atm. It features an excellent disk management tool along with a web interface, network sharing, media sharing, remote admin tools, automated backups and a host of plugins. Plus it is filthy easy to use.

Other options are cheaper but takes more expertise to setup.

Another option to consider is the Iomega ix2-200. Cheaper than the HP, but provides similar functionality.

 

if you build your own, just make sure you can plug a lot of hdds in. that means a) a mainboard with tons of sata ports (mine has 6 ports i think), or b) one with pci expansion for plugging in a pci-sata card (the solution my dad has. an atom board with 2 sata ports + a pci-card with another 2 sata ports on)

or c) both (in my case, if the 6 ports would be full one day, i could still plug in some extension cards for more ports..


other than that, check if the hw you buy (espencially the mainboard) has win2003 driver support. as it uses win2003 at it's base.


other than that, NOTHING to think about. (except making it silent and hidden, which would be a pro, ab it's on 24/7)..

oh, and, if you can, gigabitlan + wireless N



check my homeserver below.



homeserver is about the software. but with some tiny considerations done right on the hw side, it gets perfect.

fast lan is important. easy disk extension capabilities, too.

 

excellent suggestions and great solutions guys.

when i backup my data to my external hard drive via USB port, i get approximately 1 gig per minute transfer rate.... i am wondering - does anyone have rough figures of how long it takes to transfer 1gb over gigabit ethernet?

as everyone has mentioned, im thinking the best setup would be a lower end pc with a few drives in it... do you guys simply map a drive to your home server and backup your data? is there any software you use/recommend?

 

1GBit = about 125MB/s (divide by 8) - so that's the max speed ethernet can support.... (at the moment)

 

a gigabit ethernet can transfer 1 gigabit in a second. as a byte is 8 bits, a gigabyte is 8 gigabits => it takes 8 seconds.

in my config, it actually runs that fast. but it depends on each network card (a lot of gigabit cards are NOT that fast), the hdds on both ends, etc..

but the best you can expect from a gigabit lan is copying 1gb data in 8 seconds. i've seen that, it's cool

 

home server IS a software, it handles the backup automatically.

you install a client on your pc, that does the automatic backups then. you don't need to do anything more.

 

thanks for the info, that's crazy fast! ^_^

but i am wondering - what is the fastest way to backup data by directly connecting an external hard disk to a pc? -- firewire? esata? it's certainly not USB b/c it's slow as all he11!

instead of having something network based, where essentially you need another PC like device with storage in it, what's the fastest method to backup data with a drive directly connected to the machine you want to backup data from?

 

http://www.logicsupply.com/products/nano_es340

 

Any USB slowness is not per se the USB's fault (as in connection type) - its more likely the USB controller or just the limit of the external drive.

USB 2.0 will do up to 480MBit/s in theory.

I think you're possibly best of with esata if you are looking for speed.

 

no, it's the usb specs fault. it forces every data packet to be verified by the cpu, and handled with an interrupt. so it has tons of overhead, which is what reduces the performance so much.

but yeah, esata would be best.

 

480Mbits/s = 60 MB/s

I have never seen speeds over 30 MB/s though over USB 2.0.

Either eSata or backing up over a gigabit network is mountains faster than USB.

 

Well - it depends on what you want out of it and how much work you're willing to do. I have an X510 (LX495 SMB rebadge - for some reason we don't get the 495 in the UK), and it's far and away the most complete, balanced home server I've yet encountered. It's replaced a silenced Windows 2003 server built at great expense four years ago, and I'm very happy with it.

Sure - on the surface it may seem like mediocre value for money but it's quiet, compact, pretty fast, easy to use, well-feature and easy to live with.

A base PC will be noisier, will not accomodate hot-swapping and won't have the HP media enhancements which I have to say are pretty darned handy, although handier if you have an iPod / Zune.

I'm not prepared to go into a diatribe about what is good, but if you ask I will answer.

 

People may say the prebuilt servers are a bad value for the money since you could get a used or lower end PC that will perform better, but keep in mind that the lower power consumption of most prebuilt units will probably pay for itself over time. An old P4 or AthlonXP system would NOT make a good choice for a server, because the systems could consume 100W+, which would cost a little over $100/year to operate.

The onlything I dont like about prebuilt servers is that most of them are headless, so you cant hook up a monitor (without modding) to diagnose problems if they ever occur. Also since they use proprietary parts, it's difficult to replace things like power supplies when they fail.

 

Actually you can select parts for your customed built server.
If you are into energy savings you can go for Atom Processor built, 4 TB Western Digital drives with Integrated Graphics.
There are some motheerboard that support headless mode as well.
If you add up they are still very much cheaper than Pre-Built.
Moreover you get RAID if the motherboard you select happens to support it.
Isn't this better?

 

Windows Home Server comes with Software raid - and as far as I am aware the drives are still readable without a RAID controller - nor sure that's the case with hardware RAID without a RAID controller.

Also - Hardware RAID requires identical drives, software raid doesn't.

 

I thought software RAID is harder on performance?

 

It may be, but its a home server!!!
Its not supposed to have the fasted array of storage but be reliable.

On the same note, most things on a home server will be limited by LAN or Wi-Fi anyway.

(Not everybody has GBit Lan and N Wireless)

 

well, it delivers 100MB/s read/write over my 1Gb/s lan, so it maxes it out to about 100%. what more should i want?

and it does a software RAID-ALIKE solution. not software raid. the solution is much better than raid.

 

It's not actually RAID at all as we know it on WHS. It's just duplication of data, and it's a slightly different concept to RAID.

No. Because the Atom will be struggling to push traffic onto/from the network - a good deal of network IO is still processor-bound in systems like this.

The HP system for example is a 4-drive hotswap system in the cubic volume of a Shuttle box. I can tell you for sure that it's going to be very hard going to find something as quiet and expandable in a similar size. And you could build a system that has the same environmental and practical characteristic, but it's going to be more expensive.

It's the same with custom-built PC's. People (usually the types who have never had an upper-end prebuilt) tell me that the prebuilts are junk and it's possible to build something similar for much less - but when I look at the builds that these guys are doing it's not even in the same league.

 

grhgjnwold

 

I don't like Home Server software because the files are spread all over the disks and they have proprietary file systems. So without it it is unworkable. Second: sometimes is good to access web to search something ex:drivers and install an ftp or torrent to share something fast and it has limitations with that.
For now i still prefer the old PC as a server.

 

Nahh you just couldn't find the right guy.
I built a highend AMD Rig for a friend.
It cost less than 800USD (converted) has a AMD Quad Core Phenom II BE 3.2GHZ + 5850HD Graphics.
I don't think Atom stress to do network control.
Pushing data doesn't require much cpu performance.

 

That's twice as much as the starting price for the home server from Acer...

 

You have your terminology backwards. USB 2.0 lacks DMA as an option and therefore requires a high amount of CPU interrupts. That's the overhead.

In fact a lot what I have read in this forum is backwards/off. Gigabit is your best option for speed, but a lot of factors matter in the overall speed and the weakest link is what you will see for the actually speed. If you have a PCIe based gigabit connection on your server that offloads connection duties, you'll see the highest speeds.

Home Server still has RAID/JBOD. It's the implementation that's different. You won't notice a huge drop in RAID 0/1 or JBOD but anything more will definitely be hardware dependent and you'll likely notice a drop in performance.

eSATA by far will have the highest performance (assuming your eSATA controller isn't hampered on your system) because compared to USB/firewire it's the only connection medium that leverages DMA.

If you want performance and a dedicated machine, at this point it really depends on how much money you are willing to spend. That home server you bought from HP is going to have limitations of it's own. It's definitely not built for speed, and using USB drives on it doesn't help things.

Bottomline is, what sort of performance (throughput on network) are you looking for, how much are you willing to spend, and how much data do you want to serve at the rated speed you want? Do you want fault tolerance of that data? You're getting speculative answers at best as you need to provide more criteria for what you're wanting.

 

WHS uses the NTFS filesytem, whereas linux based servers or FreeNAS might use a proprietary filesystem that makes it difficult to retrieve data. I find the data duplication concept in WHS is actually much better than raid because if the server fails and the drives are still good, you just pop the drives into any computer system and retrieve the data. There's no need for RAID, other than maybe on the system drive. The disadvantage of WHS is that if your system drive fails, you have to do a complete reinstall and lose your server settings (but your data is still safe via duplication).

An Atom build would be more than enough for most WHS applications. You really dont need a powerful CPU if all you're doing is serving files.

 

which is what i said.

obviously..

no it's not one of the raid modes, nor is it jbod. it is a "redundant array of disks", though, yes. but far more flexible and save than any raid mode ever is, or jbod.

internal is best. just because it's all in one place, too, then. but eSATA will be the same speed

jup. it all depends on ones need.

fault tolerance is the fantastic part of the home server: it will serve at the same speed for fault tolerant (dublicated) data, as for non-save data: it serves at the speed of a normal ntfs-based windows share. because that's what it is.

 

well, as the server shouldn't fail, that's no problem. but even then, just put the disks into another machine/on a usb, and copy the files off.. works without problems (you just have to merge the spread files together, not that hard).

the most easy way to get the data out of a whs is trough it's shares. if c: fails, and thus the server isn't bootable anymore, just put a new one in, and do a repair installation. it will recreate all the shares.

so for what ever you prefer the old one, it's all untrue. how is your data saved on the pc? do you have a raid? what if the raid chip fails? you have a spare raid? no? how do you want to get the data out there, then? if it was raid5, say byebye to your data.

what ever you take as argument, the ones you brought don't work. home server is more flexible than any raid0,1,10,5,whateverbased system. and much less proprietary, too.

 

Uh, yeah that's called RAID.

 

yes. but it's none of the RAID MODES. which means it has completely different characteristics.

the first and most amazing one: you can mix and match ANY type and size of drive. it will always balance the data over all the drives.

second amazing one: it's on the network-share-level handled => for the disk, its just "files on the disk", so it's nothing magic, nothing with striping, or anything. no special setup, too.

it's a bit like jbod, but with optional data redundancy. no typical raid config (all those 0,1,10,5,6,50, jbod, etc..) have the feature set of the system the home server delivers. which is why microsoft will port this to their corporate systems in the future.

 

Exactly - Any idiot can throw parts together. That's what I meant in my post.

 

I have 2 disks in my old PC. One duplicates the other.

 

Ugh, i read their document. It's a mashup between JBOD and RAID technology. MS is NOT going to merge this into their server operating systems as no company in their right mind would choose this over standard RAID options.

So it's inexpensive in that it's flexible with what you have already, albeit with an expense @ performance. Of course, if it's not fast enough to suit your needs, you need to look into some other configuration.

The OP still needs to post how much storage capacity they want, redundancy, and how fast they want to read/write it and their desired network throughput.

 

My Gawd!!! Plz don't use an Atom. A Home Media server will easily overwhelm this little guy.

AFAIK, all motherboards support headless mode. Just don't connect a monitor.

And RAIDing on a motherboard doesn't provide any more performance than a "software" RAID. The CPU is still performing all the parity bit operations. You are just best off going with a set of 1TB Western Digitals, which can push 80 MB/s just by themselves.

 

I don't like the atoms for a single reason - price vs performance. for the same price or a TAD bit higher, you can get a lower end AMD which will still kill the atom in performance. AND I KNOW that an insanely good cpu is not needed to simply copy files... but it doesnt make sense paying so much for such little to work with. what if you wanted to do something else with the machine later on? the cpu is then the bottleneck depending on what you want to do.

im also against netbooks w/atoms... again, for a nicely equipped $400 netbook, you can get such a nicer setup. the staples near me has a dv6t (t4300) for only $499! brand new! yeah it's more expensive than a netbook but there are tons of uses for it.

fwiw. i dont want to start a fight about it but i appreciate all the suggestions on here. i once built a pc for my car using a ridiculously low cpu and hated working on it... it was like a grand down the drain (even tho i later sold it for about $800...) .... lesson learned - opt for something faster even though you may not have use for it at that very second.

 

Yes I agree AMD Desktop Machines are better in terms of price.
I just want to say that
Home Server don't need much processing power unless you are using it for Computation Cluster. Atom will suffice as you shouldn't be gaming on a home server.
The choice for Atom is more for energy conservation more than anything else.
For laptops it is another matter as CULV exist.
I have tried streaming DVD from my Home Desktop...
CPU utilization is next to Zero almost negligible.
FYI my BIOSTAR mATX Mobo has 8100m GPU


So I think for the homeserver the following is important.
Moreover AFAIK there are processing offloading network controllers.
1)Power Savings (Processor Mainboard and harddisk)
2)Small Form Factor (mATX or smaller)
3)Good Disk Controller
Either way I believe you can get it cheaper than Prebuilts.
I have horrible experience with Prebuilts especially AIOS.
When something goes wrong due to their non-standard form factor it is a nightmare when you need to replace their parts.

Plus of Prebuilts
1)Everything is done for you out of box
2)Warranty?? (Although I trust myself better)
3)Usually looks good

Plus of DIY
1)Customization
2)Standard Form Factor (Part replacement is a walk in the park)
3)Can choose different OS (Not limited to Window$ OpenSolaris anyone?)
4)DIYs can be cheaper according to what parts you choose and where you source it.

 

Nope I see a "headless mode" option in my BIOSTAR Mobo.
That is the real headless mode.
From wikipedia

 

I've always thought that a HomeServer computer should be a Media Center PC you have attached to a Large screen TV that can do double duty as a file/backup server. If you have guests over you don't have to go scrambling around for a computer to use, there's one right there, ready for sharing

That's my take, anyway. Make it as small as possible but make it do as much as you can within the space you give it; most people won't want a full tower as a Media Center PC unless that tower can really control everything.

 

The custom built can let you choose what you want inside the system not a prebuilt.

 

absolute bull. why? because they ARE integrating it in other server products right now.

and there is no performance loss. it's not a mix-thing between jbod and raid. you just read too much into it. what they replaced are the network-share routines. there is no expense at performance at all. a dublicated share has the identical performance as a non-dublicated one.

as i said, i max out my gigabit lan when accessing my home server. i copy over full movies in 3 seconds or so. never come and tell me it's slow, as it isn't. my gblan is the bottleneck.

 

my media center pc is in the living room, connected to the full-hd beamer. it accesses the home server, which is in a private room, over the network. the media center is 100% backed up and only handles media playback and such.

the central point of the home is the server, obviously. i can access this from my, right now, 4 machines, and work with the data.

the media center, for me, is just the "intelligent tv". it allows any media accesses. but it doesn't store anything. it shouldn't ever have any data on it. any data not on the server is not to be trusted to survive.

 

The Acer Revo R3600 is an excellent solution. That is, assuming you can live with its three limitations:
(i) 1 TB maximum storage
(ii) you must switch the HDD which will void your warranty
(iii) no redundancy

But, apart from those caveats, the Revo is pretty sweet. It's ridiculously fast compared to consumer-grade NAS boxes (the Revo transfers ~60MB/s which is two to three times as fast as the average NAS) and cheaper than some.

You get a full Windows Vista OS with it. Or you can install Linux on it if you so desire. Thus, the Revo can run virtually any server app you can think of.

Also, you get Geforce 9400 graphics. So, if you feel like it, you can hook it up directly to a TV and it will have no probs delivering 1080p content.

 

So let me reliterate
DIY over Prebuilt
1)Full Customization
2)Easy part replacement (Usually standard form factor)
3)Long Part 3-5years Warranty compared to some OEM 1year warranty

Prebuilt over DIY
1)Fuss Free Setup
2)Get fanciful designs
3)No need to stress over parts and specification
4)OEM handled warranty no trouble troubleshooting

 

Well, that device is pointless as a home sever, because:
The point of a home server is data security hence redundancy.

 

You haven't been RAIDing long enough have you?

Even with the introduction of the new Southbridge, their performance is still a snore. Even worse, try to restore an array with their software.......


A dedicated RAID controller , like from Adaptec, will smoke any motherboard you can up with. Not only that, the restore operation is much faster and is also non-OS dependent.

But alas, this is not a RAID thread.

And the headless mode option you see on your mobo refers to out of band management probably. Otherwise, any motherboard out there will boot up without a monitor attached.