Windows WHS 2011 or Win7 64 Bit

If you use the release preview of 8.1 you will have to re-install everything when it is officially released.

 

don't mind, I like to mess around until I am satisfied. Once I know what I want and how I want it, its going to be reg'd and left alone.

So I am going to -

Try NAS4Free, just for fun

then

Install Win7 64bit on the Server
Install Win8 on the main rig

Any issues with Win 7 as server software?

 

Depends what you want to do - it doesn't have all the useful configuration tools that 2k12 does

 

iTunes server and a vault for my own music, vids and games/coding stuff. No plans to run it as a media server for anything other than iTunes music.

 

sounds like nas4free could do that for you tbh from my limited experience with it

 

But.. why would you want to fight with it? Mulb : Win7 would be fine for that kind of thing.

 

ah, that's what I was looking for, I was thinking its a bit oversized?

 

Or the £300 price tag that 2012 Essentials has either.

Just use the included 250GB drive for the OS. Buy some cheap adapters so it will go into the Optical bay, then plug it into the SATA port on the motherboard. That port doesn't run at full speed but the HDD isn't fast enough to hit the limit anyway.

You'll then still have the 4 cold-swap bays available for data drives. No storage worries with that many bays available!

 

mulberrycrush

Just wondering what you ended up using at the end of the day?

I have just bought a N54L & managed to pickup an addition 2gb or ram for it. Looking to put my bluray burner in it to rip my bluray/dvd/music collections to it so it can stream them to my HTPC.

I will use it for sabnzb downloads & stream them to my HTPC also.

Wondering if I should just go with what I know Win7/8 x64 or something else?