Budget: £450 (ish) Main uses of intended build: Home Server/File Share (All windows), Back-up, light media streaming to XBOX 360 Parts required: Everything (except keyboard, mouse and monitor) Previous build information (list details of parts): None Monitor resolution: N/A Storage requirements: ~ 4TB plus system drive will you be overclocking: No Extra information about desired system: All info below from Scan. Find below a hopefully decent spec machine, although feel free to suggest changes: CPU – Pentium G3220 – LN52923 M.Board – MSI z87-G41 – LN51009 RAM – Corsair 8 GB (2x4) – LN40264 Sys Drive – WD Blue - LN50977 Storage – 2x WD Red 3TB - LN46168 PSU – Corsair Builder 500W - LN47075 This is only a rough spec. No OS is needed as have a copy of Home Server 2011, Win7 HP, Slightly overkill but also have Server 2008 R2. Was also thinking of going down the freeNAS route but unsure how windows would handle this and how one could go about streaming to my xbox. The above comes out at £420, thus leaving a bit of room for a case, just the cheapest that will do the job since poor little box will be shoved in a cupboard. Also no disk drive required as can “borrow” the one out of my main rig for install. Hopefully the above all makes sense since it's been a while since I posted here.
You could just buy a HP Microserver chassis... they are built for being home servers, tons of people on here have them (including me!) and they are great http://www.ebuyer.com/616877-hp-pro...1p-4gb-u-non-hot-plug-sata-150w-ps-744900-421
cheers for the replies guys, did look briefly at the mircoserver but to be honest was unsure how they exactly worked (sounds terrible considering I work with computers all day) which was why I thought simple standard (ish) pc would be best, will have a further look at the microserver though.
HPs Microserver is a standard(ish) mini-pc. I also have unRaid as my OS, and after a little bit of tinkering (and one not in-expensive flash drive dying on me) it's been chugging away happily for a couple of years now. UnRaid's headless, but you could easily put any of the more standard OSs on there, either running on a separate drive (it has an internal SATA header separate to its four swap-bays and you can have a drive in the 5.25" bay) or as a partition on one of the array discs. And putting up with abuse - if I'm knackered in a summer evening I'll just hit the off button, rather than taking the array of-line properly; and power cuts, it's suffered lots and lots of power cuts!
As suggested I'd go HP Microserver and WHS2011. Then when you come to using more drives you can migrate to a bigger case
It's basically a small pre-built PC with a 4 drive hot-swap bay in the front. Drives mount the the tray and then just slide into the bays which connects data and power connectors as well, this shows an SDD but HDD is the same: It'll take 4 standard SATA drives in the hot-swap bays and an Optical drive in the top 5" bay (or HDD with 3" to 5" bay converter) Putting a HDD into the optical drive bay and routing the eSATA internally you can load 6 drives into it! Crazy for something as small as it is. It's got standard ports at the back, with VGA so you can set it up the same as any normal computer. I had WHS2011 on mine but now have Win 8 instead. It's a great homeserver, it's simple to build up with drives and HP support is good if there is an issue also. I had a new mobo sent out next day delivery as mine had intermittent boot issues, it was 10 months old and they didnt question anything about it. It's been fine since so I think I was just unlucky as I've not heard others have the issue.
Third voice for HP Microserver and unRAID - it's got room for enough drives for all your needs, and if you need more space, just add another drive! I have mine running flawlessly for the last 5 years (I first started using unRAID in 2005) and I've swapped, added and upgraded disks without it missing a beat. Its only downside is that it doesn't play well with RTL-based network chips (which most motherboards tend to use). I currently have mine serving over 300 movies, and I run Plex Media Server on it too so I can watch films on all the different devices scattered around the home.
Cheers for all the replies guys, you've sold me the HP microserver, now to look into unRAID and what it can do, would i be right in thinking that theres the four sata ports for the bays, plus on emore for the optical that could be used as an extra hdd, plus the possibility of using the external, i know atomic mentioned all this, just making sure as might fit the os disk in the optical bay leaving the four main bays free for data.
That's exactly right, with the following provisos if it's the N54L you're looking at: the optical drive bay and eSATA port are limited to SATA 1, whereas the other bays are SATA 2; the drive caddies are not hot-swap, unless you install a modified third-party BIOS like wot I did, which also lets you set the optical bay and eSATA ports to SATA 2; the USB ports are all USB 2.0, which is a bottleneck for external storage. With care, a SATA multiplexer and a replacement PSU, though, you can fit a considerable amount of storage in the N54L: four 3.5" drives in the caddies, 4x 2.5" drives in the 5.25" bay, an internally-mounted 2.5" OS drive, and whatever you want to dangle off the eSATA port.
You're right although, as Gareth says, you'll need to update the BIOS to get SATA2 out of the drive bay SATA connection. Bear in mind as well that if you're looking into unRAID, the OS sits on a USB thumbstick meaning that all of your hard drives are used for storage (albeit with one as a parity disk) - thankfully, the Microserver has an internal USB port on the motherboard.
ebuyer have a 4GB version of the n54l for £129.99 oh and although it says max mem 8GB I have 16GB in one of mine, I bought 2 of these as it works and was cheaper than the same memory in 16GB kit
