Windows Home Server Component advise

TheWolfHowling · February 16, 2014

Hey everyone,

For my new build, I want to build myself a Windows home server for back up my computers to and media storage. Right now, to back up, I copied my files to a 1TB portable USB 3.0 HDD and it takes forever, both because I have a lot of files and transfer speeds over USB 3.0 seem glacially slow.

Anyway, I would like some advice on my choice of components, which are as follows;

A Fractal Design Node 304 Mini-ITX case. It has a clean design with adequate cooling pre installed and space for 6 3.5" HDDs and a few extra SSDs if you get creative with the double sided tape while still being same and compact enough to be put almost anywhere. Also, the front USB 3.0 has a built in backward compatiblity with a USB 2.0 header as well as the USB 3.0 header.

A AsRock E350M1 motherboard with an embedded dual core 1.6GHz AMD E350 APU. While the E350 is not a powerful processor and this motherboard has sort of low end to mid range specs as it supports USB 2.0 but not USB 3.0, Gigabit LAN, 4 SATA3 6.0 Gbs ports, a pci express 2.0 x16 slot running at 4x bandwidth, it should be fine for a server. Plus, it cheap, costing about US$70 for both the board and the APU.

A Boot SSD, either a 180GB Intel 335 Series, a 240GB Crucial M500, or a 240GB Seagate 600 Series.

6 3TB 3.5" storage drives in RAID 5, either Western Digital Red or Seagate NAS HDD drives.

A LSI 9240-8I RAID controller. However, this controllor ~US$300 so if anbody knows of a less expensive but still good quality RAID 5 controller with at least 6 SATA ports, it would be greatly appreciated.

A Corsair 350W VS350 PSU

And Windows Home Server 2011 64-bit.

Thanks for your time and any advise that you have would be greatfully recieved

Vitalius · February 16, 2014

I guess I should start from the top:

Good case for this utility
Good Motherboard/CPU for backup only. Don't expect to stream from this machine. The CPU will make it crappy for HD video and slow transfer speeds for read/writes.
Why? What else is going to be stored on that SSD? If it's just the OS, there's no point in getting one over 60GB imo unless you plan to re-use it later or put things on it (though there would be no point, as the CPU will likely limit transfer speeds anyway)
That's fine. I personally wouldn't use RAID 5 but that's because I don't like lacking performance. This should be great for backups.
I would only go with Hardware RAID if your pockets are deep enough to not care. The only positive I see to it is rebuilding the array faster. Not much else. WHS has built-in RAID 5. The only thing that sucks about that, that I know of, is that it takes ages to rebuild. Just remember, RAID 5 cuts performance by around 20%, so you only have 80% to use (of one drive), so expect 40-60MB/s read/write speeds.
I would go with the Corsair CX 430, but that's more so out of habit. No real reason beyond it. That PSU should be fine.

Alright, so, that's what I think of your build.

You can go with that if you wish, but just for the sake of honesty, I feel I should mention that I wouldn't use WHS 2011 for media storage and backup. I would use FreeNAS. That's because I've used it a lot, but also because I know it is good for what I would need it for (media storage and backups). I wouldn't use RAID 5 simply because I wouldn't buy NAS/WD Red drives, so I would go with RAID 10, but that's because I'm cheap in that area (storage) and I don't like parity RAID.

There are many more reasons why I'd use FreeNAS over WHS 2011, RAID 10 over RAID 5, and such, but, long post is already long.