I am thinking of building a Windows Home Server instead of getting a pre-built unit. I have read that there can be motherboard issues with custom builds and would like to hear what components people have used successfully (and which to stay away from). I would like to do video streaming with it and have at least 4 hot-swappable hard drives in the unit. Thanks.
i have a webserver running on a pentium2 with 256 ram .. works splendidly.. but it runs a REAL server OS (not windoze, the hackers friend) Just about any surplus hardware will do for a server. I build them out of old junkers and they do the job nicely. Streaming video is a pretty hardware intensive mission over ethernet. I don't stream.. I use my servers as storage and just access media files like anything else.. browse, right click and open/play. Ask 10 people and you will get 10 different answers, but 9 of them will say don't waste time and hardware with windoze for servers.. the mythTV site has good info on setting up a media streaming server. Learn to walk before you try to run.. swappable drives means caddys.. and those are expensive. They tend to come as part of commercial hardware rack setups, just trying to hotplug sata drives on domestic motherboards will end with blown power supplies.. damaged drives or dead sata ports.. the commercial units have hardware switching built in to the caddy interlock levers.
video streaming isn't that hardware intensive. I have windows xp pro with sagetv and a bargain basement motherboard/intel e2140 cpu streaming video to 4 PC's over a LAN. It streams video to all 4 PC's at the same time without interruption. Just remember to format your hard drives with the ntfs 64kb clusters. The larger the clusters the smoother your data will stream. My setup isn't a true server, more of a mediapc server. But it runs 24/7 365 days a year, I only shut it down to upgrade hard drives or clean the case. Recommend you have a good power supply because that's one of the components that usually fails (I replaced 2 of them). I built my mediapc server around the motherboard (I needed a motherboard with 5 pci slots). But depending on your situation, example if your hard drives are IDE get a motherboard with an extra IDE port. CPU doesn't have to be highend, even a single core semprom will work fine in a server. I got the e2140 because of it's low-power requirements and it was the least expensive cpu that would fit on the motherboard.
