Introduction

With the saturation of PC’s in the market place, it’s becoming more common to have more than one PC in the home. With multiple PC’s in the home, the question arises how to go about backing up all the data on so many different PC’s?

We won’t go into detail about all the available options for backing up your PC’s, that’s another topic and you can read some possible solutions here.

Another option that I recently implemented at home for myself is Windows Home Server which in addition to backing up all your PC’s at home to a central location, has the ability to stream  your media files across your home network and provide access to these files from a remote location.

You can purchase a complete PC with WHS from a vendor or you can build yourself one from scratch like I did. Building from scratch gives you the option of choosing your own components best suited to your needs.

Albeit this is not the first article on this subject, everybody has their own unique experience to share in building a WHS. My hope is someone will become inspired by my article to build their own WHS and learn something in the process.

Choosing your components

The requirements for WHS are fairly low on the scale, see here for Microsoft requirements. Their is no reason to go out and buy the fastest and greatest components. WHS is considered a headless Operating System which means there is no need to have a permanent Monitor, Keyboard or Mouse attached to the device. You will be doing all your administration and configuring remotely from one of your other PC’s in your home. The only time you will need a Monitor, Keyboard and Mouse is during installation of WHS.

My requirment recommendations

 

CPU: 2GHz
RAM: 1GB
Hard Drives: One 500GB hard drive for Windows Home Server and at least two 300GB drives (or larger) for the storage.
DVD drive that is bootable
Monitor for the installation
Keyboard and mouse. For installation only.
Network Interface Card (NIC) 1Gbps Ethernet preferably 

A WHS machine is meant to be left on so I wasn’t too concerned with performance as much as stability and energy efficiency. So with that in mind, the components here are reputed to be stable and efficient on the green scale.

• AeroCool M40 MicroATX Cube Case $74.99
• BIOSTAR MCP6P-M2 AM2 GF6150 AMD motherboard $44.99
• AMD Athlon X2 4850e 2.5GHz 2 x 512KB L2 Cache Socket AM2 45W Dual-Core Processor  $64.99
• Kingston ValueRAM 2GB (2 x 1GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 800 (PC2 6400) Dual Channel - $30.49
• 1 x 1.TB Western Digital Caviar Green WD10EACS SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive – OEM  $129.99
• 1 x 640 GB Western Digital Caviar Green WD6400AACS 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s – OEM $74.99
• Seasonic SS-330GB 330W power supply $48.99
• ARCTIC COOLING ALPINE 7 92mm CPU Cooler   $13.99
• Antec 761345-75024-0 120mm Blue LED Case Fan - $14.99
• 2 x I-Star 3.5? bracket for 5.25? bay $2.98
• Microsoft Windows Home Server OEM $149.99

        Total   $651.38

Next… Part 2: assembling components
Index: all posts in this series

If you have any questions regarding this topic you can post them at the Forum