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So I had an interesting trip report with switching a homemade file server from Ubuntu to Windows Home Server. The machine in question has the following parts:
Important: Windows Home Server was installed on the 80GB drive because WHS will not install on a drive less than 65GB in size. I initially wanted to make the external Seagate in the USB enclosure an internal drive, but I could not get the onboard Promise controller to work in WHS. I did not try a Windows XP driver, only a Windows 2003 Server driver. It fails every time stating that the device cannot start. The setup process was a breeze in WHS with the installation automatically attempting to obtain the latest Internet updates. Control of the server itself is accomplished via the physical terminal itself, Remote Desktop, or the really interesting Windows Home Console. The Windows Home Console can be obtained from the "Software" shared folder on the WHS and is then installed on any Windows PC connected to the same network the WHS is connected to. This is a very handy application mainly because it informs the WHS of the system's presence on the network. Using this utility will enable the WHS to make daily/weekly/monthly backups of PCs on the network as well as notify you of any problems with the WHS. The Windows Home Console itself is essentially the most convenient and simplistic method of controlling your WHS. The biggest headache was with copying data from Ext3 partitions to NTFS. To help alleviate some of the pain, I had installed the Ext2 IFS for windows package in WHS. Only problem with this was you cannot add an Ext2/3 formatted drive to WHS' storage pool, but you can read and write to them normally through My Computer. The storage pool takes all of your hard drives and more or less mashes them together. In my case, there were 2 750GB Seagates with a total storage pool space of around 1.5TB. When you place files in the storage pool, the first 750GB is filled to capacity then once the first 750GB drive is full, it automatically starts to fill the second 750GB drive. If there is a shared folder that contains data you would like to never lose due to drive failure, you can utilize the shared folder replication feature. This feature requires two hard drives. When it's selected on a shared folder, that shared folder will be constantly replicated on both hard drives. It's essentially a software RAID 1 solution for individual shared folders. This will obviously consume more space on your drives, but that's a small price to pay for redundancy. This project of switching from Ubuntu to WHS was done for many reasons, the most important being the difference in network file sharing speed. Ubuntu's Samba support, while incredibly decent, is much too slow for transferring large files over a network. In addition to that, comparing the ease of use for the not so tech saavy users between Ubuntu and WHS for manageability, WHS wins hands down. A big part of this stems from the use of the Windows Home Console. The second most substantial issue was the difference between compatibility with Ext2/3 and NTFS. Both are excellent filesystems, but when NTFS support is limited in Linux, and 95% of a network uses a Windows operating system, you don't have a lot of leeway. Windows Home Server: Good
Bad
Ubuntu: Good
Bad
I would definitely recommend WHS to anyone having spare PC parts laying around and a small Windows PC home network in need of some organization. With the cheapest price I've seen for a copy being $139.99 at ZipZoomFly, it's definitely a little costly. However, with the first PowerPack update nearing completion showing performance improvements and a fix to the data corruption issue, it's quickly turning into a really nice and convenient NAS solution. What I failed to mention before was you can also use web-based remote access to your WHS when you're far away from the server. You simply login via Internet Explorer, download/upload files to and from the server on the PC you're using, and you can even login to Windows PCs on the same network via Remote Desktop. AlienAardvark fucked around with this message at 07:24 on Jun 16, 2008 |
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Jun 16, 2008 06:57
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HPL posted:You could buy a DNS-323 for that price. While the DNS-323 isn't all things to all people, if you want something easy to set up and run, I recommend it. It doesn't sound too bad after reading some reviews, but some users report RAID 1 being problematic and FAT32 and NTFS are not supported. This means you'd have to format any drives you install in it to Ext2. What I'm interested in finding out is what its Samba performance is when a Windows client copies to and from the D-Link device. Bingo. Doesn't sound too bad. Curious about any outstanding bugs. AlienAardvark fucked around with this message at 22:47 on Jun 16, 2008 |
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Jun 16, 2008 22:27
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I'm curious about something and was wondering if anyone with WHS experience can answer this. If I have two machines running WHS and I want to take a drive from one machine with all of my files on it and move it to the other machine, do I have to format it for the second machine to recognize it? Will the second machine just add the new drive to the Storage Manager and leave the data intact?
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Jun 21, 2008 22:10
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ozziegt posted:You might want to check the DNS-323 hack forum to get mor info. Seems like a decent board, but it doesn't have Gigabit LAN and it doesn't have onboard RAID. This with the Chenbro case is around $300 plus a PCI RAID Controller will bring it over $300. I probably would have went this route instead of building a regular ATX system if there were a slightly more feature-rich Mini-ITX board available with an Intel RAID chipset.
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Jul 5, 2008 21:05
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The Home Server Show is advertising a deal on the HP MediaSmart EX470 from Newegg: "use Promo Code “HP75MS” for $75 off! The shipping is free and will total up to $464! That’s a great deal but it only lasts until July 8th so don’t wait!" For those of you willing to drop a lump sum on an HP server running on WHS.
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Jul 5, 2008 23:00
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