Looking at the dimensions and such, the Norco RPC-450B is perfect for my needs.

What are your opinions on this case?

What kind of OS drive is recommended?


I see, in such a case would a 2.2Ghz Quad core (Athlon X4 600e - 45W TDP) with 4gb DDR3 RAM suffice?

The case looks nice and one should always give good thought to the case they chose. I do like the larger cases. I also like drive trays and hot swappable configurations as it elliminates the need to open the case each time you need to service your drives but that does add cost to the project and I believe you have already made it clear you want to keep the cost down. Make a note regarding a WHS ADD-IN called Disk Management It will allow you to create a wireframe of your servers drive layout so you can easily identify the drives in your server. This comes in handy when you have a drive problem and need to remove a drive. Nothing worse then having to search for the drive looking at Make, Model and Serial Number.

The RAM is important but the current version of WHS will only see the first 3 GB thus installing 4 doesn't make all that much sense. Also WHS will basically make use of about 1 GB on average so 2 GB is enough but if you want more then thats upto you. Now when Vail is released it 64 bit so it can utilize more but the question is how much will it actually make use of. Maybe the answer is already out there but I do not know it just yet.

A Quad Core processor should be able to handle anything you throw at it. My server has 2 AMD Opteron duel core processors running a 2.4 and whats significant about that is it streams movies online extremely well regardless of what WHS might be doing. Some would say its over kill for WHS but I would rather have more processing power then I need. Nothing worse then having to little power and having to wait for things or have the movies stop and start. Now my EX470 steamed movies well with the stock processor but when it decided to do things the stream suffered horribly. In the end it really comes down to what your going to use the server for.

As for the system drive. Wow you ask that question and your going to get a wide range of answers. Since your case can support 10 3.5" and 3 5.25" drives you have some expanability there and yet your plans for drives do not even utilize all the space available. What I am getting at here is this.....If you have a limited amount of space for drives and you do not want to expand outside the box then put the biggest drive in for the system drive you can. If you have lots of expandability options then go with a smaller drive. The the next thing is how fast of a drive and you will get varied answers there. Some even use SSD drives for their system drives. Personally I don't have any other objective way to explain this other then what I use as a rule of thumb.

I can tell you from experience over the past 2 years running WHS at which time I thought 1 TB drives was more then you need but back then they were expensive so I bought 750 GB drives for my server and lived with 2 of those and the stock 500 GB drive and was quite happy with everything and very comfortable. It was not long before I was running out of space and adding 1 TB drives and then a Port Multiplier then 2 TB drives and swapping out the lower capacity drives. The reason for the need for space was I was putting my movie collection on the server and everything under the sun and now I have 15 drives running accross 3 servers and space for an aditional 8 drives and really thats 12 if I put another Back Plane into service.

Recently I borrowed some drives from my primary server to do a test run with VAIL but soon I will have to retun those drives to my primary sever because I have more movies to store on it. The thing is the amount of drives you plan on using today may not be enough in the future and there are those approaching the 32 drive limit that WHS has now. Not sure what that limit will be with VAIL as it remains to be seen.

Now not everyone uses that amount of drives or stores huge amounts of data on their servers and most I believe will average 4-8 drives but what you plan on for today may not be what you end up with tomorrow. Hey I remeber when hard drives were small like 3mb and my first was 20 mb and when I got my first 100 mb drive I thought I was on top of the world but things change and hard drives just keep getting bigger and our need to store stuff just continues to grow.

Anyway I am rambling on and showing my age now.

_________________
Exploring the possibilities!

Migrated from WHS2011 to WS2012E: HIGHLANDER

~ Norco 4220 Enclosure
~ Gigabyte GA-990FXA-UD5
~ AMD Phenom II X4 995 3.2 GHz
~ 8 GB Corsair Vengeance DDR3 1600 (PC3 12800)
~ 3 Supermicro AOC-SASLP-MV8

Very informative post!

I had 2gb RAM in mind but as I will be moving to vail later on, decided to go for 4gb for the extra buffer zone.
The WHS Disk Management is very impressive, always wondered how posters got a wireframe model of their exact drive setups

I hope not to do anything as heavy as streaming, as the HTPC will be pulling the files of directly and the quad core is a low power one (45W TDP) hopefully its a sweet spot between dual and quad cores.

Haha, guessed all possibilities will shoot up with the OS drive q. Cant afford an SSD especially with Vail's 160GB free space requirement. Maybe a fast/decent 250-500gb ought to suffice will have a look around.
At the moment I have no plans to do any kind of HD streaming/storing/editing on this server, free space wont be hurt as much. Such plans might be implemented in the future however and then I do know I would have to expand. If so in the future I will have to look for a massive HDD bay/2nd home server and hopefully a larger budget .

Kind of decided to go for some form of Windows till Vail releases and becomes stable and issues ironed out.

I remember in my 3rd grade, dad installing a 240mb hdd into our 386 computer ...how times fly.

LOL kids - I remember the 5 MEG hard drive for TRS-80s - it was a mere $2999! My first MS-DOS machine, everyone was buying 20MB drives, I looked at the stack of floppies I had and went with the whopper 32MB drive. Eventually added a second - both ended up filled. I never had a 286 machine, when I bought my first 386 I upgraded to the largest drive they had to fit in in - 120MB. Stock was 40MB. Upgrade added $1000 to the price of the machine. Now I have a WHS box with 6.7TB of space that cost less than that 386 did.

--Randy

lol.... crazy how computer technology has progressed!

Had a look around and the following things have come up

Looking at SATA controllers, something cheap but good in quality, not looking for RAID, possibly not limiting read/write speed with slot bandwidth.
Rosewill RC-211 Silicon Image 2 port SATA II PCI Express Host Controller Card(RAID 0/1/JBOD)
HighPoint RocketRAID 620 PCI-Express 2.0 x1 SATA 6.0Gb/s Controller Card
SYBA SD-SA2PEX-2IR PCI Express SATA II Controller Card
They are nothing like the top-end ones couple of forum users get with hardware RAID and such, but my humble build can't afford such high end devices
The HighPoint one actually has SATA3 6.0Gbps, true PCI-ex1 will never be able to take one SATA head on but atleast it will be future compatible.
What would your opinions be, if not any other brands/models to suggest?

Cables to Go 6IN SATA Dual Power Splitter Cable
Considering 11 HDD bays, SATA power cables will run low as well as molex connectors, would this suffice with WD 2tb green drives?
Also the non splitter version: Serial ATA SATA Power Adapter Cable

Couple of fan filters and a CPU cooler should do the finishing touches.
Any recommendations on silent and efficient 120mm and 80mm fans? (Antec Tricool?)
Any recomendation on CPU coolers/heatsink at around 140mm due to the height of the motherboard standoff in the RPC-450B?

Thanks again

My migration plan for beast is a bit interesting.
As I have dual power supplies and a number of unused backplanes within BEAST, I will use a cheap I5 mobo and the unused backplanes to build a temporary new server inside The Beast. (Tested to insure MOBO's Drivers etc.. = compatable HAL)
Setup vail, and move the hard drives over direct connected 10gbs card I will borrow from work.
Once the data is moved, I will simply unplug the old OS drive, Plug in the new one, replace the controller.
and reboot, I might have to reload a couple of drivers but should go OK.
I do this with server at work all the time.
Build an os on a surragate box then take and swap the drives.
But I do like Cavedivers idea of a VM of vail, leaves some flexability at the 2008 side, but the price tag is a bit higher I think.

_________________
Current DIY server DL380 G6 2xquad core 2.8ghz 32GB rdimm ram 512mb 2xHP 410 raid with 2x sas expanders (2 X norco RPC-4220) 48 slots stacked with room to grow.
30TB (Movie/File/Music)Win 2012 essentials 64bit Storage spaces
Ex490 E6400 4gb ram

You know, if you want to play aroudn with VMs on the cheap, and be able to migrate from physical oto virtual servers and back, check on XenServer from Citrix. Free bare metal hypervisor, and the XenConvert utility can go both ways as well as convert other VMs like those from VMWare. All free - and it runs darn near anything. You'd have to build a RAID large enought o hold all of your physical disks, but you potentially could P to V the whole WHS system, then build a Vail system adn copy the data over. Or something like that.

--Randy