As I posted before: after my visit to the HP solution center in Houston, I became quite intrigued by their MediaSmart Home Server (which I just noticed has already gone up $40 in price) running the new Microsoft Home Server software. Being the geek that I am, I knew I had to try it.
Rather than forking out the $710 (now $750) I decided to build my own. Since the hardware requirements are quite low, I decided to use an old machine I had laying around. First on the agenda was ordering up 2 new 500GB hard drives to allow plenty of storage. Next: even though I had already acquired an “evaluation copy” of Home Server, I decided to go legit and purchase an OEM copy (only license form currently available).
Time for assembly: the old computer had a Biostar motherboard, AMD Sempron 2.0GHz processor, and 512MB RAM. I replaced the tired old 60GB IDE hard drive with the two new 500GB SATA drives and booted it up. This is where I hit my first glitch. The old motherboard croaked on the SATA hard drives. Even throttled down to 1.5 transfer rate. One drive would work fine but, with both connected the system would crash during post. An email to Biostar Support (never answered) and a phone call to Seagate support (complete waste of time, the idiot ehhhh nice tech asked me if I wanted my SATA drive jumpered as master or slave). I quickly switched to plan B and moved those monster drives to a newer Celeron machine with 1GB RAM which had no problem with the drives running at the higher 3.0 transfer rate.
The Home Server software install went quite nicely, although it did seem slower than a typical XP install. Microsoft does not hide the fact that Home Server is built on Windows Small Business Server 2003 (the Server 2003 logo was seen several times during install). After installation, I simply had to install the network card driver and Home Server was up and running.
More thoughts and observations to follow….
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