Time to join the Windows Home Server crowd.

After hearing/reading about all of the awesome features in WHS, and, with a little birthday money in my pocket, I decided it was time to build a Home Server.

Requirements:

1. Silent! I don’t want a 747 during take-off in my office! I want to display the machine and be proud of it, but still be able to have a conversation, or even think around it.
2. Lots of hard drive space, or at least room for lots of hard drive space. Although external RAID enclosures are cool, I know I’ll get a red light from the misses if it doesn’t look good and is self contained in one box.
3. Keep cost down as much as possible.

That’s it really. I decided to wait and cherry-pick good deals off of http://newegg.com to save some cash. Here’s how it all went down:

1. After hearing several positive remarks about Antec’s P180, I decided this was the way to go. It has room for an astonishing 11 HDD’s, and has received several positive reviews for it’s amazing sound proofing! The best part: I scored a NIB P180 off of a guy locally through Craigslist for $90! That saved me $60 off retail!
2. Here’s a decision I fought for a long time: motherboard and processor. I’m an Intel guy and always have been. My problem was that an Intel board and dual-core processor with at least 4 SATA ports, 1 PCI-express 2.0 x16 slot, and at least 1 ESata port would run at least $160. A comparable AMD board and dual-core (that ran 20% faster!) was only $115. Rule #3 finally led me to buy the AMD setup, and honestly, I’m very happy with my decision. (Bonus: board came with onboard everything in the display department: VGA, DVI, HDMI, and DisplayPort!)
3. Power Supply: although I will eventually need a bigger power supply to handle all of the hard drives, for now, I opted for a small 380W Antec Earthwatts unit. There were two reasons for this. Rule #3 had a lot to do with it, but also, I intend to build a “TV” computer for web surfing once I buy a bigger TV. This machine will in no way be power hungry, and will probably reside in a microATX enclosure, so 380W should be plenty. When that time comes, I’ll go bigger, like 500W/650W for the WHS.
4. Ram: 2GB OCZ Platinum DDR2-1066. motherboard recommended speed, and product was recommended by a friend.
5. Hard Drives:
   1. System Drive: 160GB 7200rpm Barracuda. I know there’s been a lot of talk lately about these drives failing for people, but I’ve used 2 previous model Barracudas without failure, so I felt good about this one. Plus Rule #3 again!
   2. Storage Drives: At the recommendations of friends, and reviews, I opted for 1TB Western Digital Green Power Drives. More power friendly, and at a good price too!

So, with everything but the 1TB drive (out of stock, will arrive tomorrow), I set off this weekend to build it! Here is the end result!

Update! Prices:

Case: $90
Power Supply: $35
Board and CPU: $115
Ram: $35
HDD: $42 & $105
ODD: $5

Total: $427 + WHS license