Hard-drive setup for a home server

FrankGrimes

I bought one of the Dell Poweredge SC440 (2 x 80GB HDDs) servers that were discounted last month and plan on running Windows Home Server on it mainly to centralize my media from my Vista Ultimate HTPC (500GB HDD and a 200GB HDD) in the living room and my XP MCE 2005 PC (200GB HDD) in the office for sharing amongst those PCs and also to serve audio to my Roku Soundbridge M1000 network music player. I’m not focused on backup as this is stuff I can afford to lose so don’t want to fork out too much on storage for backups.

I’m trying to figure out what would be the best arrangement of harddrives to get the most out of having a centralized server without being short of Media Center recording space on the HTPC. Vista on the HTPC is installed on the 500GB drive – if I was to move that drive to the server would it be straightforward to install Vista on the 200GB drive using my Vista DVD and product key?

I think I might buy one 500GB drive and just leave the current 500GB drive in the HTPC to avoid the hassle. I could then move the 200GB drive from the HTPC to the server, giving 780GB in the server (think it can only take 3 HDDs over SATA). Does this sound like the best approach?

Should I go with an internal or external 500GB drive for the server (i.e. would an external USB 2.0 drive be much slower than an internal 3.5” SATA drive)? Thanks

blorg

Hard drives are cheap; I wouldn't bother moving a drive with the OS on it. If you did have to try that, I would shrink the OS partition to under 200gb and then ghost it onto the new drive.

External will be slower, around 50% of the internal speed with a typical drive, but this will make no difference to serving music/movies etc., it is more than fast enough for that. External drives are often cheaper than internal these days for some strange reason (they all have an internal drive inside after all, you can rip it out and use it internally if you want- but you can't be sure these days whether you are getting IDE or SATA inside.)

500gb seems to be the sweet point but 750gb is not much more expensive per gb. I would tend to go for the biggest drive that is still a reasonable per gb cost, you can then run fewer drives with less noise, space and power consumption.

Note you should be able to record TV over the network if you want to consolidate storage in the server. A 100mb network is more than fast enough for this.

FrankGrimes

Good stuff, thanks blorg.

So it seems external is up to the job for this purpose - good to know as I might go with a 500GB internal drive to start with, but nice to know I can add in external drives easily at a later stage to expand capacity if needed.

How would IDE drive performance compare to external USB 2.0? If it's faster, I'd then buy an external drive if it's cheap and pull out the drive and fit it internally knowing it'll be at least as fast.

blorg wrote: »

Note you should be able to record TV over the network if you want to consolidate storage in the server. A 100mb network is more than fast enough for this.

Not sure what you mean by this - are you suggesting putting the TV tuner in the server (think that will be next version of WHS), or are you saying I can set Media Center on the HTPC to record to a network folder directly on the server? I think its the latter, and if that works it would seem to be a great solution.

Actually, if that works, my 500GB drive in the HTPC would go under-used, so I would probably then bother transferring that drive to the server....in which case I'd be back to figure out how to do the partitioning and ghosting!

blorg

IDE will be substantially faster than USB2.0 - at sustained transfer at least. Firewire is a better option, especially as it puts much less drain on the host CPU. There will be no difference between IDE and SATA internally, although eSATA should give you the fastest possible speed in an external enclosure. Having said that, USB2.0 is "fast enough" in that it works substantially faster than the bitrate of anything you might want to record or watch.

Here are some figures from my own system, using what I suspect is the same 750gb hard drive (with USB2/Firewire the interface is the limiting factor, with IDE/SATA the interface is faster than the drive):

Linear Read (MB/Sec)
IDE: 74.9
Firewire: 34.5
USB2: 20.3

Random Read (MB/Sec)
IDE: 3.7
Firewire: 3.5
USB2: 3.2

Access Time (ms)
IDE: 7.57
Firewire: 6.99
USB2: 7.37

Note that the figures for random read and access time don't differ very much, it's only in the sustained transfer that internal is so much speedier. USB will be more than fast enough to read/write media files but the other options may be a bit nicer if you tend to do a lot of bulk copies or whatever. These figures come from this very simple benchmark so you can compare with your own if you like.

Note that if you yank a drive out of an enclosure you lose the warranty on both drive and enclosure- a possible downside. Plus point you can sell the enclosure.

By recording over the network, I mean the TV tuner is left in your HTPC but the files are saved to a network share on the server. I don't have Media Centre myself but have no problems saving the output of my MPEG2 card directly over the network; the bitrate (~6Mbps) is low compared to the network (100Mbps).

I would leave the 500gb where it is TBH and use it for backup, etc. Cloning Windows can be a bit of a hassle. But if you want to ghost it it should be easy enough, there are free tools, including one from the maker of that benchmark. Shrinking the OS partition to fit on a smaller drive is easy with Partition Magic if you have it.

blorg

BTW, Pixmania have good prices on external drives- 500gb from €95, 750gb from €139, 750gb with Firewire from €159. Komplett have similar prices on the 500gb but are a bit more expensive on the 750gb.

FrankGrimes

Fair play blorg - I'll give that benchmarking tool a look when its up and running to see how things are going.

At this stage I'm thinking I'll just pickup a Samsung 500GB drive for €90 from Komplett and will add an external drive later if need be. I'll leave the 500GB where it is for the moment and will look into arranging recording over the network as that would be sweet.

Thanks.