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New Windows Home Server

By Nick Hodge | June 19, 2009

After becom­ing increas­ingly frus­trated with the Tran­quil Home Server, I decided to de-commission it. The drivers required at install time didn’t work, and Tran­quil tech­nical sup­port (online and via email) just didn’t work. #epicfail

Old Tranquil PC in Pieces

There is a mother­board con­fig­ur­a­tion called Mini-ITX where the dimen­sions are 170mm x 170mm. Intel have a great board with 1Gb Eth­er­net, 4 USB and a PCI con­nector. Adding memory, a SATA HD and case: and you have an instant Win­dows Home Server. I used the Win­dows Home Server media and serial num­ber from the Tranquil.

What I purchased:

Stuff Price
Aywun A1-8989 Cube Mini-ITX Case with 150W PSU 67.10
West­ern Digital Caviar GP WD10EACS, 1TB SATA HD 180.40
Intel D945GCLF2 Mother­board, Integ­rated Intel Atom 330 1.6GHz 128.30
King­ston 2GB PC2-6400 (800MHz) DDR2 240-pin DIMM 39.99
Total 415.79

 

The case:

New Server in its New Home

Build­ing the hard­ware took less than 10 minutes, and the soft­ware install time (fresh) was less than an hour, includ­ing format­ting the drive.

Now installed at home, repop­u­lat­ing the data and get­ting on with life. I feel way bet­ter hav­ing built this myself.

Oh, and the kit­tehs like the box the case arrived in:

Kitteh in Server Case Cardboard Box

Topics: windowshomeserver | 6 Comments »

6 Responses to “New Windows Home Server”

  1. Luke Oliver Says:
    June 20th, 2009 at 5:58 pm

    Nice build. Got a recom­mend­a­tion for HDMI out­put with that one?

  2. Nick Hodge Says:
    June 21st, 2009 at 5:39 pm

    Luke

    Maybe one of these?

    http://www.intel.com/Products/Desktop/Motherboards/DG45FC/DG45FC-overview.htm

    Other mobo vendors also make these size boards. The Form factor is a major win

    Nick

  3. Nicholas Says:
    June 22nd, 2009 at 4:39 am

    Very cool, we’ll have to show this off at the next Sydney Win­dows User Group

  4. Luke Oliver Says:
    June 22nd, 2009 at 9:09 pm

    Yep, Mini-ITX is the new black :)

    Pro­ject sus­pen­ded wait­ing for ready avail­ab­il­ity of this one:

    http://www.antec.com/Believe_it/product.php?id=MjEwMg==

  5. Nicholas Says:
    June 27th, 2009 at 3:19 pm

    Did you get all these parts from Aus­P­CMar­ket? Think­ing of build­ing mine in the next week or so

  6. Nick Hodge Says:
    June 30th, 2009 at 3:01 pm

    actu­ally, pur­chased from mwave.com.au … staticice.com.au is your friend :-)

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