Dawn and I have had our share of hard drive problems lately. When I joined the Microsoft Home Server beta a few months ago, I set up a decent little server and connected a few external drives and set up the shares. Off we went with 120GB of Primary storage and a 250GB volume for music. All was well until either the case died or the drive died on the 120GB. I am not sure which came first, the chicken or the egg, but in the process the partition was corrupted on the 120GB to the point that I was unable to repair it despite days of effort.
Starting fresh was the only way to go. Since I was not overly impressed with Windows Home Server as a whole, I decided to go with Windows 2003 Server Standard Edition on a machine with the following specs:
- 2.4Ghz Pentium 4
- 2GB RAM
- 40GB Primary HD for OS
- (2) 120GB IBM Deskstar 7200rpm HD’s in a RAID Mirror for Primary Storage
- 250GB External Disk for Music (Will be replaced by a dual 500 stand alone NAS soon)
- Gigabit Ethernet
I also placed this box on a switch so I have a secondary input for tinkering on PCs. Around the Burns/Fink household we have quite a few PCs around. I have two PCs I use, Dawn has one, there is a PC in the kitchen, one in the Game Room, Andy has one, and there are about 5 others in the closet in various states of disarray. We also have 3 laptops. That’s a whole lotta computing going on. Now I am able to take any PC that needs some work or playing on and hook it up on the Server desk in the office so I don’t clutter and disorganize my workstation.
When the Disk Mirror is finished syncing I also intend to set it up as a Primary Domain Controller, a RDC/RAS Server and our file server. This will be a pretty fun experiment, I am not sure if I am going to go crazy and implement roaming profiles, home directories, disk quotas and the like yet, but it will be fun having a full server around for a playground for my geekdom.
Are you thinking about your storage security? Are you holding your precious data on an external disk alone? With hard drive prices plummeting (a 500GB Lacie External for $110 at CompUSA recently) you might want to take a serious look at something like the Netgear SC101T Storage Central Turbo. This box holds two SATA hard disks and has gigabit Ethernet for fast file storage and access. I recommend you check this or some device similar out and get yourself some data security before it’s too late.
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