File Server Build-Up

While I'm waiting for the arrival of parts and funds to buy parts (specifically a capture card), I decided to go on to stage 3 of my Winter Computer Rebuild Extravaganza!!! .....well really, it's just an operating system changeover to MS Windows Home Server from Windows Server 2000.
I had accumulated parts to build a file server for home use by mostly trading parts for an old Tyan Tomcat P4 motherboard with a "Northwood" Core Celeron processor which has 2 onboard Ethernet adapters. So, what's the mumbo-jumbo about "Northwood" blah, blah, blah!?! Here's the deal:

• It was cheap (free) since it was acquired in a trade for parts on hand.
• Its a motherboard with onboard graphics (so no extra vid-card), plus it used older DDR RAM that I already had on hand (read free).
• Plus this board has the almost ubiquitous socket 478 allowing me to choose from a WIDE variety of CPUs. Given that this thing is a file server, there would be VERY little processing being done. This allowed me to choose a very low-draw/cool-running "Northwood-128" Series CPU.
  

As most of you will know the "Celerons" were less expensive products that allowed Intel to be competitive in the lower end of the CPU market since at that time, AMD was "breathing down their proverbial necks" in the lower price points. They were cheaper by typically lowering the size of the onboard cache as well as a few other tricks. When they moved from the "P6" generation of Celerons to the "Netburst" series, they became known as the Celeron-4 and VERY powerful in their own right. The first of them were the "Williamette" Cores and much like the true P4s of the same core, ran pretty hot.

However, when the "Northwood" core was introduced, the 130nm process majorly shrank the die size and they were able to bring the voltage down from 1.7v to 1.52v making these the "hot ticket" because they ran much cooler! Anyway, when combined with 2 Ethernet connections on the motherboard and the fact that I traded for the whole she-bang, I was pretty stoked!

So, here it is, several months down the road, and after picking up 2 2Tb hard drives for storage and a SATA RAID adapter so I can connect them in the $35 Cooler Master case that I bought on special from buy.com, I've finally gotten this thing the way I want it.

And this came courtesy of a Window Home Server load that I was able to trade some other computer parts for locally. I had done some research and decided that this adaptation of the MS Server 2003 would work very well for our growing home network, but I just didn't want to pay the $100 to buy it! So again, a trade was perfect for my situation.

I stayed up late last night and loaded it (couldn't sleep after the basketball game anyway), got the SATA/RAID adapter recognized today and the big-boy hard drives formatted as well. Then a few client loads later, plus a little time setting up "Users", I have 4+ terabytes of, always on, "headless" file storage that I can tuck away in a literal corner! Now, we finally have that automated storage solution that's no-muss/no-fuss, AND I haven't even tapped into its media server capabilities yet. The best part? Built for less than $400 of which $300 was in hard drives alone.