As promised, I am updating the status of the Wegotserved series on building a Windows 8 Home Server. Part one of my post is here. Wegotserved is providing a series of articles about using Windows 8 as a replacement for the end-of-life Windows Home Server (WHS) product. Microsoft has announced that there will be no follow on to WHS and WHS 2011 - thus the need to explore other options if you want a reasonably priced Windows based home server.
In this article, Wegotserved explores hardware options for building the server with Windows 8 as the software:
For our Windows 8 build, I’ve selected Intel’s quad-core Core i5-2500K, one of the chip giant’s “Sandy Bridge” range of processors. You can argue it’s a little over powered for basic home server usage, and a new generation of “Ivy Bridge” chips have just been released by the processor giant in the course of writing this series, but it’s got a great feature set for those likely to use their PC heavily for media (streaming multiple HD videos, encoding, decoding and so on). It runs at a speed of 3.3 GHz, but can be overclocked up to higher speeds if required. That K at the end of the model number means that the processor is completely unlocked, so you can tweak with its settings as you need to in the BIOS settings. At 95W TDP, it’s most definitely not a low-power processor so drop down to an Atom processor if that’s your thing. But, it supports Intel’s powerful HD Graphics 3000, so there’s no need for an additional graphics card for HD Video playback – that’ll help when it comes to minimising your chassis footprint. There’s also support for Intel’s VT-x Virtualization Technology, allowing the creation of Virtual Machines on your server – that’ll allow you to host a variety of of Operating Systems within Windows 8 should that be useful.
As you can see, the author decided to go with a pretty powerful processor. This is not an extremely low power consumption device, but if you want the possibility of transcoding video, it is probably a good idea to go for as fast a processor as possible.
Check out the article for the rest of the hardware choices.
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