Rebuilding my media server….maybe

[bbig119]

I’ve got some time off the next few weeks and have a number of HTPC related tasks on my to do list. One that wasn’t on the list, but it now near the top is trying to figure out what to do about my media server.

I’m currently running Ubuntu with a bunch of drives primarily in one of two software raid 5 arrays. I’ve never been thrilled with the performance and always attributed it to software raid 5 more than anything else, however the box is stable.

Last week I jumped on what I thought was a good deal and bought a pair of 2TB WD drives that have the new advanced partitioning on them. Not really knowing what it was, I wasn’t concerned until I did some more reading after I got them.

It looks like it won’t be fun to get these working well in linux right now, but I could do it. However, I’m also toying around with the idea of using this as an opportunity to try Windows Home Server. I know that the current version doesn’t officially support these drives, but apparently if they are jumpered as is supposed to be done with XP, they work alright. I know there is the beta of the new WHS, ‘vail’ out and about, and I would hope that these drives would be better supported there.

So I’m curious if WHS is a good idea and which one to go for. Right now the linux box is primarily used for media storage. I also run apache for a very out of date website, shared printer and FTP server. I suspect that these functions are available and trivial to setup in WHS.

[George L. Schmauch Jr.]

I love my WHS setup, so I’m clearly biased.  The PC backups and drive pool are just plain awesome.  However, if you’re using Media Center, then the integration is currently still lacking (but slowly getting better).  If the jumper trick works, great, but I understand there may be a performance hit from it.  Otherwise, you’ll need to wait for WHS v2.

I wouldn’t exactly say that those additional services are “trivial” to set up.  Since they aren’t supported functions, it may be more work than you’re expecting or may not work exactly as you would like.  I haven’t done any of them, so I can’t say, but I have read about it being done.  While I’m currently doing “unsupported” things on my WHS box, I’ve come to the realization that I would prefer to have WHS simply do WHS tasks and would rather have a non-WHS OS performing these other tasks.

Note that WHS does allow remote access to your files, so you may or may not want/need the FTP server.  Sharing a printer across Windows boxes is pretty simple, no matter what.  Obviously, you don’t need a full server to accomplish that.

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