Rock Hymas

Around September, Kami and I decided we would dedicate some money to replacing our dying backup server. It was nothing fancy, just a simple box that backed up important stuff via FolderShare and provided access to our printer. With the impending release of Windows Home Server it made a lot of sense to just wait a bit and setup a new box with that for backup, printer sharing, and away-from-home access. A friend of mine had recently tried to convince me to start building my own PCs for the savings, the customization opportunities, and the ability to build something more likely to last longer. So after thinking about it a bit I decided to do just that, instead of just getting the HP MediaSmart Server. I’ll outline the process of building the box in this post, and later talk about installing and setting up the software.

You can see the computer I got as a NewEgg (but without the motherboard, which is no longer available). Some of the things I wanted over the MediaSmart server included dual hard drives with more total storage space, a faster, upgradeable processor and motherboard, and 1G of RAM instead of 512 MB. What’s cool is that I got all this for less than the price of the cheaper MediaSmart server.

So, everything finally arrived and I found an evening to put it all together. I basically followed the instructions that came with each part and used Jeff Atwood’s excellent Building a PC series to direct my efforts. I skipped the overclocking, since I don’t really care about that at this point, nor do I have the time to really put that kind of effort into this PC. However, I may do it with the new dev box I’m buying for home use next month.

I got everything set up and connected, and it worked! I have yet to install the software, because I have yet to get the software. I planned on using Microsoft’s company store to get a nice discount on Windows Home Server, but they’ve been out ever since I started working on this. And the discount is big enough that I can wait, praying that our old backup server doesn’t totally die in the meantime. So I’ll post about that soon.