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The Big WHS was originally supposed to house approximately 30TB of storage when the plans were first detailed on an Excel spreadsheet BOM in December 2009. This was a big upgrade to my first DIY Windows Home Server box that had well under 20TB. About five months later, the storage capacity has crested 60TB, with further room to expand. The Big WHS now spans two 4U Norco cases (using a total of 8U of rackspace and another 4U chassis is in the works) has over 60TB of storage, and requires well over a dozen ports on the gigabit switch.

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Sempron 140 WHS - In a Corsair Cardboard Box

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Things have been progressing on the Big WHS front. First off, my main PC is now is using the WHS Connector software and has back-ups scheduled on the new WHS. The old WHS is still assembled, but it is not powered on at this point, just in case something goes wrong with the current setup. I also decided to play around with some other popular NAS/SAN solutions while I was at it.

Here’s a quick screen shot of the Windows Server 2008 R2 hosting Hyper-V virtual machines with Windows Home Server, OpenFiler, and FreeNAS:

Windows Server 2008 R2 with WHS, FreeNAS, and Openfiler in Virtual Machines

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This week the Big WHS underwent a major change and dropped the Asus motherboard in favor of a Supermicro one. Apparently the Asus P6T7 WS Supercomputer motherboard does not like the HP SAS Expander at all. I could not find a card that could see the SAS Expander. This all culminated when I finally took the working setup out of the Gigabyte H55 board and couldn’t get it to work in the Asus. For those wondering, yes, it was a $200 motherboard/ CPU with 36 raid ports + another 5 onboard and 1 esata. Windows Home Server v1 can only support 32 drives so that is a lot of connectivity at about $660!

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As I posted previously, the new Clarkdale based chips (or Intel’s 2010 Core line-up) are quite nice chips. Speed wise, they are similar in performance to the venerable Core 2 Quad Q6600 (often faster) yet come equipped with integrated graphics and a much refined process (32nm on the CPU core for the i3/i5′s and 65nm for the Q6600). The net result is that the power consumption is particularly great on the new chips.

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