Recommended OS

[MB Rich 4]

Afternoon all,

 

My current NAS (Thecus n5200) is reaching the end of its life, mainly due to it not supporting HDDs of a large enough volume for my media collection.

 

I had originally planned to replace it with a more modern NAS, but with the advent of MB3 I'm considering building a full-fledged Windows PC to act both as fileserver and as an MB3 server to various clients around the house.

 

I think Windows Server would be overkill for my requirements which include just a handful of clients, with very light loads, e.g. Media Browser and the occasional bit of file sharing.

 

As a result I was planning to just stick a version of Windows 7 (probably Professional to enable RDP) on but I just wanted to get some feedback as to whether this is likely to cause me any problems.

 

Is this likely to work well for fileserving and MB3 server/

 

[GhostRider 46]

That's similar to how I run my server.

 

It is a headless PC so I use Remote Desktop to manage the Windows 7 OS.

 

I use the RAID controller on the Intel Motherboard to manage the RAID configuration to mirror the hard disks.

 

The PC runs MB3 server as a service for movies.

 

Music is currently shared by Windows Media streaming. (Will investigate MB3 for this when I have some spare time).

 

General file serving using network drives for backups etc.

 

I have only set one performance tweak on the server PC as it is headless I have set performance to favor background services:

 

Right-click Computer, select Properties > Advanced system settings > Performance settings > Advanced and then select Adjust for best performance of the background services.

Edited February 26, 2014 by GhostRider

[Aphid 212]

There shouldn't be any problems with running Win7 Pro on your server. You may need a registry hack to allow multi-user login for RDP to be useful. Windows 8 Professional will also get you HyperV and Storage Spaces, but is otherwise the same as 7 for server use.

[MB Rich 4]

I'm not fussed about multiple RDP logins, one will be just fine, so I might well go down this route with Win7.

 

I'm guessing that for a really small setup like this 2012 Server is just overkill?

[gcoupe 63]

Overkill, and also expensive. Even the starter set of Windows Server 2012 Essentials is not cheap. One alternative you might consider is Windows Home Server 2011. It's built on Windows Server 2008 R2, but an OEM license can be had at around $50 - $60. I've used WHS as the basis for my media server for years.

Edited February 26, 2014 by gcoupe