Finished Building Custom Windows Home Server for Work

Vanguard Instruments Company, where I currently work at, was founded in 1993, but ever since then they have never had a network server. Although we have a network, there is no server and no one uses any shared resources, mainly because my boss is afraid of networks and the internet, and technology in general. So up until now, everyone here runs around with a USB memory stick that is used to transfer data (and viruses) from one computer to another.

When I started here in January of this year, one of my main goals was to build and install a network server to handle computer backups and data storage. Sadly, it took nine months till I could finally get to building one! The last nine months I’ve been mainly buried under user’s manuals that I’ve been writing and re-writing.

Last month I finally convinced my boss that it was time to spec and build our server. Since we have a very small network here and we aren’t going to be serving up any applications, I decided to go with Microsoft Windows Home Server. I’ve been in love with Windows Home Server ever since I built my own server for my home network. It’s really a wonderful operating system with a great set of robust features and very easy administration. I love the automatic computer backup feature, and especially the automatic file duplication feature for shared folders. I also really like how it creates one huge storage pool from all of the hard drives you have connected (internal and external) and manages storage balancing automatically.

For the server at work, I used a lot of the same parts I used for my home server with a few upgrades. Here’s the full parts list:

ASRock A780GXE/128M Motherboard

AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual-Core 6000+ 3.0 GHz Processor

Cooler Master Centurion 5 ATX Mid Tower Case

OCZ OCZ2N800SR4GK SLI-Ready Edition DDR2 PC2-6400 4 GB Dual Channel Memory Kit

I-Star BPU-340SATA – Internal RAID enclosure

4 x Samsung Spinpoint F1 1TB SATA Hard Drives (Love these quiet drives)
Microsoft Windows Home Server Operating System

So far this is the second Windows Home Server machine that I’ve built from scratch without a hitch. So if your small business is in dire need of a network server that can provide reliable network storage as well as automated backups, shoot me a line!

Resurrecting My Dell Inspiron 1501 Laptop

While still contemplating my next purchase, I realized that I might actually be able to use my current Dell Inspiron 1501 laptop for music production. The biggest problem with this laptop is that it doesn’t have a firewire port, which I need for the Presonus FireBox audio interface. However a long time ago I had bought a Startech Firewire Expresscard for it which I couldn’t get to work. Then I remembered that I was trying to get the card to work with Windows Vista.

I hate Vista. I regret the day I “upgraded” my laptop to it. It slowed it to a complete crawl. So yesterday I decided to upgrade back to upgrade back to Windows XP which the laptop came with originally. To sweeten the pot, I also decided to swap the stock 30GB drive for a Samsung 500GB drive that I had bought for one of my PS3’s. I never used the drive for the PS3 because frankly I found no use for it, so it has been just laying around.

The move back to XP went great and I was able to get the 500GB drive in there as well. In fact I’m currently posting this from my laptop. Also, I ordered 2GB of RAM for the laptop because currently it only has a measly 512MB and it’s swapping way too much for the hard drive.

Once the OS issues were worked out, I went back to the Firewire expresscard. Plugged it in and sure enough, it’s working great with the FireBox. Well, I mean it seems to be so far. I haven’t tried it with any soft synths yet, but I’m not really anticipating any problems. If anything, the problem may be with the speed of my laptop since it’s only got an AMD Turion X2 running at 1.6Ghz.

UPDATE

Well, I finally got everything installed and for some crap reason the FireBox doesn’t work correctly. Such a waste of time. I plugged in the Firewire Expresscard to the laptop and plugged in the FireBox to the Expresscard. The card seems to be functioning fine and the computer sees the FireBox. I was able to install the drivers and everything just fine. I even get sound out of it, but the sound has a ton of garbled noise mixed in with it. That’s usually a latency issue, but changing the latency time values didn’t fix it at all. I rebooted the computer many times and only ONCE I actually got perfect sound out of it, but the next time I rebooted it was back to the crappy distorted audio.

At this point I have no idea what the hell is wrong with the computer. My best guess is that the ExpressCard firewire interface isn’t fast enough or is causing problems. I’m not gonna spend any money to buy another ExpressCard because I have a feeling the FireBox won’t work with any of them. *sigh* This really sucks because I was hoping to use this for music production.