Windows Home Server has had some interesting developments over the past couple of months and how it can work with all the PCs on your network. After looking into WHS it seems that its very promising and useful for a central server need. Mostly I got convinced by my friend to work on it.
I have this 8 year old Alienware case which is perfect for the job, I stripped it of all the old items.
By the time I am done with the retrofit of the case I will be able to install at least 11 Hard Drives and one optical drive which is very large. I just install the 1200 Watt PSU, DVD Writer,and One 320 GB Sata (OS Drive)
What I will be needing:
- New Motherboard
- Processor
- Ram
- Basic Graphics Card
- Hard Drives (Raid Pool)
I had to use a vacuum cleaner to clean out the guts of the case, it was dusty as hell.
I decided to try out Firefox 3 Beta and from Beta 2 I have been enjoying all the new features and light browser. It just kept getting better and better, didn’t hang with me yet. I just recently downloaded Firefox 3 Beta 5 and it is really annoying, for some reason Youtube keeps hanging and there just seems to be something wrong, can’t seem to put my finger on it. Overall I think it is a great improvement and still with development it will beat Explorer as usual, in comparison Explorer 7 is heavy and crashes every time I load more the 7 tabs, but with Firefox its still better in Beta form then Explorer 7. Right now I’m having a few issues with Beta 5 but hopefully it will keep improving.
I don’t think there will ever be a point when there is enough space for everything I’m downloading. Every few weeks I keep expanding, I have filled up my Infrant Ready NAS and my Main Computer to the brim. So I was slowing down the downloads, every time I download I have to move something around. So I checked with Professional they only had 750 GB drives and not 1 TB drives.
I found that I had a 250 GB hard disk laying around which I mounted right away, and I picked up a Seagate 750 GB 16 MB cache hard drive from Professional for 57KD. I shifted a lot of things right away to the new 250 GB drive (Side Drive), while waiting for the new 750 GB drive to finish formatting. This helped a lot, now I’m back on track downloading more shows, more movies, and more anime.
At the rate I’m downloading I have to purchase a couple of hard drives every few weeks, I have to find a long term solution which might be a very large rack mount media server.
I have been using this keyboard for a little over four months now, and I think this is probably the most necessary computer accessory.
Pros
- Very Solid Build, Stylish
- Bluetooth chip is small and can communicate from 10 meters away, which is perfect for a media center
- I charge it only once in the past three months so it does last over a month and half for one charge
- It is extremely thin, but it feels good in your hands, lap, and desk
- Very good track pad and you won’t be touching it when you type like other track pads
- Scrolling is very intuitive, you just have to go in circles on the track pad, very simple and useful
- Good placed buttons:
- Zoom
- Volume Control
- Media Key
- Big Delete Key (Very useful)
- It feels good to type on it
- Almost nothing is sacrificed between this and a regualr keyboard, instead you get a lot more then you expect
Cons
- No Number Pad (Don’t care for it)
This is nothing short of the perfect keyboard, it has all that I need and it is one of the highest quality keyboards I have used and one of the best that Logitech have made, it is worth every penny.
Price: $164
Rating:
Everybody at this point in time has a sizable amount of music in some sort of hard drive. In my case I have my music mostly stored in my Network Area Storage. I have had the Sonos system for over three years in storage now, I got them in 2005 and didn’t connect them for the longest time since I didn’t have the right setup to take advantage of it.
At this point I do have the right setup to make use of my Sonos system, I have two ZP100s which are the base machines which connect to the database through a wired or wireless connection. These machines recognize each other which is fantastic through the network, I control the two ZP100s through the Sonos Controller 100 which you can choose what to play where. I am deploying these machines in different locations but at this point I really have to organize and clean up my music, they are really messy and the naming is just horrible.
I also need to clean up all the duplicates I have, I have some music stored in other places but with this new system I really need to clean things up with my audio files. My video files are all organized and categorized which is easy to search through and find, but my audio is one huge jumble.
I have had more and more picture piling up over the few years, I haven’t really used any photo organizer until this point. This is where Picasa steps in perfectly, I need to see what I have and to remember how I want them organized. The only pictures I have organized perfectly is the my motorcycle pictures, by brand and then by date. The best part of the program is seeing all your pictures in one window, it even reminds me of pictures that I haven’t seen in a while. I have to figure out how to index certain pictures and how to leave out certain photos, it took a little while to index my main PC that is holding about 6000+ pictures and some in very high quality, I tend to snap away with the camera.
This is one of the first steps to reorganize all the pictures I have, the first set of digital pictures are from 1999 which I took with my Sony Cybershot F505 which was a gift from my cousin, it was an amazing camera and was great for a 2.0 Megapixel for a very long time. Now I have a few other cameras and always snapping away, I just want to organize all the photos I have since I know they are located in different drives and on different computers, with Picasa its going to make things a lot simpler. I just have to figure out all the bells and whistles of this program, I really like how smooth it is and very feature rich.
I have been downloading at a very high rate over the past two months, and I’m reaching a bottle neck which I didn’t think I would hit this quickly. I am currently running out of space on my main systems. I’m filling up my hard drives with TV shows, Anime, and movies.
Space Breakdown:
- Main PC (Armor Jr) :
- Space: 698 GB
- Free Space: 27 GB
- External (USB Attached Maxtor):
- Space: 233 GB
- Free Space: 58 GB
- Infrant NV+ (Network):
- Space: 1603 GB
- Free: 231 GB
- Network Drive (Maxtor):
- Space: 278 GB
- Free Space: 198 GB
- Total Space: 2812 GB
- Free Space: 514 GB
- Free Space: 18.3%
I had a simple process of moving old things to the Infrant and keeping new things on the Main PC, but I reached a bottleneck with that a few weeks ago and so I started moving some data over to the external storage and some over to the network drive. I had a system before but now that just doesn’t accomodate the amount of data that I am downloading. I have to figure out a different system of moving things over, I don’t even have enough time to watch all that I am downloading, but I want to download all that is available now so that if it isn’t available in the future at least I could. I have to figure out a new system, this isn’t the total amount of space that I have available but I need to figure out where to move all my media at this rate it is just getting all filled up. Before I thought I could just organize all my photos at a later point, and I kept postponing so many things but at this point I have to organize my pictures, music and other folders so that I can utilize all the space I have efficiently, since I have more to download.
I have been on a huge downloading spree as of lately, I have managed to get a lot of Movies and TV series. Then I realized that there are some Anime’s that I don’t have complete and I don’t have access to them all the time.
So this is just part of the list of Anime’s that I am currently downloading to complete the ones I have as well as the more episodes:
- Mazinger Z – Full
- Kyo Kara Maoh – Full
- D.Gray-Man
- Gundam 00
- Oh Edo Rocket – Full
- Bakumatsu Kikansetsu Irohanihoheto – Full
- One Piece 1 – 300
Between all these Animes it easily adds up to 200 GB to be downloaded over the next few days. Now I just have to figure out where to store them and how to organize them. (Click On the Picture for More Details)
I have had a Home Theater PC for some time now, and it has turned it one of my most essential sources of media. I thought I could sustain my usage with a small factor PC but because of the HD quality movies and TV series that I have been downloading it just couldn’t handle the usage, the Mini-ATX wasn’t cutting it.
So I have upgrade and transplanted some parts into my new HTPC from Silverstone, it could fit 6 Hard Drives, ATX motherboard, and everything else. Turns out it isn’t completely the case, who ever designed it packed everything in extremely tight. With my configuration I could barely fit everything in, cooling was very important for this heavy duty machine.
K pretty much redid all the wiring and hardware configuration done in Hawally, it was completely rewired due to bad wiring. We moved the hard drives around as well. Instead of taking 1 hour for the software install after getting the hard installed, supposedly ready, we had to reconfigure the hardware and start again from there. Thanks to K for being a stickler for neatness and airflow.
New Specs:
- Silverstone LC16M
- Intel Core 2 Quad Core Q6600 2.4GHz
- Gigabyte GA-EX38-DS4
- 2 GB 1066 Mhz Corsair Ram
- ATI 2600 XT 256 MB DDR4
- 3 X 750 GB Hard Drives (Total 2.25 Terabytes of Space)
After all those hours we managed to get things up and running, while things were downloading we went out to get some food from Maki. There was a lot of traffic but K had the navigation and I had the driving, it was more like rally then a drive. I want to thank all the police for keeping all the riff raff on the roads in check. When we got the food, we ate like there was no tomorrow while continuing the install and updates, everything is completely operational. The tweaking will be left for another time.
I have been downloading a hell of a lot over the past couple of weeks, and I didn’t notice but my Hard Drive filled up. The only reason I did notice was because I wasn’t able to unzip some files, it gave a strange error that there is no space. I never thought that I would max out the space on 750 GB Hard Drive with just new media. So I have 750 GB worth of Movies, TV Shows, Anime, and Torrent Uploads that I haven’t seen. The ones I have seen have been shifted over to the NAS.
After three days of clean up and slight reorganization I managed to get 64 GB worth of space enough to continue my downloads. All I have to do now is rethink my organization scheme for the new shows. I’m planning to shift everything to the NAS, but that was supposed to be at a later point. With things in the current situation I might have to shift earlier then expect. Too much to watch and not enough time.