jwcolby
jwcolby at colbyconsulting.com
Thu Dec 20 11:01:33 CST 2007
That $500 cost includes buying the OS, motherboard, processor, memory, case / PS and hard drives (everything). I know that Dell builds low end components that can't be touched in a custom build, but high end DELL systems are easily beat in a build. I was expecting these new boxes to be more "high end" like but they are definitely not. The absolute cheapest AMD proc, motherboard, only a single drive etc. Thus there is still a reason to build if you expect to use the perfectly valid and available Windows 2003 server for something besides twiddling its thumbs over a home server app. I doubt that you can upgrade the proc in the HP and I know they only have two memory slots, both filled with 256m dimms. The only thing you can do is drop in more hard disks, and they sure made THAT easy!. All in all a pretty cheap and reasonable widget (for what it does) at $600 from HP. I had an old motherboard and AMD single core processor, in an existing case and PS which I could have used for this. The issue is that the WHS license is an OEM license which means that once registered in a specific MB / proc it cannot legally be moved to any other motherboard. My old system was pretty old and I did not want to build a brand new SOTA system around it so I bought a new motherboard. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16813130065 Cheap and fairly powerful, this MB will accept my old dual core "3800" processor (or a newer faster processor, even QUAD I think) and my existing memory. I needed a new PS to handle this board (different power connector and more power). So I am using my existing case, dual core proc, some old hard drives laying around, etc. I am buying the OS, MB and PS and a pair of memory dimms as well. I have two already but wanted to be able to bump it up to 4 gigs "just because" and memory is cheap. My actual cost to build is about $340, but if I bought EVERYTHING required to mimic the HP it would be about $500. BTW, this is designed to be "headless" meaning it expects to not have a monitor, keyboard and mouse although you can if you want. It is designed to be a box in the closet, and it is normally maintained from another machine, and will even accept RDT connections. It will run other apps too so you could have various things chunking away in the background. John W. Colby Colby Consulting www.ColbyConsulting.com -----Original Message----- From: dba-tech-bounces at databaseadvisors.com [mailto:dba-tech-bounces at databaseadvisors.com] On Behalf Of John Bartow Sent: Thursday, December 20, 2007 11:31 AM To: 'Discussion of Hardware and Software issues' Subject: Re: [dba-Tech] Windows Home Server update Do those costs include what the processor (and other parts) would cost if you had to purcahse them? IME I have found that the only build your systems that come less expensive than new PCs are ones that use higher end components. Wasn't the case a few years ago though. Good luck on the system building and WHS install! I anticipate the results. _______________________________________________ dba-Tech mailing list dba-Tech at databaseadvisors.com http://databaseadvisors.com/mailman/listinfo/dba-tech Website: http://www.databaseadvisors.com