No way am I paying $450 for a machine with a Celeron processor.

Ok, thanks for sharing. Now go away.

#1 This is a step up many use atom.

Anyone tried building their own?

Sure have #4, they are about the same as building a windows machine. I took and old XPS 700 I had and stuffed 10 1.5TB drives and a 160GB boot drive in it and has been running perfect. Not the most energy efficent server but it does what I need it to.

#4 & #5 - I rolled my own. A low power Athlon BE-2350, microATX board with two extra SATA controllers and 18 1.5TB drives. Dell had them for $82 at the end of 2008 and I bit hard. All stuffed into a well ventilated Armour+ case.

The system will drop individual drives to standby when not used and since it is NOT raid only a single drive will spin-up when I am watching a movie or downloading pictures. It idles at 67W and I have never seen it in double digits.

Also, it has never crashed/locked-up. It just sits in my basement. I don't know about the box that HP is selling, but my box can saturate gigabit ethernet when sending mutliple large file. I have even needed the recovery feature (I backup 3 Win7, 2 XP, and 1 Vista) and it worked simply and flawlessly.

#6 That is awesome! How much did you spend on the system without including the hard drives?

I have the EX470 which I upgraded myself. It has 4x1.5TB drives in it and it has been functioning without problems for the last 8 months...bacon's quiet

#7
$70 - Used Armour+ case
$50 - 550W Corsair TX PS
$50 - Asus microATX MB (with 8 SATA ports!)
$20 - 4 port SATA controller
$20 - 4 port SATA controller
free - 2 port SATA controller
free - cables
$50 - BE2350 CPU retail
$90 - OEM license for WHS
$10 - 1GB DDR2 (ahh, the good old days of memory glut)
$40 - fans and 4 into 3 mounts
----
$400
plus $1476 for the drives... so just under two grand for 27TB.

FYI - I actually bought 30 drives. I don't use folder duplication since I have eleven full 1.5TB drives re-sealed and packed into a tub that I store elsewhere. The only good backup is offsite and I have archived every bit of data - pictures, home movies, everything - for myself and my entire extended family. All accessible across the Internet. Seriously, WHS is the best thing Microsoft ever did and nobody knows about it.

Okay, a good question for #9 on backups, I don't use folder dup either, what do you do for backups on your WHS? I manualy backup complete folders to external drives but its time consuming, some sort of incremental backup for changed items only would be nice. Oh and nice setup! 27TB would be nice!

Windows Home Server Vail is pretty awesome too. It does video streaming.
http://blogs.zdnet.com/microsoft/?p=5063

#10 - I actually keep extra folders that include duplication. I have a hot/external bay that I keep a backup drive. Every night I have a backup script copy whatever is in those duplicated folders into both the appropriate non-duplicated folder and into the backup drive. That way data is always duplicated in either the server or outside of the server. When the backup drive is full I pop it out and put a fresh one in. I take the now full backup drive and run a batch file that creates a file listing the contents. I add that list to a tracking file so that I know what files are on what backup drive. I also print out the file list and include that sheet of paper in the antistatic bag that will hold the drive. On the next opportunity I drop the drive off at my family member's house and everything is safe and secure. Actually, all I really do is check how full the backup drive is and go through tracking info process when I swap out new backup drives. Pretty simple really. I am a bit paranoid about my data. When you shoot about 100 hours of video each year and 20k photos in RAW format, plus what everyone else adds (everyone else can only put new files in the duplicated folders). The server is already 2/3 full.

#12 I have been in the IT professional for almost 2 decades. and working with the big 500s. As my understading, you do a full backup of dupe folders (compare to raid 1 on linux NAS) to a raid 1 setup external drivers. I think you're way over protection of your data, I don't know if this is good or bad idea though since the duplication setup on WHS will slow (maynot be noticed) down the write process so does the raid 1 setup on external backup driver. Sorry for my English guys.

#13 - The only files that are folder-duplicated are the files that have not been copied to both a non-duplicated folder and to a removable drive that will be taken out of the computer and stored when full. Every file I have is either stored in a duplicated folder or is stored in an unduplicated folder and in a second disk that are mostly stored offsite.

I have used RAID 0,1,0+1, 5, and 6 in the past. RAID is not about backup, it is about uptime, and my concerns are exclusively about data protection since my access needs are not immediate. What does amaze me is how fast WHS is. It can saturate gigE in both reading and writing, something which I can only demonstrate when accessing the server from my workstation which uses dual WD640GB black drives in RAID0. I am really not sure how WHS can handle speeds that I would think would require some type of striping. Maybe it is doing some kind of caching in memory since none of my files are over a GB. I don't know. I have been very pleased with the solution since it provides most of what I need from MS Server without the high license and user costs. I would have like better media function since it is a 'Home Server'. I had issues with getting TV tuning software to work properly with WHS so those duties have been shifted to an Acer Rivo1600 which can access my HDHomerun, record my shows, and store them on the server to be viewed from any computer on the network (or even remotely).

#9 Thank you very much Mcnabney for all the great information!