Home server hardware - need input please

[Grit]

I have WHS 2011 running on an Asus P5B based motherboard with 4GB DDR2 and an Intel Core 2 E6700 CPU. There are three WD Red drives for storage.

I was considering upgrading the hardware, and possibly the software to Windows Server 2012 Essentials. My wife's laptop died and the new one has Windows 8.1 (all other computers at home are Windows 7 varieties).

The server is mainly used as our primary storage for photos, videos, music, and movies. It also serves as the only backup system for four computers. The data is redundantly stored via Amazon Glacier.

So, would upgrading to a new Haswell cpu/motherboard and going to 8GB DDR3 make any noticeable improvement? Is there any future-proofing benefit? Will that new hardware be more necessary with Server 2012?

I'd appreciate any input anyone has. And no, I don't really notice any current speed issues with the current hardware. It only came up because the server stopped working (traced to an ultimately bad boot drive). But in the course of diagnosing it, I discovered the on-board video on my P5B no longer works. At the time, i had no video card to put in the server and and thought the whole board may be fried. Turns out, it SEEMS to work fine (no video though, but that's not an issue, unless it somehow points to upcoming failure on the motherboard?)

Thanks in advance for any input.

I was worried that switching hardware

 

[dave_the_nerd]

If you're just using it as a filestore, you don't need a lot of CPU power. (The E6700 would be fine.) If it works and you're happy with transfer rates / performance, leave it be.

If you're running applications on the server, it's a different story. Even if you're not performance limited (say, you're using a small database and a web app, or using group policy to manage your home PCs - well within the capabilities of the CPU you have) I'd want to at least keep the OS version on the server ahead or equal to whatever I was using on my client machines.

I would NOT want to have known-defective hardware in a server. Generally, if one component on your mobo goes, another isn't far behind.

In your current position, I'd probably either replace the motherboard with a new (used) Socket 775 motherboard, or I'd get a low-end mobo/CPU bundle that had CPU "oomph" equivalent-or-better to the E6700. (See this thread for ideas.)

 

[master_shake_]

my windows home server 2011 machine is a q9550 8gb's of ram an lsi 8888elp raid card and an sgi omnistor 16bay jbod enclosure with 14 2tb drives.

perfect for backups file storage and media streaming.

a little over kill but anything wroth doing is worth over-doing

 

[mfenn]

I agree that you definitely don't need more CPU performance given your workload. If you have need of a spare, you can grab a used P5B from Ebay for pretty cheap.