There’s a Windows Home Server build guide on Ars. I was currious and ran the numbers myself in a spreadsheet. These days there are several tradeoffs smaller drives are cheaper, but it takes more of them, more power, and more controller cards. Larger drives are more expensive. The question I wanted to answer is:
- Where is the sweet spot?
- By updating the price information, where will the sweet spot be?
What I found out was very interesting. The storage is most of the cost and the sweet spot can drift. For a 1 terabyte box 2 X 500 meg drives is the way to go, but at 2 TB 8 X 250 meg drives are the cheapest option.
Notice that this table is about hitting a target size, some of these options make larger than the listed sizes. This table is only concerned with the storage price, the hardware will be, for me at least, roughly the same no matter what size. This table also assumes one large share, no extra parity drives or mirrors, which is unreasonable. One in 8 drives is likely to fail and no one will chance losing the whole thing. I did it this way, because WHS is supposed to include mirroring in it or some kind of filesystem that would allow multiple drives of various sizes in an array. This is unheard of and what is so exciting. RAID setups with recovery capability assume equal drives sizes.
The 1 TB line is blank, because they have not been released yet.
| With Controller Cards | Size(TB) | |||||
| Capacity (MB) | Price($) | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 |
| 200 | 68 | $340.00 | $730.00 | $1,120.00 | $1,510.00 | $1,900.00 |
| 250 | 65 | $260.00 | $520.00 | $830.00 | $1,140.00 | $1,450.00 |
| 320 | 85 | $340.00 | $595.00 | $900.00 | $1,205.00 | $1,460.00 |
| 400 | 110 | $330.00 | $550.00 | $880.00 | $1,150.00 | $1,530.00 |
| 500 | 140 | $280.00 | $560.00 | $840.00 | $1,120.00 | $1,450.00 |
| 750 | 340 | $680.00 | $1,020.00 | $1,360.00 | $2,040.00 | $2,380.00 |
| 1000 | 0 | $0.00 | $0.00 | $0.00 | $0.00 | $0.00 |