• Welcome to TechPowerUp Forums, Guest! Please check out our forum guidelines for info related to our community.
  • The forums have been upgraded with support for dark mode. By default it will follow the setting on your system/browser. You may override it by scrolling to the end of the page and clicking the gears icon.

Best Windows-based OS for home file server

Red_Machine

Red_Machine

Joined
Oct 1, 2010
Messages
2,366 (0.44/day)
Location
Marlow, ENGLAND
System Specs
System Name Chachamaru-IV | Retro Battlestation
Processor AMD Ryzen 9 5900X | Intel Pentium II 450MHz
Motherboard ASUS ROG STRIX X570-F Gaming | MSI MS-6116 (Intel 440BX chipset)
Cooling Noctua NH-D15 SE-AM4
Memory 32GB Corsair DDR4-3000 (16-20-20-38) | 512MB PC133 SDRAM
Video Card(s) nVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 FE | 3dfx Voodoo3 3000
Storage 1TB WD_Black SN850 SSD (OS), 3TB Toshiba (Storage), 8TB Seagate FireCuda/2TB WD_Black SN580X (Steam)
Display(s) Samsung Odyssey G5 27" @ 1440p144 & Dell U2412M @ 1200p60
Case SilverStone Seta A1 | Beige box
Audio Device(s) Creative Sound Blaster AE-7, Edifier speakers, Grado Labs SR80 X headphones | Sound Blaster AWE64
Power Supply EVGA Supernova 750 G2 | 250W ASETEC
Mouse MX Master 3S| Microsoft Serial Mouse v2.0A
Keyboard Vortex Race3 | Dell AT102W
Software Microsoft Windows 11 Pro | Microsoft Windows 98SE
I want to set up a file server with an old PC I have here for backups and using as a media server. I've come to the conclusion that I can't use Home Server, because it doesn't support my 3TB hard drives due to it being based on XP, and I can't use Home Server 2011 because it's 64-bit and the CPU in this machine is 32-bit. I'd rather use Windows-based solutions because I really have no clue what I'm doing with Linux.

I have access to every basic corporate-level OS (some server editions) with my TechNet subscription, but I also have discs for home versions of Vista. So given what I want to do, and the fact I'm limited by my 32-bit CPU and 3TB hard drives, what do you recommend? I was thinking of using Vista Basic, as the PC doesn't have a lot of grunt, but it apparently only supports 2 incoming connections (not sure if this was patched with SP2 like it was with Home Premium/Business/Ultimate or not).
 
You'll want a professional level OS at least. It just makes user management and remoting into the machine much easier. I'd probably recommend Windows 7 Professional/Enterprise. It should do everything you need to do and will run on pretty much anything as a server. I ran Win7 Pro for the longest time in our office as a file server on a Celeron D and 1GB of RAM. It was slow and kind of a pain in the ass if I had to sit at the machine and actually use the GUI, but it worked great as a file server, and the GUI became much better to use once I dropped 2GB of RAM in the machine.

What are the specs of the PC? If the machine doesn't have a lot of grunt you can turn the GUI options way down and Win7 Pro behaves much better on weaker machines.
 
It's a 3GHz Pentium 4 HT with 2.5GB RAM. Did MS patch support into the 32-bit versions for 3TB drives? Because I've read that at the time 7 was released, it still had the same limitations XP did.
 
Im using Windows 8.1 Pro myself with no problems at all. Have Hyper V running to play with VMs as well.
 
My answer would be: Forget Windows and ask for help on setting up a Linux box. Samba is pretty easy to set up. I could walk you through it.

Since you probably won't like that answer, I would recommend Windows 7 Pro or Server 2008 R2 if you have that available to you.
 
Aquinus said:
My answer would be: Forget Windows and ask for help on setting up a Linux box. Samba is pretty easy to set up. I could walk you through it.

Since you probably won't like that answer, I would recommend Windows 7 Pro or Server 2008 R2 if you have that available to you.
Click to expand...

Yep, honestly if I didn't have ways of getting Windows for cheap, I would have gone with a Linux OS on my file server.
 
Red_Machine said:
It's a 3GHz Pentium 4 HT with 2.5GB RAM. Did MS patch support into the 32-bit versions for 3TB drives? Because I've read that at the time 7 was released, it still had the same limitations XP did.
Click to expand...
It won't install onto a 3TB drive, but you can use 3TB drives as storage drives.
 
You know, I haven't tried it but FreeNAS sounds like it could be cool. I personally like linux solutions, even more so on slower boxes. Something like FreeNAS might have enough GUI to make it simple as pie to configure as opposed to doing it yourself on the CLI.

Just because you have Windows doesn't mean you should use it. ;)
 
I installed Vista Basic 32-bit as it was the disc I had to hand, but the OS only recognises the first 2TB of the drives, believing the other 750GB to be separate discs.
 
You have to convert the drives to GPT for it to recognized more than 2.2TB.
 
newtekie1 said:
You have to convert the drives to GPT for it to recognized more than 2.2TB.
Click to expand...

This also means you can't boot off of it if it's configured as GPT because a UEFI bios is required to boot Windows off of it iirc.
I remember having this discussion with @FordGT90Concept , he should know for sure.
 
Having a technet sub I would just use "Windows 7 pro" 32bit due to the limited cpu. I would not use Vista basic/home due to it's limited functionality. Plus, Windows 7 pro 32bit is a lot snapper and you can always add it to a domain. If you want a domain (and I would) I would get an 80 to 160 gb drive, and install Windows Server 2003 32bit on it and use the 3tb drive for just storage. :toast:
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top