NAS or Home server?

[BryceBooth]

I think that either board/chipset will be great for a NAS, it just depends on what you want to do later on. If you think that you may want to build a new gaming rig soon, then you may want to consider buying an H77 board for this build, as it offers a lower price, and won't be overclocked.
Or, you could use the board that you have on hand, and wait until Haswell is released, which will require a new board anyway.

[tangrisser]

Z77 won't offer much more than H77 can if you are putting it into a NAS. If you have motherboards with both then I would recommend H77 and keep the Z77 for another build.

[dustin1706]

For a WHS there is no appreciable difference between Z77 and H77. I went a little overboard with a 3450, Z77 board and hardware raid, but it works well.

If I was going to do anything different with my system I would have gone for a board with thunderbolt and/or I may have gone with an Matx so I could have 2+ pcie slots. Mitx looks baller sitting on my tv stand, but matx would have let me run a 4 port NIC in my second slot. I get around 110 mbps transfers (~6.25 GB/min) which is pretty much max for my HDDs, but HDDs are getting faster and it makes running RAID 1,5 or 6 pointless if you only have gigabit.

[Mena]

H77 has more sata ports on the asus. No need for an overpriced raid card then.

[Mena]

Decided to forego the 2TB reds and grab a 3TB red for now. Will expand as needed.

[radish]

for me a nas is much better for one basic reason, the power draw of a server might be 300-400 sometimes higher depending on your components. a decent NAS such as my netgear nv+ and the 2nd version nv+ v2 usually draw about 30-65w. which is phenomenal in my opinion. and when you dont use the nas it pretty much shuts down. reducing power draw to a min.

[Mena]

Point taken. However if you research the parts very carefully and plan ahead you can get a server to do the same power draw.

[dustin1706]

With my server listed below I am drawing 35w at idle as measured by a kill-a-watt. A haswell system should be even lower.

[Mena]

How much on load? ( I see that you have WHS2011 so I am guesing on load would be during a PC Backup...I dunno )

[dustin1706]

Just dug out my meter and gave it a try. I had it backing up to one array and I simultaneously wrote files to the other array. Sat at 47 watts.