When installing WHS 2011 the installer would copy the files and then move on to "expanding files" and time out at 0% after about 30 minutes or so. I tried 4 hard drives, 2 different brands of E350 motherboards, different cables, and different optical drives. Windows 7 Pro took a while to start expanding but installed. According to the WHS requirements list it should work. Perhaps my Google Foo is weak but I couldn't find any other useful information either before or after starting the project.
RAID5 with green drives is doable (for home use only) but hit or miss. I've gotten away with it with 4x WD Green 1.5TB in my Intel E4200 NAS for probably a year. Just to be safe I set the go-to-sleep time on the OS to match the drives so that it wouldn't be looking for sleeping drives, I have no clue if it helps but the NAS is working. I have 4x WD Green 1.5TB in my Mediasonic HFR2-SU2S2 ProRAID external HW RAID enclosure. They've been working fine but perhaps it's because it's so slow. Unfortunately none of the E350 based boards that I looked at had a RAID5 controller or I'd have given it a try. I did look at a few HW RAID controllers but they either had problems or cost $500. That's still an option down the road which is why I selected a MB with expansion slots and I still have plenty of room for drives. Besides I caught a sale on WD 3TB drives and there are still plenty of options for the future... I can still add 2 more in RAID1 for a total of about 5.5T, then my external array to get me up to 10T, then a HW RAID5 controller in a slot (4x2T internal) to bring that up to 15T, then up to 4 more external 4x2T RAID5 enclosures. Unfortunately money limited me to 2x3T in RAID1 for now.
Transfers have been going surprisingly quick with data flowing from the 4x1T WD Black RAID5 array in my PC across wired Ethernet to the server at right at ~500Mb/s. Transfers from the Mediasonic attached to my PC were slower at ~280Mb/s.
The MB is officially passively cooled but they include the little CPU fan in case you want active cooling. One more thing about the MB the BIOS setup screen is about the slickest I've seen. Admittedly it's been a while since I've built a system but the interface is a full on mouse enabled GUI and not just plain text menus and once you exit training wheels mode and enter the advanced menu everything you could want is right there.
