I was recently accepted to the Windows Home Server beta test, and just got it all installed yesterday. First, let me explain the system I created. I didn’t want to go out and buy anything so I went through my spare parts (junk piles) to see what I could find that would meet the system requirements. The system I’m running consists of:
Generic Socket-A Motherboard
AMD Athlon 1200 CPU
512 MB PC-133 RAM
32MB AGP nVidia Video Card
10/100 LAN Card
PCI IDE Card
PCI USB 2.0 Card
PCI SATA Card
40 GB PATA Drive - System
40 GB PATA Drive - Data
30 GB PATA Drive - Data
80 GB SATA Drive - Data
120 GB SATA Drive - Data
250 GB USB Drive - Data
Not too bad, huh? So far I’ve copied all my saved data over to the now 500+ GB of storage I have, and tonight I plan to start sorting it into the folders that were created (Music, Pictures, etc). Once that’s done I’ll setup a couple of my systems to backup to the “server” and also enable the data protection to see how that affects the performance. One thing that surprised me is that I have a variety of different drives, all plugged into different controllers, and not only did the system recognize it all, it merges it all into one “pool” of storage space. I kind of hope to see this technology used more in upcoming home user versions of Operating Systems, as I can’t count the number of people I know who have a second Hard Drive and don’t know that they could just save files over to it.
Amazingly for what it is, Windows Home Server works great. It doesn’t have that many options, but it would be excellent for someone like my father, who for now is forced to manually backup to a removable hard drive. It would be nice for him to have a server in the corner of his den that would just sit and hold his data.
