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in our house, we own a homeserver since a month.
its real cool. i like it.
it shares over 2tb of movies, tv shows, family fotos, music...
the best thing is the file duplication. for each share, you can decide if the files should be duplicated to multiple hard disks. so there is nothing lost in case of a hd fail.
you can argue that you don´t need file duplication if you use a raid system.
in my opinion that's wrong, because raid has a few disadvantages.
if the controller fails, you need to replace it with the exact same one, to get your data back.
if you connect a hd from the raid to a normal PC (to rescue data) you won`t see anything, because it must be member of a raid.
instead, if you connect a hd from a homeserver to a normal PC, you can rescue the data easy, because it uses simple ntfs file system.
there are more things i like about the windows homeserver.
-the homeserver console. its a little tool to administrate the basics. specially for the family members who don't have good computer knowledge, that's a good thing. And there are plenty addins for it. as example a download manager (to schedule downloads to night time. so you don't slow down your internet at day)
-automated backups. the homeserver can wake your computer in the night to backup the whole system.
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The reason I use WHS instead of a 2003/2008/Win7 installation is mainly because of 2 features of WHS.
1. The automatic client system backup. It's simply fantastic. I just install the Home Server Connecter software on the clients I want backed up, set up the schedule and backup retention time, and which folders I want to exclude, and it'll take a backup of each of my systems without no further configuration or management from my part. In case of a complete system failure, I pop in the restore CD, and chooses a backup from which I want to restore and voila, my system is backup in a matter of 30 or so minutes with all updates, apps, docs, etc.
2. The Drive Extender (DE). I have 5 HDDs in my WHS at the moment, and if I had to manage 5 (6 if you partition the system drive) logical drives, I would go mad. The DE simply manages all my physical drives and presents them as one big logical drive, so I only have to map one network drive on each of my computers instead of one for each physical HDD. Another way around this could be to run a RAID on the server, but then I'd get all the disadvantages of a RAID, like not being able to recover form harddrive failure (raid0/JBOD) or needing to get a matching raid controller in case of a hardware fault (raid5 - because I cannot simply swap the disk in a different system and see the files)
There are many other reasons to use WHS over a normal Windows installation, like the Home Server Console with all the community created add-ins, and the WHS webpage, which makes it easy to access files and computers from outside your local network.
EDIT:
Downsides of WHS that I can think of are: Only 32bit, and it's based on Windows 2k3 (would prefer 2k8)
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Geeba
Posting Freak
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Drive pooling is great... remote access, duplication, backups.... and reasonably cheap.
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Geeba
Posting Freak
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Bleze - I was thinking of using lights out... but isnt the rule of thumb with servers that you do more harm keep powering them up and down?
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bleze
Senior Member
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geeba, it's not a "real" server and in this case you use desktop harddrives etc so I think it's better to have it off when not in use. This will make it last longer and you save a lot of power and money on electricity. So go for it!
