Windows Home Server setup…
I’ve been hiding in my cave for a while now. The funny thing is that I have acquired a lot of new stuff to install but life and work sort of got into the way of me actually writing about what I’ve been up to. While I love my job, the last month has been kind of intense with me averaging nearly 50 hours a week. I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t starting to burn me out but I’m working through it.
One of the things I’ve been playing around with over the last year is Microsoft’s Windows Home Server. I was a beta tester from day one and I absolutely loved the product. I re-purposed an old Athlon 64 system and build a little server which held about 1.5TB of storage. Over the months, I accumulated a lot of backed up data including a lot of multimedia type files.
When the product was finally launched last fall, I knew I would have to eventually purchase it; however, I was on the fence of building a custom system or going with HP’s Media Smart Server which I thought was really cool looking and well designed. Early this year, my beta version of the software timed out putting me in a bind. My systems were no longer being updated and accessing my existing data was difficult (the system times out after one hour). So, I had some added pressure to hurry up and get a new system up. Due to my increasing workload, I didn’t think I was going to have time to put together a new system and I was still really intrigued by the HP MSS which would likely be quicker to setup. With that in mind (and the discovery of an added discount), I took the plunge and purchased the HP MSS EX-470 which includes a 500GB HDD. There’s also a EX-475 version which comes with a 1TB drive but it’s not worth the dramatic price increase.
I bought this thing more than a month ago but didn’t have time to set it up and transfer data. That’s pretty sad.
This weekend, I finally unboxed it and started the painful transfer process. I’ve had to restart the old beta server numerous times just to get the data off and even with a gigabit network, terabytes of data takes forever to move. Once, I get everything transferred, I’ll give out some impressions on this thing and try to get back on track.
