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Most of the packaged Windows Home Servers are headless.  This includes the Acer easyStore h340 and the various HP Media Smart Servers. Being headless at first sounds like a great idea. Since it is a server, you will use it more or less like a network attached storage device, and you will interact with it using the Windows Home Server Connector software to setup most of the configurations. If you really want to log in to it, you can always use the remote desktop client. That was what I thought until I ran into some issues with Windows and would like to troubleshoot it right on the server. A headless server that came without any video output makes that impossible. Luckily I found this cable from VOV Technology.

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I have been having the Acer easyStore h340 Home Server for a while now.  Most things work pretty good.  But as you probably know, Windows is not the most stable platform and I run into occasional file corruption sometimes (which is not supposed to happen, Microsoft…) Most mysteriously, the Home Server restarts from time to time unexpectedly and there is no useful system events logged to help me diagnose the problem.

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I used to think I have to save a whole bunch before I can have a networked media centre PC or Mac Mini solution in order for me to watch anime on my TV in the living room.  I had at one point considered the HP Media Centre solution but couldn’t really see myself buying another Windows machine that needs a lot of maintenance to keep it going.  I also thought about a Mac Mini but it has always been a bit too pricy for me when I add the wireless mouse and keyboard to the equation.  Well, thanks to the recent advancement of networkable media players in the market, I finally can enjoy my anime collection without having to sit in front of a computer.

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Since I acquired the Acer easyStore Home Server, I have been trying to reorganize my digital library within the server.  As the Acer easyStore Home Server came with 2TB of drive space, I quickly added a couple more 1TB drives I used to have with the old homemade Home Server to it to make it a total of 4TB in storage.  After migrating all the files back to it, I was left with only about 0.8TB of free space.  I was faced with a new decision, either deleting old files or add additional storage to the server. Continue reading

We bought an HP Pavilion notebook from Future Shop about 15 months ago.  At the time of purchase, it was the right notebook without costing an arm and a leg.  Smallish footprint, bright screen, 250GB hard drive and a decent CPU makes it an attractive package for less than $800.  After 15 months’ usage, the notebook hard drive is starting to make some ticking noise.  Time to look into finding a replacement hard drive. Continue reading

I did spare some time to test my Home Server again.  It turns out that it is the drive enclosure that was flaky and causes the Home Server to misbehave.  I had a clue which drive enclosure it could be because out of the 3 drive enclosures still connected to the server, 1 does not have the light on.  After exchanging the drive enclosure with a spare external drive, and connected everything back with the server, everything seems to be normal again.

I still don’t think it is very safe to store my data in external USB drives.  After having numerous problems with this setup, it probably is time to retire this aging hardware and replace it with a newer setup for the sake of my data.  So I actually ordered and picked up the Acer easyStore Windows Home Server from NCIX (a local computer chain store in Canada).

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What do you do to safe guard your digital photos, and all other personal data that you cannot afford to loose?  Do you have a solid storage solution for your personal data that you are confident that it can survive some level of hardware failure?

I have a self-rolled Windows Home Server at home.  It is running on a rather old P4 2.8 system with 2 GBs of RAM.  The motherboard has only 2 SATA connections and 4 PATA connections.  PATA drives are difficult to find these days so when I was upgrading the storage of the server, I often ended up adding SATA drives in external hard drive enclosures.  There was one point in time that I had 8 external drives of varying sizes connected to it. Continue reading