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ericthehalfbee · 12-30-2009, 06:25 PM

I built my own WHS box. The only expensive part was actually buying the OS itself, but I'm extremely happy with it. Performance is outstanding and it's almost as fast as a direct-attached drive. In fact, I store everything on my server now and my PC's only have Windows and my programs. Very rarely will I keep data on my PC to work with (usually when editing HD video or other disk-intensive tasks).

I back up 4 Windows 7 PC's and the backups go very fast since WHS won't duplicate files. So backing the 1st PC took awhile, but the others went very quickly since they had a lot of the same content. Subsequent backups also go much quicker. You can have WHS do automatic backups, but I just do manual ones whenever I've made major changes to my PC. I've had one machine go down, and restoring it was as easy as booting with a WHS boot CD and restoring my machine.

The biggest thing with WHS is how many add-ons there are available. You can find a software package for just about anything, with an emphasis on things like media management (one of the more popular uses of WHS).

WHS has remote access, but I haven't tried this yet (though I'll be setting it up so I can access files from work if I need them).

As mentioned, you can't specify where files are stored. You specify which folders are to be duplicated and WHS takes care of the rest. There's some long discussions online about how WHS stores files vs using RAID and I think WHS is better. Some die-hards may not like the idea of not knowing where your files are or being able to specifically mirror a drive, but I think it's just because WHS is a different paradigm from what people are used to. WHS is far more efficient as it only duplicates folders you want, whereas RAID (mirroring, for example) duplicates the entire drive. I do make sure to backup my WHS data to an external drive so I essentially have 3 copies.

12-30-2009, 06:25 PM	#5
ericthehalfbee I Will not Admit my Addiction to RS Join Date: Apr 2008 Location: North Vancouver Posts: 584 Thanked 194 Times in 59 Posts Failed 164 Times in 42 Posts	I built my own WHS box. The only expensive part was actually buying the OS itself, but I'm extremely happy with it. Performance is outstanding and it's almost as fast as a direct-attached drive. In fact, I store everything on my server now and my PC's only have Windows and my programs. Very rarely will I keep data on my PC to work with (usually when editing HD video or other disk-intensive tasks). I back up 4 Windows 7 PC's and the backups go very fast since WHS won't duplicate files. So backing the 1st PC took awhile, but the others went very quickly since they had a lot of the same content. Subsequent backups also go much quicker. You can have WHS do automatic backups, but I just do manual ones whenever I've made major changes to my PC. I've had one machine go down, and restoring it was as easy as booting with a WHS boot CD and restoring my machine. The biggest thing with WHS is how many add-ons there are available. You can find a software package for just about anything, with an emphasis on things like media management (one of the more popular uses of WHS). WHS has remote access, but I haven't tried this yet (though I'll be setting it up so I can access files from work if I need them). As mentioned, you can't specify where files are stored. You specify which folders are to be duplicated and WHS takes care of the rest. There's some long discussions online about how WHS stores files vs using RAID and I think WHS is better. Some die-hards may not like the idea of not knowing where your files are or being able to specifically mirror a drive, but I think it's just because WHS is a different paradigm from what people are used to. WHS is far more efficient as it only duplicates folders you want, whereas RAID (mirroring, for example) duplicates the entire drive. I do make sure to backup my WHS data to an external drive so I essentially have 3 copies.