Acer Aspire AH340-UA230N Home Server

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I’ve had this for two weeks now, and I am very happy. I had certain expectations, and am usually prepared to have a product miss those expecatations by a certain amount. This Home Server has exceeded my expectations in the following ways:

- set up more easily than expected

- was very simple, no expert IT skills required

- did the job it said it would do, and much more
- for example, I was able to install a Tivo server on it, so it now hosts/serves video, photos, and music to my Tivo
- there are many “AddIns” to meet your specific needs. Web server? Download agent? Security or antivirus? Email server? This is what made me choose this over NAS. NAS is relatively dumb and limited, except for the uber-geek who can write their own linux code on a home-made server.

- Actually IS a good media server. I’ve had a bunch of NAS products that claim a DLNA media server. What actually happens is that the server part of the NAS is just a few lines of code that allows them to print that feature on the box. They didn’t really expect anyone to use it, and they didn’t dedicate any hardware or resources to making the experience good. This WHS does offer a good media server experience. Notably much faster than my prior servers that were integrated into NAS. (faster: menus and content listings display much more quickly)

- does image-based backups of all my PCs
- the backups use some very intelligent methods, such that if you have a file on multiple PCs, it will only store one copy
- thus, the space consumed by backups is EXTREMELY low compared to when I was using Acronis products
- ex: I can have 10 backup images of my 60GB laptop that only consume a total of 64GB
- ex: My wife’s 60GB laptop, with the same photos on it as me, actually has 10 backup images and consumed LESS than 40GB
- Backups are easily found, navigated, and a single file can be pulled, or a complete system rebuild
- I used it to upgrade the hard drive on my wife’s laptop, very easily
- my Acer came with boot disks for restoring a PC, restoring the server, and a third software disk for PC setup

- Remote Internet access to my files was a welcome bonus, and worked easily

- Remote access to my PCs, left running and located at my home was a huge bonus. It’s like a free GoToMyPc

- Transfers went quickly. I moved some 700MB movies in about 40 seconds on my Gig network. Other people have measured the speeds more scientifically than me, but I found it “felt” much faster than my prior Gig-E NAS from D-Link.

- Windows networking is usually terrible, complicated, works and fails sporadically. But this device punches through that using its own connector software installed on each PC.

- The connector software that is installed on each PC doesn’t appear to hog my PC’s resources, unlike my previous backup solution, Mirra from Seagate. It runs quietly until the middle of the night, when it kicks in to make your daily backup. (note, you can still access the Home Server without the connector software using normal windows networking if you don’t’ want to install anything. The bundled backup software does require it, though.)

- The “File Duplication” method of redundancy is different than RAID 5, but not necessarily better or worse. For me, it’s better. That’s because I don’t really want redundancy of every file I store on the Home Server. Much of it is already duplicated on the various PCs. If the home server is a backup, I don’t need a backup of the backup. DVD rips, for example. I have the DVD. I have the ripped file on a PC. I put it on the WHS to share it with the server. I don’t need 2 copies of it on the WHS, wasting space. So for this folder (Videos) I turn OFF File Duplication. Same for my music and photos. But for my valuable office documents which are stored on the WHS, I turn on duplication, so if a drive dies, I can replace the drive and lose no files.

The whole experience was very “Apple”, not very “Microsoft”. That is, it worked out of the box. The default configurations were intelligently set so you don’t need to learn and change everything just to get started. The customization options are limited, thus easier to learn. They are presented in a good, simple-enough UI. The nonsense of registry keys, services, and other Windows grief are well-hidden from the user. That said, the adventurous IT expert can log into the Home Server using remote desktop, and see that it is at the heart, a Windows 2003 Server edition Operating System. You can take some risks and work on that OS layer if you want. I installed one simple program called Synchromagic, which is great for moving files around multiple PCs and keeping them in sync.

So far, two weeks: no crashes, no hangs, no annoyances. Are we sure this comes from Redmond???

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