home server

Back in May of this year I retired my old home server that I put together back in 2009. It was built around a small form factor Asus T3-P5G31 system with an Intel Pentium Dual-Core E5200 and 4GB of RAM. Running Microsoft’s original Windows Home Server and Small Business Server (running in a VM for Exchange), before being later upgraded to Windows Server 2012 Essentials. I decided this time I’d rather go for a more standard case for the new server, but I still wanted it small and compact, so I opted for a mini-ITX case (with 6 drive bays!...

A couple of weeks back I started the upgrade from Windows Home Server to Windows Server 2012 Essentials. I never bothered moving to Windows Home Server 2011, the lack of Drive Extender was the deal breaker for me. But with WHSv1 falling out of support, it had to be done, that plus all the drives were almost full, which was having a noticeable impact on performance sometimes, so time to do something about it....

Following on from my previous post on the subject of my new server, its been running fine for a week. Here's the thing sat next to the old server. Much smaller, and much more likely to survive the journey to Guildford - I've actually decided to use screws to hold this one together, not cellotape and blu-tac. Although I'm sure I'll be swearing at it when I need to swap out some disks....

Today I'm putting together a new server, its based on an Asus T3 barebones system, I've got a 2.5Ghz dual core Pentium for it, and 4GB of RAM. As well as some of the new low power Western Digital disks. This will be replacing my 9 year old system which has faithfully been running almost nonstop based on a 1.4Ghz Athlon Thunderbird, with 1.5GB of RAM and a collection of aging hard disks, this has been running Windows Home Server and a Virtual Machine running Small Business Server flawlessly, so hopefully the new system will be just as reliable....

I picked up a copy of Windows Home Server a couple of weeks back, saw it on Overclockers and ordered it with a new 500GB hard drive, I was originally going to have this finished a day or two after installing, but things got in the way. Microsoft announced Windows Home Server back at the CES in January, it was very well received and I managed to get onto the beta program a couple of months later, so I come at this review having used it for 6 months or so already....