Home Server - is it worth it?

I have had a server for years now on and off, just depended on what I was doing and if there was a need. Running a full server in a home enviroment does have some major draw backs. But we are not here to talk about that. We are here to talk about the alternative, a Home Server. The one I chose is the one you find in the link, a Lenovo D400.

There are many manufacturers of Home Server hardware out there Acer, HP, and others prices vary as well as the configurations, be sure to get what you need. The reason I chose the D400 is simple, Price. I was able to get it on sale for $239.00 off Amazon so i snapped 1 up for myself and a couple of more for clients, the silly things are now over $400.00 again on Amazon, and I don't know why.

The D400 has the Atom chipset as well as 4 hot swappable had drive trays. My unit shipped with one 1 TB hard drive, I filled the other 3 bays with SATA drives I already had on hand. Two 1.5TB drive and One 500GB drive for a total 4.5TB storage on the system. We'll get more into that later.

The D400 is a solid unit but it is the OS that made me want to purchase a home server. The OS is Microsoft Home Server, which is built upon Windows Server 2003, which is a very solid OS and is still in production in businesses around the world.

Windows Home Server (WHS) is a stripped down version of Server 2003, but don't let that keep you from this system... Yes there are a lot of higher functions which are stripped out of the OS, such as it cannot be a DC (domain controller) and it cannot be a member of a domain, however you can still use it as a DNS server, DHCP server, as well as a print server. These are advanced features and you will need advanced server knowledge to configure and take advantage of these services.

WHS is designed for the average home user, hence it is designed to be accessed via a desktop applet. This applet gives you access to all the basic features of the home server as well as backups. Did I say backups? Backups are where this product really shine. WHS will make full image backups of up to 10 workstations, and this includes Apple products as well. That alone makes this product a great value, and that is why I have business clients which have this product in there businesses, simply for the workstation backup.

I would like to briefly go over the storage, as I mentioned i have 4.5TB of storage on my home server, well I have that much in drive space, but not in storage??? Let me explain... WHS does NOT, let me repeat does NOT support raid 5 or any raid for that matter. The system use a process called "folder replication" to duplicate your data across the drives this is what gives your redundancy in your data. This also lets you use whatever drives you have laying around for your home server, it will even accept usb drives into the system.

I enjoy having my home server, it is economical to say the least, and I don't have the heat issues that I had with my full server. I currently have my DVD collection on my server as well as all my business documents. I keep finding more for it to do, and it simply does it.... Not to mention it is so quite, you cannot hear it run.

If you have any questions let me know.

:)