Hands on – Acer Aspire easyStore AH340

Acer H340 Aspire Home Server

The popularity of hand held multimedia devices like iTouch and iPhone creates a need for a central storage for multimedia. All those videos, vacation pictures and digitized songs have to go somewhere. There are four people in this house, each one with computers filling up with multimedia. It would help to have some of them stored once. It should stop the demand for more hard drives or computer upgrades – maybe.

I can remember when an 80 GB hard drive was considered plenty. My current desktop has 5 TB of storage spread across 7 hard drives. It is impossible to back it up. Two other computers I use have another 5 TB across 5 drives. A home server might be the right solution.

Home servers are computers without a keyboard or monitor. They store files, act as backup servers and can be used to collect all your media files across multiple computers. A home server can use any software but the most popular ones today are running Windows Home Server (WHS), which is a sub-set of Windows Server 2003.

Essentially what you get with a home server is a box with 1 TB of storage, 1-2 GB of RAM, an entry level dual-processor, network access and some USB and SATA ports for expansion. They cost between $400 and $700. You add up to three more hard drives for a total storage of 7 TB.

There are cheaper storage solutions such as SATA/USB NAS drive storage. They are slightly cheaper but lack the smarts to serve files and do backups without taking processing cycles from your computer. WHS works in the background and doesn’t add a load to my desktop computer. Backups can be done during the day without impacting desktop performance.

Another cool thing a WHS will do is let you access your files when you’re away from home. If you travel that may be handy although there are risks involved with putting your data files online.

Fun and games with HP Media Smart EX495

My first choice for a WHS was the HP Media Smart EX495 which runs about $700. I ordered one in November along with 2 additional 1.5 TB drives from Tiger Direct. The drives came first. The HP EX495 arrived weeks later without any software. Neither Tiger Direct nor HP would ship the WHS software so I returned it. Since then, the EX495, which has a Celeron processor, has been impossible to find in Canada. I assumed they were releasing a new model.

Acer Aspire AH340

This week in Future Shop’s flyer they advertised the Acer Aspire AH340 for $399. It has a newer Atom 230 1.6 GHz dual core processor, 2 GB RAM, 1 TB WD Green hard drive and 3 empty drive bays. The reviews on Amazon.com were mostly positive so I got one. (Another review at ZDNET)

The Future Shop price includes in-home install and setup. That takes some of the fun out of a new computer but you might like the help. In the US, Amazon.com will ship the unit free but it’s not available from Amazon.ca in Canada.

Value

The cost at $399 is good value. WHS alone costs $125. A WD 1 TB Caviar Green drive is $100, and a 2 bay NAS from DLink is $130.

Setup

The server is an 8.5” black cube that looks like a small beer fridge. Setup was mostly automatic. You plug in the network cable, power supply and turn it on. After 20 minutes or so, you put the Installation CD in the drive of your desktop and the software installs Windows Home Server Console. Add a user and password and it chugs away for another half hour or so.

Once the screen came up and the flashing lights settled down, I selected “Settings…Install Updates…Update Now”.  It took slightly more than 2 hours for WHS to download and install the latest updates to SP3 level.

You can read the manual but it’s a lot easier to read the one page glossy set-up map that comes in the box.  Reading some of the more instructive reviews on Amazon.com makes the process easy to understand.

One of the great things about WHS is that there is a large and helpful user community that posts instructions and fixes for newbie’s. That is a plus since my years of supporting Windows Server are a vague memory and I don’t want to complicate my life with more techno jargon that necessary.

Backing up

The next day, today, WHS was working at 50% capacity trying to back up my desktop which I stopped since there wasn’t enough room on the 1 TB installed drive. It was being a busy little beaver. Apparently once set up the WHS will automatically back up at night. It will even bring back your computer from “sleep” state to back it up.

I added the two 1.5 TB hard drives  (Western Digital Caviar Green) and WHS is chugging away formatting the hard drives and adding them to the storage capacity. Once the drives were added, I started the backup which took about 50% of the WHS resources and 8% of the desktop. That’s a big improvement since backup is a task that is better left at night since it kills performance.

To test the fail-over capacity of the server, I pulled the plug during the backup. On re-boot, the software couldn’t find a restore point so it started again.

After 24 hours, I’d say the Acer AH340 is a good solution for backups. It was relatively inexpensive, easy to setup and is quiet and will hide away under a desk.

How it works as a multimedia server is yet to be determined.