A Bit of Background

I have been looking for a backup solution for home. Ever since I took up a digital camera in 2001, I have been accumulating quite a bit of slices of my life in the form of digital photos. That collection grew with the arrival of my daughter.

I never liked the idea of burning it to a CD or a DVD: Each medium is relatively small. It’s a bit cumbersome process. It makes it easy to lose a piece of backup with (potentially) so many disks. So, I had an external 160GB drive that I’ve been using as an external backup device. It seemed to me, for backing up growing size of data, HDD seemed to be the only affordable backup medium.

However, this single external disk solution lacked redundancy; That is, if this single 160GB disk were to go bad, all (well, most of) my data would be gone.

Choices, Choices

So, I’ve been looking for an affordable redundancy backup solution. One of the obvious solution is a RAID system. However, it seems it had some special requirements (same size disks, controllers, etc.).

When I heard about Drobo, that seemed to have all my requirements. It had 4 hot-swappable disk bays and provided data redundancy with no same-disk-size requirements. The reviews seemed to be fairly positive (albeit a couple of hardware failure horror stories). However, the base model wasn’t a stand-alone product and it seems a bit expensive (I kind of vowed to never spend more than $500 for a computer, a notebook or a desktop).

Then I heard about Windows Home Server. It’s Microsoft’s contribution to the software-side of a home backup system. It was an OEM’ed product based on Windows Server 2003. The most important part for me was that it provides selective data duplication (thus redundancy) per shares.

HP seemed to be the most prominent hardware vendor that had a WHS product. It also launched with WHS and they had many additional software that made certain things easier. And the reviews seemed pretty positive.

The only thing was that they were still over my target budget (of $500 or so). It was actually similar to Drobo. HP did have a product that met my budget, but it was a single disk solution, which meant that there was no data redundancy.

acer Aspire Easystore H340

So, while searching around for different WHS solution, I came across acer Aspire Easystore H340. The first thing that stood out was that it was based on Intel Atom (N230). This meant that it was lower price and low power. The low price advantage is obvious (the price is below $400).

Since this is going to be an always-on stand-alone server, the lower the power consumption the better. It also means less cooling, which meant more quiet machine. Its lack of performance didn’t matter that much (I would have preferred N330, which is a dual core, though) since this is just going to be a file/backup server and I am not going to use it as a compute server.

It has four (4) hot-swappable SATA disk bays (for future capacity increase and file duplication), which came with a 1TB disk pre-installed with the WHS software. The disk that came with the system was Western Digital Caviar Green. This is a low-power version, which is also a plus for me. I’ve heard that the earlier ones came with a Seagate. I actually prefer WD, so that’s also good for me.

It has a gigabit Ethernet port and several USB ports. This is a head-less system, meaning there is no video-out (which is true for most preconfigured WHS systems). However, there is a WHS console program that you can run from another machine. Or you can even use the Remote Desktop client to log in.

Besides the low base price, NewEgg offered a free extra 1TB WD Caviar Green for a limited time. That just made my decision easier although this product was fairly new. Also Bing Cashback helped a bit.

Setting Up of Easystore H340

The setup was relatively easy, but there were a couple of things that acer could have done better. 1) The quick install guide and the physical manual that came in the box is really lacking. The system has a “information” indication on the front (the “i” indicator) and it remained “RED” during the first boot and installation. I was really concerned thinking that I might have gotten a lemon.

It turns out that this was because the McAfee AV that came with the system was complaining that the evaluation copy was not properly enabled. There was no description of indicator lights on the system in neither the quick install guide nor the manual. The manual I downloaded from the acer’s website does have descriptions of those indicator lights. However, it’s incomplete and made me more worried because of its description of the “RED” “network health” indicator (the “i” light).

Anyway, if you ever get this box, just let it run for a few minutes until things seem to quite down and ignore the “RED” network health indicator for now. When it seems the disk activity has quieted down, use the WHS console (installed either from the CD or from the box’s webserver) to set up things such as the admin password and stuff. Once you are done with it, you can deal with the “network health” messages.

I like having an anti-virus software, but I don’t know if I like the McAfee tool that came with it. It has an evaluation license, so I can hold off that decision for 60 days. I wonder if other free AV software works with WHS (there seems to be a plugin API that other components can hook into the WHS console) or Microsoft’s own “Morro” for that matter would work in WHS…

Adding the extra 1TB disk that came with it was very simple. You just plug it in into a free slot without turning off the computer. It comes up in the WHS console and you then need to enable it as a part of the backup system. You actually have an option to turn that into a backup device for the WHS system itself, too. I am actually thinking of turning my old 160GB external HDD into this role once I get confident with this system.

It set up some default public shares. You can also create your own public or per-user shares. The only left was to create file-duplicated shares for my photos and videos and copy things over.

It came with a media server software, but I turned it off and using the Remote Desktop client, I installed a free version of TVersity that I’ve been using. Because of lack of performance of Intel Atom N230, transcoding video (e.g., cellphone videos into something that Xbox 360 can play) is really bad and I wouldn’t recommend it. However, just streaming things without transcoding is perfectly fine.

So, now I have a small, low-cost ($389 + tax + shipping – $12.25/Cashback), low-power (I doubt it will use 50W), 2 TB (10 years ago, I never would have imagined I would own a terabyte storage at home) file/backup solution that does the daily backup of two Windows 7 RC1 PCs. I am pretty happy with it.