Thursday, March 15, 2007
Kicking The Tires on Windows Home Server Beta 2
Posted by Jason Dunn in "SOFTWARE" @ 08:00 AM
I've been playing with Windows Home Server (WHS) since they offered the first round of private beta testing, and I've found it to be a pretty useful product - not bug-free mind you, but that's why it's still in beta. I'm a bit surprised it's not more polished at the beta 2 stage - some of the bugs I'm seeing are the kind of thing you'd expect to see at the alpha stage (like shared music not being accessible as a library from other PCs). This weekend I re-configured my Windows Home Server machine for the third time, and this time I think it will stick.
At first I had a 120 GB drive in there, but I ended up using it for another PC and put a 60 GB drive in. That resulted in some strange problems with the backup routines, because even though I had 500+ GB of external storage attached to the WHS it was coughing up critical service errors because it was running out of storage space on the 60 GB drive. I had a 500 GB SATA drive so this past weekend I went out and bought a PCI add-in card that gave me one SATA port...and WHS would blue-screen during the install over and over, even though I had provided the driver for it. So, giving up on that, I purchased a 320 GB IDE drive (only $109 CAD...amazing!) and installed it all again. I also found an extra 1 GB of RAM kicking around my office so I'm up to 1.5 GB of total RAM in the machine.
One of the greatest features of WHS is that you can attached external USB hard drives and they'll be added into the "glob" of total storage. There are no drive letters, no separate hard drives: just a giant disk array that stores your data. I had a few external hard drives kicking around, so when it was all said and done, I topped out at just over 1 terabyte of storage:
[click image for a different view of the storage array]
I also decided to really push WHS, and Vista along with it, hard. So I kicked off a transfer of all of my data from two client machines to the WHS machine, all at the same time. Here's what that looked like:
[click image for full-sized version]
It was more of an exercise in data-transfer gluttony than anything practical, but in a geeky way it was fun. A total of 52,426 items were transferred at the same time, split up into four different transactions on one machine, and one transaction on another. A toal of 122 GB of data being pumped from two machines running Vista Ultimate with gigabit ethernet cards. The WHS computer is only running a 100 mbps ethernet card at the moment, but I plan on putting in an Intel gigabit card when the WHS software goes final. So how did the machines fair with the transfer? Well, adding up all the transfer speeds, I was pushing 9.8 MB per second to the WHS, which is 78 mbps - apparently the real-world upper limit of a 100 mbps port.
The transfers went smoothly and now my WHS has 122 GB of data on it, mirrored for redundancy purposes, and I have 838 GB of room left over. I'm going to need it once I start backing up each PC in the house - WHS supports complete image backups, meaning you can go from a blank hard drive to a restored computer with only a boot CD and the image file from the WHS. There's a very smart feature on WHS where it will only store a copy of redundant data once. That means, for instance, that even though I have all my photos on all my PCs, when I back them up I won't be using up space for more than one copy of those photos. That's smart!
If WHS continues to evolve and they can fix the irritating bugs in beta 2, it's going to be a great product for those of us with multiple-PC households looking to centralize our data storage and media sharing. I also hope to see useful third-party add-ons such as FTP servers, but I'm not sure if we'll see things like that in the first-generation product. Because WHS lacks an iTunes-compatible media sharing protocol, I'm hopeful a third party will step up and create one - if not, I'll likely be looking to abandon this custom-built WHS product to go with a finished product from HP or another vendor that will likely support iTunes. Regardless of what form it takes, there's a Windows Home Server product in my future.
Jason Dunn owns and operates Thoughts Media Inc., a company dedicated to creating the best in online communities. He enjoys mobile devices, digital media content creation/editing, and pretty much all technology. He lives in Calgary, Alberta, Canada with his lovely wife, and his sometimes obedient dog. He enjoys writing the word "terabyte".
At first I had a 120 GB drive in there, but I ended up using it for another PC and put a 60 GB drive in. That resulted in some strange problems with the backup routines, because even though I had 500+ GB of external storage attached to the WHS it was coughing up critical service errors because it was running out of storage space on the 60 GB drive. I had a 500 GB SATA drive so this past weekend I went out and bought a PCI add-in card that gave me one SATA port...and WHS would blue-screen during the install over and over, even though I had provided the driver for it. So, giving up on that, I purchased a 320 GB IDE drive (only $109 CAD...amazing!) and installed it all again. I also found an extra 1 GB of RAM kicking around my office so I'm up to 1.5 GB of total RAM in the machine.
One of the greatest features of WHS is that you can attached external USB hard drives and they'll be added into the "glob" of total storage. There are no drive letters, no separate hard drives: just a giant disk array that stores your data. I had a few external hard drives kicking around, so when it was all said and done, I topped out at just over 1 terabyte of storage:
[click image for a different view of the storage array]
I also decided to really push WHS, and Vista along with it, hard. So I kicked off a transfer of all of my data from two client machines to the WHS machine, all at the same time. Here's what that looked like:
[click image for full-sized version]
It was more of an exercise in data-transfer gluttony than anything practical, but in a geeky way it was fun. A total of 52,426 items were transferred at the same time, split up into four different transactions on one machine, and one transaction on another. A toal of 122 GB of data being pumped from two machines running Vista Ultimate with gigabit ethernet cards. The WHS computer is only running a 100 mbps ethernet card at the moment, but I plan on putting in an Intel gigabit card when the WHS software goes final. So how did the machines fair with the transfer? Well, adding up all the transfer speeds, I was pushing 9.8 MB per second to the WHS, which is 78 mbps - apparently the real-world upper limit of a 100 mbps port.
The transfers went smoothly and now my WHS has 122 GB of data on it, mirrored for redundancy purposes, and I have 838 GB of room left over. I'm going to need it once I start backing up each PC in the house - WHS supports complete image backups, meaning you can go from a blank hard drive to a restored computer with only a boot CD and the image file from the WHS. There's a very smart feature on WHS where it will only store a copy of redundant data once. That means, for instance, that even though I have all my photos on all my PCs, when I back them up I won't be using up space for more than one copy of those photos. That's smart!
If WHS continues to evolve and they can fix the irritating bugs in beta 2, it's going to be a great product for those of us with multiple-PC households looking to centralize our data storage and media sharing. I also hope to see useful third-party add-ons such as FTP servers, but I'm not sure if we'll see things like that in the first-generation product. Because WHS lacks an iTunes-compatible media sharing protocol, I'm hopeful a third party will step up and create one - if not, I'll likely be looking to abandon this custom-built WHS product to go with a finished product from HP or another vendor that will likely support iTunes. Regardless of what form it takes, there's a Windows Home Server product in my future.
Jason Dunn owns and operates Thoughts Media Inc., a company dedicated to creating the best in online communities. He enjoys mobile devices, digital media content creation/editing, and pretty much all technology. He lives in Calgary, Alberta, Canada with his lovely wife, and his sometimes obedient dog. He enjoys writing the word "terabyte".
