Acer Aspire EasyStore H340 + 1TB. $299.99 free shipping

[aceO07]

I think this is the lowest price I've seen for a while and it comes with 1TB drive and free shipping. Newegg.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16859321013

 

[mshan]

Don't forget 10% Bing Cash Back is also available during their Black Friday sales promotion.

 

[Nitecaller]

Just looked and they are SOLD OUT.

 

[NICKel]

Smokin deal ... this is the cheapest I have seen it in the last 5 mos on Amazon or NEWEGG... With the CB is a steal.

 

[Binky]

Fry's has the same deal. In-store only I think. Online shows $399. Good little WHS unit.

 

[indamixx99]

I paid about the same price at Frys back in Sept for this. Great unit, and it's definitely worth the price.

 

[erwos]

I bought one, too. Excellent price. I'm hearing that the McAfee software sucks and should be uninstalled, though.

While the H340 doesn't support a port multiplier on the external SATA port (sometimes; see below), it DOES have a PCIe slot that you can mount up an appropriate card into (if it has a low profile bracket). Instructions for that can be found here:
http://kamlau.com/software/sans-digital-towerraid-tr4m-b-and-acer-easystore-home-server/

There were some other reports that newer H340s do support port multipliers out of the box, but either way, you can add another 4 drives for ~$170 (or 8 for $340). That's pretty sweet!

 

[Thanda]

Rumor is that MS is working on 64bit WHS. Can the Atom processors handle it?

 

[erwos]

Rumor is that MS is working on 64bit WHS. Can the Atom processors handle it?

Depends. The Atom CPU in this box (230) can. Some of the others cannot. Given the pricing and function of the box, though, I'd rather expect you'll be replacing the hardware around the time you'll be upgrading the OS.

 

[Ualdayan]

I recently built a machine out of spare parts to use as a Windows Home Server (bit noisy, so I'd still prefer one of these specially designed ones for easy drive addition/removal, lower power usage, and lower noise) and WHS is really very surprising.

The way it analyzes the file structure itself so it doesn't duplicate data from different computers. The speed of the backups because it only has to back up the portion of any file that changed. The add ins that you can do that add so much versatility because it is by nature a server.

Even enabling remote access was done easily and on the first try with it automatically telling my router what ports to forward.

That's just the backup part of it too; it does a ton of stuff with pictures/videos/music.

 

[erwos]

Got mine today. Works great! Stuffed it with three more drives, so about 2.5TB of storage space.

My only quibble is that they don't provide an officially supported way to do local operations using rdesktop (rdesktop works, you're just not supposed to screw with the data drive like that).

 

[hellfire88]

Doh! kinda wished I ended up buying this. I had it in my cart and wasn't 100% sure I needed it and Newegg's return policy for this unit was "exchange only" so I ended up not getting it. Anyone buy one and having buyer's remorse? If so I'd take it off your hands

 

[zerogear]

I bought one, too. Excellent price. I'm hearing that the McAfee software sucks and should be uninstalled, though.

While the H340 doesn't support a port multiplier on the external SATA port (sometimes; see below), it DOES have a PCIe slot that you can mount up an appropriate card into (if it has a low profile bracket). Instructions for that can be found here:
http://kamlau.com/software/sans-digital-towerraid-tr4m-b-and-acer-easystore-home-server/

There were some other reports that newer H340s do support port multipliers out of the box, but either way, you can add another 4 drives for ~$170 (or 8 for $340). That's pretty sweet!

Mine works fine with port multipliers -- I bought it ~1 week release, just make sure you have the RAID drivers installed from Acer website and it'll work

It doesn't do hotswap of eSATA well, so you usually need a restart before it'll detect the eSATA drive, but once it gets detected, it works great.

 

[erwos]

It doesn't do hotswap of eSATA well, so you usually need a restart before it'll detect the eSATA drive, but once it gets detected, it works great.

OK, that's kinda funny, because I was just shoving drives in and allocating them - while simultaneously doing copies. So, gonna disagree on hotswap not working correctly, although I've never tried pulling one out...

 

[zerogear]

OK, that's kinda funny, because I was just shoving drives in and allocating them - while simultaneously doing copies. So, gonna disagree on hotswap not working correctly, although I've never tried pulling one out...

Might be an updated chipset in the newer version then?

Edit: Wait do you mean hotswap within the drive bays of the server itself or in a external eSATA case?

 

[erwos]

Might be an updated chipset in the newer version then?

Edit: Wait do you mean hotswap within the drive bays of the server itself or in a external eSATA case?

I mean the drive bays in the server itself. If you were talking about a port-multiplied add-on, yeah, that would be it.

Of course, this thing has insane storage potential if it takes a port multiplier natively, because it also has a PCIe slot on-board. So, with a PCIe two port card in there, you could theoretically be running like 19 drives off this thing for 37TB of storage (38TB if you replaced the system drive). All for < $1000, not including the 2TB drives - not bad at all.

And that's not even mentioning the USB drives you could hang off it - even at one per port, that's another four or five drives.

 

[zerogear]

Yeah, the drive bays in the server itself works with hotswap fine -- but with the esata port multiplied add-on it doesn't detect it without a server restart (not sure about hotswapping the drive when it's still plugged in, haven't tried it yet). My server currently has 5TB and I have yet to use it all up though for the esata add-on I just popped a bunch of unused SATA disks in there so that only added up to 1.5tb