• We’re currently investigating an issue related to the forum theme and styling that is impacting page layout and visual formatting. The problem has been identified, and we are actively working on a resolution. There is no impact to user data or functionality, this is strictly a front-end display issue. We’ll post an update once the fix has been deployed. Thanks for your patience while we get this sorted.

Wait for Vail or WHS now?

R

riversend

Senior member
I have a couple of purchases I want to make in the near future, not sure of the best way to go about it so could use some advice. I have been able to do some looking around on these forums and other places, but still have gaps in knowledge.

The main purchase I am looking at is a WHS box. Was originally looking at building one, but given that there are several good products on the market by HP and others I can probably save myself some time by buying pre-built. Other purchases will be a new laptop (looking at the ASUS UL-30 models) and probably a media streaming device. Would look to build an HTPC, but just don't think it would be worth the effort, all I really need is something to pull movies/tv etc off of the server/net and onto the TV, not full HTPC capability of record etc (main computer can do that).

So, eventual home configuration will be my main computer, laptop and a media streaming box. Do I wait for a Vail device to hit the shelves later this year or early in 2011, or go ahead and pull the trigger on the WHS now? Don't know if purchased boxes will provide for upgrades to Vail (my initial guess is no) if I jump in now. Advantage to jumping in now is I can get the server up and running with only one main device to shuffle files / organize, and can then connect the other two into the server as I purchase them.

Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated.

RE
 
I'm sure the WHS guru's on the board will be able to jump in with more detailed suggestions, but I would probably go with WHS v1. Vail is changing things up quite a bit (and not necessarily in a good way).
 
I would do a complete cost-benefit analysis. IOW, is the potential gain over what you presently have worth the cost and effort?
 
I took a look at Vail and it seems like a full version of Windows 7... which would be a resource hog... Go for WHS now, or maybe even take a look at FreeNAS. I've only had my box for a weekend but it's features seem endless, not to mention it's free. Their are a lot of handy vid tutorials on youtube as well.
 
With the deals that are out there on off-the-shelf WHS v1 boxes its hard to pass up.
The additional features found in v2 really do not appeal to me at all, so I will keep my WHS1 machine as-is (been running since early betas). It does flawless backups and recoveries. Remote access. Duplication. And very easy and convienient shares. Toss in some well established add-ons out there and you have a rock solid, completely functioning machine. You will have to look up the new features to v2 and see if they are worth the wait and the price to you.

I will chime in about the HTPC too... I can strongly recommend picking up a small ION based atom machine to run XBMC on (something like a Acer Revo) While set-top boxes are nice, they don't nearly have the felixbility and "wow" factor as a XBMC machine does. Or wait for the Boxee device to come out...
 
^ agreed. Stick with WHS 1 for now -- it will also take a while after WHS2 release before all the useful plugins can catch up since it's based on 2008 R2 server (and 64-bit). WHS 1.0 is much more mature at the moment in terms of plug-ins and software available.
 
Thanks for the input, definitely drove me to a decision. Will pick up a WHSv1 box here in the near future, can evaluate after v2 has matured.

Did a quick read of XBMC, looks like a great set of tools to access media. Very nice. Need to figure out what I want to run it on. Any other alternatives other than the Acer Revo off the top of your head? I'll try to dig in and do some searches on other good platforms to run off of (to include Boxee).

RE
 
riversend said:
Thanks for the input, definitely drove me to a decision. Will pick up a WHSv1 box here in the near future, can evaluate after v2 has matured.

Did a quick read of XBMC, looks like a great set of tools to access media. Very nice. Need to figure out what I want to run it on. Any other alternatives other than the Acer Revo off the top of your head? I'll try to dig in and do some searches on other good platforms to run off of (to include Boxee).

RE
Click to expand...

Any mITX ION based setup should do... at the very least for 720p content. (ION allows the GPU to do the decoding so CPU is of little concern... assuming you're running a LINUX build of XBMC or XBMC LIVE).

The new Boxee machine from DLink does look promising for $199. If something like that came out for XBMC I'd be in heaven. I'm just not 100% sold on the Boxee interface and the whole "social networking" portion of it (stoooooopid).
 
I run both WHS v1 and Vail Beta. Personally I prefer the Vail beta and I keep that machine online while keeping the WHS V1 offline for when I need to do the migration.

There will be no easy migration to Vail and if you wish to copy data over you will need 2 machines or a couple of externals to copy the data over. So if you wish to reuse your machine for Vail you will need one that has a 64 bit CPU and a few extra drives for the transfer.

You could buy something pre-built and cheap to tide you over or you could build your machine now and go through the transition with a couple of extra drives. With pre-built you are generally limited to 4 or 5 drives. If you record a lot of TV it generally is not enough.

I consider WHS v1 to be a first generation product and it has some issues when copying over large files which I find annoying. Vail is far better but it also takes an extra 12.5% space for error correction. It also breaks data up into 1GB chunks which gets around the large file issue.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

TRENDING THREADS

Back
Top