A New Kind of Home Computer: Windows Home Server Preview
by Ryan Smith on September 4, 2007 1:00 PM EST- Posted in
- Systems
Initial Thoughts
In assessing the value of Windows Home Server, for even a "simple" product like it with only a handful of core functions, there are a number of variables that really need to be taken into consideration. We can't give a blanket recommendation on WHS as a result, as the decision to use WHS rests on the variables to take into account for each user/household that a server would be installed in.
The chief variable is cost, and even this is in several forms. WHS is a new product, not any kind of upgrade, so using it is a matter of either buying an OEM box, or building one yourself, which can dramatically affect the actual cost. For enthusiasts with suitable hardware practically collecting dust, WHS is the cost of the OS plus minor costs for additional parts such as a gigabit switch. For more normal home users or enthusiasts without the spare parts, WHS means making an investment in new hardware. WHS has very low system requirements, so high-end OEM configurations will be well below the cost of a high-end computer, but it will still be in the neighborhood of a low-to-mid range computer.
Then there is the issue of the price of the WHS software, which we don't have. We're confident it will be between $100 and $200, but that's a very large range. We do know what the pricing will be outside of North America, and after converting currencies we are seeing $175-$200 in most regions. Microsoft's software is seldom more expensive in North America than in other locations, so this is a solid cap, but as they do charge less in North America on some pieces of software, it's not a solid floor.
The final element in the cost equation is the number of computers in a home. If you count WHS solely as a backup suite, in a house with the maximum of 10 computers the per-computer cost for having a top-tier backup suite is at most $20. This is more than competitive with other backup suites sold at retail. And then there is everything else WHS can do too; what's the value of an easy to configure file server? A web server? Various Linux distributions come close in some features but don't offer an equal feature set overall, so we can say WHS is overpriced compared to a free operating system, but...
And then we need to ask if WHS is even ready for use yet. HP says no, and they're holding back the launch of their WHS products from a September ship date, towards November and later. In doing so they're citing their desire to wait on third-party add-ins, on which development started much later, to catch up to WHS. Furthermore the WHS team is already at work on some unspecified updates that HP wants to wait for.
As a matter of opinion - and we're not disputing HP on their own choices - we think it is ready, especially for the enthusiast crowd that is the main audience here at AnandTech. We haven't encountered any noticeable bugs in using a WHS server even with the release candidate (although undoubtedly there are some lurking beneath) and the interface is more than easy enough for any enthusiast user to deal with. WHS is ready for the enthusiasts that want it.
We're a bit more tepid on recommendations for typical users however, some of which is due to our own inability to measure what counts as "average" computer knowledge these days. WHS is not caveman-simple, then again neither is Vista if you go far enough off of the beaten path. A bare minimum amount of computer knowledge isn't enough to properly operate a WHS server if we're talking about how it comes in the default Microsoft configuration; OEMs will be adding their own spice to the out-of-the-box experience.
But on the other hand Microsoft has done a great job simplifying the controls for what is really Windows Server 2003, and someone doesn't need to be an enthusiast to use it. With a level of knowledge above the bare minimum it's very possible and easy to make a WHS server work. And frankly, actually using (as opposed to configuring) a WHS server is extremely easy once it's set up; this is something even users with minimal amounts of computer knowledge could handle if a big box electronics store set up the server in the first place.
The next issue then is the feature set, and if it justifies the effort and the price. WHS is a file server/NAS, it's a backup suite, it's a webserver, and more. We really, really like the folder duplication feature (even if it is really just a poor RAID 1 knock off) because of the excellent ability to select what does and doesn't get extra protection. Most of these features work quite well, and we have no problem justifying WHS when two or more features are going to be used, since other devices WHS is in direct and indirect competition with are limited to only one function. A critical mass of computers is still required, but a couple of computers that receive heavy use would but enough to reach that critical mass.
Finally, there are the issues that have cropped up in our time with WHS that are outright design/feature problems. We speak of course about the nagging integration between WHS and Media Center functionality. If you have a full suite of Microsoft products (Xbox 360, MCE, and normal Windows computers) and want to use WHS as a media repository, it's simply an ugly mess. It can be made to work for the most part, but it's not a smooth experience out-of-the-box, and should be a lot better. There's going to be a lot of people - ourselves included - taking a hard look at WHS 2.0 to see if Microsoft has done a better job at integrating MCE and WHS into one box. This isn't a problem that kills WHS, but it does present a problem.
Particularly as enthusiasts we like WHS and consider it a product that justifies the costs of adding an entirely new device to a home environment. It has its flaws, but what it does well it does well enough to overcome those flaws; Microsoft 1.0 products have a bad reputation (and not for the wrong reasons, either) but this is one product where Microsoft has come out and managed to get things right enough on the first try. Starting with WHS it can seem to be a schizophrenic product, but in the end it comes together once you know what you want to use it for.
Our only caveat here is that it will take some time for most people to figure out just what those uses are. Microsoft will be releasing a 120 day trial of WHS soon, and we'd highly recommend trying it out and discovering the variables for yourself before purchasing the software or hardware for a server; not everyone will find it useful enough to purchase. It's also worth noting that while Microsoft doesn't officially support this, as a server product WHS works particularly well in a virtual machine since there's no need for high graphical performance. A virtual machine can be a good way to go through a WHS trial without taking any other risks.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
128 Comments
View All Comments
ATWindsor - Monday, September 10, 2007 - link
And if one drive in a raid5 goes corrupt, you can still accsess the data. That doesn't mean you can't mess it up to the point where additional recovery is needed, and its the same with WHS, you can stand to loose one drive, but no problems "bigger" than that.Thats not the point, the point is that for you to have "hot-spare-functionality" as you talk about on WHS, you still need to have that amount of aditional free space, so having that dta will cost you extra HD-psace, just as having a hot-spare will. Depending on usage, WHS will need more or less free space than a hot-spare drive will provide.
You might think it's little point having redundancy on backups, i feel like it's worth it. If one doesn't feel the need for this redundancy, the duplication-system in WHS isn't that useful either (that if if you don't want to risk having all your data on a single machine).
To repeat the point yet again, the system should be more flexible, there are of course quite a few people who don't need the extra functionality, but there is also quite a few that want's to have smething easy to set up, but still maintain some features and flexibility.
Gholam - Monday, September 10, 2007 - link
Thing is, however, on first glance RAID5 is very alluring - on paper, you get great performance, high reliability, and minimal loss of usable HD space.However, in practice, it is far, far more complicated, expensive and dangerous - but your typical home user doesn't have the depth of experience to know that.
Therefore, if you absolutely must have a RAID5 setup, just buy a controller, set up WHS on a single large volume and disregard its drive pooling features.
As for myself, I'm currently planning replacing my system which is getting a bit long in the tooth to handle the latest games. It's an A64 3200+ on ASUS A8N with 3GB RAM and GF6800GT, housed in a CM Stacker case. So, since upgrading a S939 CPU is currently next to impossible, once WHS is available over here (Israel, supposed to arrive sometime in october-november) I'm planning to build a new system, and in this one, replace the graphics card with something passively cooled (7100/8400), stick in a bunch of drives (probably 4x500GB) and run WHS drive pool on it. I considered getting a hardware RAID5 controller, but after examining my options, dismissed the idea as too expensive - I can get 3-5 extra 500GB drives for the price of a decent RAID5 card with cables. With room for 12 HDDs in the case, 8 SATA + 2 PATA connectors on the motherboard and ability to expand via USB/Firewire, I don't see this system capping out anytime soon.
ATWindsor - Monday, September 10, 2007 - link
I agree that raid5 has some pitfalls, but once (properly) setup, I think it's pretty easy to handle, just stay away from it until a drive goes down, and then replace it :)However I would still like to have it implmented in WHS, if needed under some kind of "advanced setup", one has to activate.
Personally I use a 16-port-hardware-controller, with the same controller also in my off-sote backup-computer. It might be over the top, but I find it worth the convinience when i have well over 10 sata-drives, restoring from backup is a hassle, so it's nice to be able to handle a single drive going down without having to get everything from the backup, and you get added security aggainst file-corrption when the cache has battery-backup (and also, the preformance is good, but that is not so important, only nice :))
Gholam - Monday, September 10, 2007 - link
16-port hardware controllers are nice, but I can't justify sinking $800+ into one, not on my budget.n0nsense - Thursday, September 6, 2007 - link
hm ...raid 5 corrupted ?
search google for "raid 5 corruption".
the only thing that real threat is 2 or more dead disks simultaneously.
WHS redundancy duplicate files over several disks, which mean that you waste as much space as in mirror.
advantages - different disk sizes.
disadvantages - performance.
hard to believe that some one will think to mix IDE SATA and SCSI disks for file server (actually i do mix as i have 2 mirrored 36GB SCSI drives @ 15k rpm for system 2 mirrored 500GB SATA drives for sensitive (in terms of redundancy) data and 250GB SATA drive for temp files, incoming, and other things that i don't care about).
Once i used raid 5 of 4 74GB SCSI for about 3 years 24/7/365 with almost constant load, then it was replaced with bigger SATA drives when one of them died without loosing 1 bit of my data.
more probably you'll put 2-6 really big (250-750GB) disks for such purpose. smaller will go to the boxes.
you wont run dedicated box for less then 3 clients.
so for the same space price you can set up hardware raid 1, probably get more performance (controller dependent), 0.0004% failure rate.
depends on where you live, WHS price save (~180 USD) will give you about 2x250GB or 1x 500GB SATA drives + SATA to PCI card with RAID support.
archer75 - Thursday, September 6, 2007 - link
Performance isn't a disadvantage here. All of your data is copied to a single drive at first. Think of it as a holding area. Data is then analyzed and moved off of that to where it needs to be. So as far as you are concerned you are only transfering to one single disk.The performance is good enough for me to stream a HD movie off of it. So it's good enough.
If you are running a RAID array with constant usage for years then it seems WHS is not marketed for you.
n0nsense - Friday, September 7, 2007 - link
it's right, but even at my home with only 2 users, i can see much more load on disk performance.restoring something, can be done @ 30MBps or @90.
tynopik - Thursday, September 6, 2007 - link
> the only thing that real threat is 2 or more dead disks simultaneously.you're naive
power outages (either from power company or blown power supply, controller errors, driver errors, there are a ton of things that can mess up RAID5. RAID5 is very fragile in the sense that if you mess up just a bit of it's structure, the entire thing is shot.
> 0.0004% failure rate
did you read that article i posted? try closer to 20-30% in the real world (now that doesn't necessarily mean data loss, but problems nonetheless)
> disadvantages - performance.
for backup this isn't really an issue
plus when copying between computers you're going to be limited by your own harddrive
i need to backup a bunch of laptops (which don't contain raid obviously) daily so WHS is definitely NOT going to be a bottleneck
tynopik - Thursday, September 6, 2007 - link
here's what i pulled from ONE threadhttp://www.nforcershq.com/forum/image-vp511756.htm...">http://www.nforcershq.com/forum/image-vp511756.htm...
khayman80
"I have had these drives configured as a RAID 1 array ever since I built the computer.
I built this system 15 months ago, then 10 months ago I experienced a severe RAID failure (i.e. I lost all my data). "
aragorn_246
"I have exactly the same problem on my Asus K8N (NForce3) mobo."
andy b
"I also have the identical problem."
mschoaf
"I'm going through this exact problem right now"
"I don't think I have very good news for you all. Windows does SEEM to be running ok, but I have a bunch of little quirky problems. When I brought Outlook up for the first time, it said my mailbox was corrupted, so I pulled that from my backup. Word had a problem with the normal.dot. Norton said it's settings were corrupt and reset to the defaults. And who knows about the stuff I haven't seen yet.
So, I'm reluctantly coming to the conclusion that I need to reformat and re-install. I'm also thinking about pulling an old IDE drive from one of my spare parts computers to use as a backup drive and backing up my full system weekly and my data daily. The sad part is, that's why I bought a MB with RAID 1 capability, so I wouldn't HAVE to do this."
SteelBlueXI
"it happened to me for the third time this morning"
"So frustrating to lose my computer for a couple hours every week or so to rebuild my friggin' hard drive (when it doesn't even really need it!!!)"
"I've had this happen 3 times now with 2 different versions of the drivers."
ratts
"i saw this raid drive split thing once."
Mile Hy
"Guess what...Over the week end I got the infamous red message about the Raid degrading."
_MarcoM_
"Same problem here, today"
vsko
"The same thing just happened to me"
StedyONE
"I also got blasted by this mysterious raid degraded bug last week for no apparent reason."
Bloona
"have the same issues on my machine with an ASUS K8N"
mooredads
"Had same problem flasing red degraded."
bradwolf
"I am getting the red flashing "degraded" message from NVidia at boot."
walsterdoomit
"now i have this problem also....degraded data"
pc2099
"Over the past few months I have had 4 instances of nvraid dropping 1 drive"
"the first test trying to copy data from the raid to the external firewire drive resulted in not 1 but 2 drives dropping out."
notice that last line, copying data to an external firewire drive caused TWO drives to drop out. If he had had that in RAID5 that would have been disastrous.
n0nsense - Friday, September 7, 2007 - link
funny, but we are arguing about almost everything.of course there is a lot of problems and failures.
the 0.0004% about raid1. power outage is not on option when we talking about some kind of server.
don't tell me, that UPS is something you don't use.
hardware problems will do the same to your system and its really does not matter what you running inside.
of course i can give you examples of corporate Data Centers with 0 data loss, but we are talking about home.
and you can build cost effective system that will do the same.
let's organize it from worth to best.
no raid
soft raid
raid 1
raid 1+0 or 0+1.
about forums. you will not find many happy user of raid there. Simply because they don't need until they have a problem.
My SATA raid build on build-in controller which is part of Asus P5N32-E SLI, based on Nvidia 680i chipset.
Indigo (part of HP) with about 1000 press machines monthly out, using integrated intel's matrix storage controllers for raid (1 and 0) (they use standard HP wx4000). This press machines working at full load non stop 24/7/365. Year @ IT department, no problems with raid.
the big problem is moving raid array to another type of controller (new MoBo for example).here soft raids have big advantage.
again the main question is "Shall you or shall not pay 180 USD for WHS"
for not very advanced user i will recommend Debian box with Bacula to manage backups, syncing, share etc.
You will have fully functional machine where file/backup server can be the only task, or it can be only one of other features like gaming machine, workstation, mail server, ftp server(not fake server ), DNS, DB server (yes, there is a use for it at home. for example media library of Amarok can use it ), media server and media center, web server, and stream server. You will not limited by MS greediness, but by your need and will.
all of it or even more can run on single box when we talking about home. it was time that i had 7 computers at home for only 2 people, now it's only 2.5 (can't call P II 400MHz 186MB ram laptop computer, but it perfectly extends media and internet to balcony for nice Saturday breakfast with sea view).
i do like some MS products like Office, but when it come to OS, DB, servers, use real one.