Windows Home Server – A user’s Experience

New Windows Home Server based on an MSI Wind Desktop

My WHS trial license has long expired, and I have been in no rush to buy a retail version. This is not because I found the software lacking, on the contrary, it was an unusually robust and innovative bit of software from Microsoft. My main issue was with the machine I used to install WHS on. My old Shuttle SN41G2, this mini-PC has served me well over the years, but as my post on power usage points out it does consume approximately 100W while idle, which does not sound like a lot, but as it’s running 24/7 it can account for a large proportion of my electricity bill.

A side effect to the recent Netbook craze is the recent appearance of Nettops (20W – 30W PCs typically based on Intel’s Atom CPU), in particular the $150 (£80) MSI Wind barebones desktop has the potential to be a small, low power, and almost silent WHS. Currently not available in the UK, I’m hoping to get my hands on one from the US during September.

I’ll be planning on keeping the build as cheap as possible so will be buying just RAM (probably 2Gb just in case I eventually use it as a browsing PC), I’m hoping that the parallel IDE will be suitable for my two existing hard drives. Looks like I was getting my motherboards mixed up, I was working off an image of the new Shuttle X27 board which does indeed have an IDE connector, but the Wind does not, so it looks like I’m on the scrounge for a couple of SATA drives. I’ll use an optical drive to install WHS and then remove this once the install is complete.

If anyone has used their Wind desktop with WHS, or even with 2 parallel SATA HD’s I’d like to hear how you got on.

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