Acer's easyStore H340 says hello Atom, hello Windows Home Server
By Tim Stevens 
posted February 26th 2009 10:41AM
posted February 26th 2009 10:41AM
posted February 26th 2009 10:41AM
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Where can I get the hello kittys from? ;D
at that price ill just buy myself a HP ex470. thats a hefty price for only getting a low Atom..Running more services or apps over time will really be difficult for the Atom. At least HP was smart enough to include a more powerful processor.
Neeko,
Agreed, the hp has much better specs and the price is close enough.
More powerful means more power. Of course you could run a Phenom II-based NAS but why? Most NAS are going the other way, toward embedded procs like ARM.
As long as you can run a shell and you can get the throughput from the drive to the network the less power the better in my book.
Atom-based NAS seems like a winner in my book. Maybe not this particular one, but I like the concept.
-jp
Seriously. My EX470 has been serving me well even modded for dual core. It costs less and has more drive bays. This thing is too little too late.
I love you for giving a nod to the earthworm that was first to invade our electronics (and hearts?).
I would want one in the 300-400 dollar range, especially if only equipped with an Atom processor.
Also, please give us an option with no hard drives pre-installed, I would rather install the hard drives myself and buy them cheaper off of Newegg or Amazon.
I've never wanted anything Hello Kitty related in my life, until now. For some reason Windows+Cute Stuffed Animal=Awesome
I don't understand why people buy these. Just this morning I priced up the parts for a similar machine to build myself (Core2 4g ram 1TB mATX) and it came in at around £250 here in the UK. Slap Ubuntu on it and bam, one media server.
Is the extra money for the backup software crap? Who the hell uses that when you can do it yourself with less hassle?
Also, if you use linux instead of Windows server, you can have ssh access more easily and cool stuff like SVN on it too...
A dual core processor and 4Gb of RAM?! Is that really necessary for a NAS?
Answer : NO!
You can save a good deal of money on the CPU and RAM (and power) if you would go with a single core and 1 or 2 Gb of RAM.
And Ubuntu would probably do fine, but FreeNAS and Openfiler are awesome!
turd, WHS does more than just serve as a NAS. You can have lots of server applications running on it doing things like video transcoding, running a web server, etc etc. 4Gb is not much to ask for.
I note that you include no cost for labor.
"Linux is free only if your time has no value", jwz
@radarskiy
A fair point, however I would argue that even WHS does not come preconfigured, and to make proper use of this kind of device one would need skills above that of Average Joe. As such, both will require setting up, but I suppose WHS would require less - but only if you only want the things that Acer have decided you want.
@Brian McClure
True, but who has a dedicated NAS box in a domestic setting? You would want it to host tomcat or apache, maybe SVN, something like Orb for streaming to games consoles, torrents, live mesh... the list goes on. I would say that it is far more economical to have one box to do it all even on the power front.
@Everyone
I am considering switching my server from WHS to Ubuntu mainly for simpler svn over ssh access, but regret loosing RDC because it is simply better than VNC.
@Kabadisha I for one would disagree. I have an HP WHS box running here and had it set up and streaming media about 30 minutes after taking it out of the box and plugging it into the wall. Within an hour it had backed up my main desktop and my laptop too.
I don't discredit the power and functionality and cost benefits of a custom-built Linux solution, but for those who don't have the time to spend or for whom that time is money, I think a WHS box is definitely a sound investment to get up and running quick, and customizations down the road are as easy as dropping an installer into a shared directory and clicking on an icon through the server interface.
Wha? There are a lot of Windows Home Servers.
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/winfamily/windowshomeserver/buy.mspx
I just got my EX485. Anyone know a good way to rip WMV (with 5.1 audio) on a mac? I need to stream to my Xbox and .mp4 won't stream direct from the server. Lame.
Nooooooo! Not .wmv
Use .avi for all of your video encoding. I use .avi and stream all of my movies and TV shows from my NAS and my Macbook Pro to my XBox 360.
Not sure what you are using to stream from your Mac... but Connect360 works well. And Handbrake is a good tool to use to encode video
If you rename your .mp4 files to .avi it will stream to the xbox. I find this completely ridiculous but it works and is easier than doing crazy transcoding. Hopefully they will fix this soon.
If I get one, will they give me the Hello Kitties?
I would highly recommend just building your own NAS!
You can throw together a setup like this for under $200. I recently put together a NAS setup that was about $290 (without storage, and with a more powerful MOBO than I needed). This will allow for 6 drive bays, (or 9/10 if I convert the 3x5.25" bays to 3.5" bays).
You can use FreeNAS (I recommend) or OpenFiler (I have heard good things). Building your own NAS is a LOT cheaper... and allows for complete customization. You do not need an overly powerful CPU, most of the time you want a low-power CPU running on 45W or something.
Hope this helps some people!
I agree with the comments on building your own NAS, but WHS is still the most consumer friendly method of creating home NAS solution (other than buying one of those overpriced Buffalo terra-stations) and has a nice UI. Even uber geeks will admit it's pretty cool. Last year for about $550 I built a Fedora 8 NAS with a celeron E1200 dual core low wattage $50 proc, a spare ECS mobo from a frys bundle deal i had in my garage, and 4x 750GB seagate drives. In a RAID 5 configuration I get 2.25TB of available storage. Running samba (smbd) and netbios (nmbd), WIndows boxes can see the NAS just like any other network share. Add a uPnP service and your PS3 will be able to see the share as well. The only con (if there are any) is the overhead from samba (NTFS -> ext3 conversion) and raid5. Write speeds to the box can be a little slow.
However, being the geek I am I still want to build a WHS machine and mapping my NAS SMB share to it for protected storage. I've been meaning to download the 120 day trial from the WHS website. If I like it, I plan on picking it up on Newegg for $99.
does WHS work as a media center that extenders can hook up to? currently i have my Vista box running media center and have a network share pointing to my NAS where my media is stored. If i could host the files and run MC off one box that would be worth an upgrade for me.
One question to all the people who are stating building your own NAS is the way to go. I agree but I would like to have something the size of this Acer box. Does anyone know if/where you can buy a mini-ITX case with this footprint or similar? I'd like 5 internal bays and really just needs to store board, drives, & PSU.
Short of making it myself I have yet to find anything close.
Chenbro ES34069 could be your option(4X hot swappable 3.5"+1X internal 2.5"+slim optical drive+card reader). But it is slightly over priced. check Logicsupply (around $200) and nowdirect(around $180).
Another problem is that there is very little mini-ITX board offers 5 or more sata ports.(Intel G45 has 4 sata+ 1 esata)
Dude....am I seeing hello kitty with a rack? That is mildly disturbing.
I saw the Chenbro in the past, but it doesn't look ike it has room for a PCI card and the whole point of a NAS with that many drives is RAID. Thanks for the suggestion.
$900 for a dedicated 3t home server? I like where this is going!
I second...or higher the question, Where can we find those Windows Sever plush Hello Kitties?
After a lifetime of hating Hello Kitty, I'm suddenly liking it.
Just this once, though.