MS Windows Home Server

Episode 70 of the Home Server Show podcast has a year end review as well as the latest news and views.

Catch it here.

Media Center specialist Pete Stagman has a review of the Rosewill RSV-S8 external drive enclosure.

The 8 bay SATA enclosure comes complete with a PCIe eSATA controller card ready to fit into your home built home server providing ample expansion capabilities for your Windows Home Server.

Pete has more details here.

There is a review of the HP StorageWorks x510 Data Vault on website Absolutely Windows, which is about Windows for small and medium businesses.

The HP StorageWorks Data Vault epitomizes the ideal for an install-and-forget SMB storage solution.

Moreover, the roadmap HP has for the Data Vault means that businesses can invest in this product confidently.

Resultantly, we are giving this product the SmallBizWindows Absolute Best Award, as it represents the best local/cloud storage solution for small businesses today.

You can read their review here.

SmallNetBuilder has a 3 page review of the X510 StorageWorks Data Vault from HP.

Apart from a great set of benchmarks, (including file copy write and read performance) we are told about the internals of the unit and what happens when you pull a hard drive out whilst the unit is still powered on – Yikes!

If you’ve been looking for a bit more performance in a quad-drive WHS-based NAS, the X510 (or MediaSmart EX495) will fill the bill.

You can read about it here.

Microsoft’s Windows Home Server Blog have published 2 videos showcasing all of the features which can be found in Windows Home Server in 1 minute.

The first video shows how a family uses WHS in their everyday lives, whilst the second shows the benefits of using WHS in the Small Office/Home Office (SOHO) environment.

You can view them here.

Brad Wilson had a hard drive with bad blocks which when he tried to remove from Windows Home server displayed the following error message:

Brad managed to rescue his using a copy of ROBOCOPY which is a part of the Windows Server 2003 Resource Kit.

You can read his story here.

NEWSFACTOR.com classes Windows Home Server as one of the undiscovered tech products of 2009 alongside the likes of Google Voice and cloud based password management utility Lastpass

Windows Home Server is probably Microsoft ’s best-kept secret, and that’s a shame.

You can read the undiscovered tech products of 2009 here.

Entertainment 2.0 is a podcast about digital media which we all use in our daily life’s, and in the latest episode 57 hosts Josh Pollard and Adam Thursby are joined by special guest Dave McCabe from The Home Server Show podcast.

Dave chats about his Media Center experiences and tells us how Windows Home Server can be used to help add some functionality to MCE (Media Center Edition).

You can catch the podcast here.

The Home Server Show podcast episode 69 has plenty of news items this week.

You can listen to Dave, Jim and John right here.

We would like to wish all our readers a wonderful Christmas/happy holidays (depending on your faith) and wish you a wonderful time with family, friends and your Home Servers

A wonderful photo from the WHS page on Facebook.

From our contributors Steve Crick, Gary Quigley, Matthew Glover, Al West and myself Philip Churchill – Thanks guys!