Space For Rent?

Seagate Hard Drive

My elderly Windows Home server which I built from an old Medion PC several years ago is starting to show it's age. It has two 500GB hard drives in caddies which took the place of the CDR & CD rom drives, plus I think it has a 300GB system drive. It also has the original 120gb system drive from when it was a PC, although not plugged in. I had intended to remove it, but I couldn't get it out, so I left it there! One of the 500GB drives has started to make an odd noise, well it might be the drive, or it could be the caddy fan. Either way I'm short on space, so a short trip to Maplin relieved me of £80 and I now have a new 2TB Seagate drive sitting next to the WHS purring away.

The beauty of the Windows Home Server is that you can merrily plug in USB hard drives and they just get added to the storage pool, without any faffing with RAID etc. I know others will disagree saying RAID is more reliable, but so far I've never had any issues with my WHS it just works. Very occasionally it throws up an error telling me there are file conflicts, but a quick reboot always sorts it. I think it's like any Windows software, a reboot every now and again does wonders!

At some point I'll replace the whole machine, I reckon it could do with a bit more RAM, as it's only got the original 512mb. Having said that it copes very well streaming a ripped DVD to my lounge media centre, plus serving up MP3's to Sonos whilst backing up the netbook, so perhaps I'll just keep it running until it just dies!