Asus Home Server TS Mini Pitched as a competitor against the likes of the Acer’s easyStore line of Windows Home Server-based Nas boxes, Asus brings us the TS Mini home server. Based on Intel’s 1.66GHz Atom N280 processor, the TS Mini can be configured with up to 2GB of 800MHz DDR 2 memory and houses two 3.5in Sata drive bays. Asus Home Server TS Mini …
This is a nice box, but at the same price if not cheaper you can get a synology ds409j. Ok it deosn't come with any drives, but it does support up two 4 X 2TB drives (Tottal of 8TB). It doesn everything the home server os does. Well apart from a print server. The other options is to by the Home server OS yourself and install it on a pc with multiple bays and get the raid. It's a typical budget ASUS box that tries to make it, but falls short.
You seem to be missing the point regarding the RAID comment. This device has a heterogeneous disk spanning, file replicating and redundant file system, which is perfect for the home and is fast enough to stream 1080p. It also has a perfectly integrated automated backup mechanism for all connected PCs AND Macs - how would TimeMachine win?
Maybe it would be better to have these articles written by an actual WHS user?
Home server? Pah! My laptop has more RAM and disk than this!
Coupled with the fact that my wife can easily generate 1TB of photos / short videos a year, and hasn't even got a video camera yet, and the fact that I am moving our 400+ DVD collection to disk to save a wall of shelving, this doesn't cut it!
As for 500GB of "unlimited" backup - what? I couldn't even do a full backup of my laptop!
A comment about Win Home server though. I read somewhere that it offers disk redundancy (ignoring PSU failures that take out all the disks!) by allowing volumes to be stored on multiple disks (sort of RAID-1). Is this the case?
....so all references mad in the article and other user's comment about this box not supporting RAID are kind of futile. You could not install WHS on a RAID system even if you wanted to, tried myself when I started off with WHS and quickly found out that WHS uses it's own solution for this. As an earlier 'anonymous coward' commented: "This device has a heterogeneous disk spanning, file replicating and redundant file system...".
Although for simple file sharing and services like FTP any potent NAS would do, the WHS solution gives you much more flexibility and access to a host of add-ons that can be useful in many other ways. Obviously, if you do not need/want this, only the superb back up solution should be enough to satisfy most users.
Agreeing with earlier posters the storage limit on this ASUS box can be an issue. It is relevant to mention that the WHS filesystem is able to add in external devices attached to the box (in this particular box this would mean using the USB (6) ports or E-Sata (2) ports). If I where buying this box I would probably be thinking about attaching a cheaper 2 TB drive using e-sata (consider the Samsung Story Station Plus 2TB which is around €150 euros in NL). It will integrate seamlessly into WHS and you'd still be able to expand after this.
"""Who in the fark needs 4TB of computer storage for their home?"""
I was thinking exactly that - 4TB is so small as to be nearly useless, especially since at that capacity you get no redundancy. I'll stick with my ~10TB RAID5, which conveniently doesn't require any sort of external disks... Well I will do until it's full and I have to deal with some sort of a mess of expansion.
And no, it's not /exclusively/ used for my porn collection...
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