After my HP laptop bit the dust and I purchased my MacBook I've become interested in a NAS solution. I've been testing out two candidates -- Windows Home Server and FreeNAS. I reviewed my FreeNAS experiences first. This is my review of Windows Home Server. I have 2 PC's for testing and I'll be testing both for mac compatibility, Xbox 360 streaming capability, and general ease of use.
Starting off I knew that Windows Home Server had a much larger footprint than FreeNAS. If you recall, my server configuration for FreeNAS was my old AMD 1800+ XP and I figured I would need something a bit more up to date for WHS to be effective. I unplugged my current HD in my AMD 64 3000+ machine with 3GB of RAM and rebooted. I popped the disc in and began installation.
Installation is very similar to installing XP, same UI and process. It does take a bit longer than an XP installation and several more reboots are required. During installation I was informed that ALL drives in the computer would be formatted. I was fine with this since I had already disconnected my prior system drive...if I needed to go back I would just need to shut down and plug it back in. The installation completed and I was able to perform updates to get everything to the latest version. In case you want to get in on the action without needing to go through installation, the most popular pre-installed Home Server is the HP EX495 1.5TB Mediasmart Home Server
On my FreeNAS machine I prepared for this installation by consolidating my data down to a single 500G drive and removing my rsync target drive to place in the WHS machine. WHS itself was installed on an 80G drive, and the system took 20G of space, leaving around 56G formatted for use in the drive pool. Combined with the 500G drive, this gave me a total of ~500G (formatted) of space for storage.
I opened up the Windows Home Server Console to manage the server. I added a user account for myself and gave it full access to everything. I added 2 shared folders, one for "Documents" and one for "Downloads", and I enabled Media Library Sharing on the Music, Photos, and Videos shares. Enabling remote access was easy in the console as well. I had to forward some ports on my router and enter my hotmail email address. I was assigned a *.homeserver.com url I could use from any computer to access my home server remotely. Very well done.
Taking a look in Windows Explorer, the shares could be found at D:\shares. I mapped a drive to my FreeNAS store and I copied all of my data over from the FreeNAS machine to the newly installed WHS machine. The copy took several hours. Once the copy was complete everything was immediately available to the network, media files and all.
For the Xbox 360 streaming test I have to change nothing at all. Enabling sharing on WHS did all of the work in the background and the 360 sees the server immediately. My entire music library loads extremely quickly and streaming is a breeze. My videos also load quickly and play without a hitch.
Looking in the Server Storage tab of the console I can see each drive in my server and add/remove drives from the storage pool. In the shared folders tab I find an option for folder duplication. Basically this will take whichever share I select and make sure the data is duplicated on two of the drives in the pool. I select my photos and my music for duplication. This ends up filling the smaller drive in the pool and I receive a notification of the problem. Duplication is automatically disabled for one of my shares until more space is added.
I decide to go all out and remove the 500G drive from the FreeNAS server and I add it to WHS. Adding the drive is simple, I click "Add" when I have the drive selected in the server storage tab and I am asked if I want the drive added as storage or backup. I choose storage and I'm up near 1TB of storage. I re-enable duplication and everything is good once again.
I scrounged up 2 200G drives to add to the server for 2 purposes: 1) bump me over the magical 1TB mark (now at 1.17TB!) and 2) testing out the backup features. I add one drive to the pool and I add the second as a backup drive. I configure the server to backup the Documents, Photos, Music, and Software shares. The backup proceeds without issue, and I am able to see the space used on the backup drive. This would be very useful with an external drive which could be removed and stored elsewhere once a backup is complete.
In addition to all of this, add-ins are available to add additional functionality. The most useful ones I have found so far are the Disk Management, uTorrent, and Duplication Info ones. All add-ins I have tried have worked without issue. The best place I've found for add-ins is Home Server Plus.
In addition to the built-in functionality, I was able to install uTorrent and PeerGuardian2 as services to use the box as my home torrent server. Enabling the web GUI in uTorrent and opening the assigned port on my router allows me to access uTorrent from anywhere, even on my iPhone. How handy is that?
Other notes in the comparison of FreeNAS and Windows Home Server: FreeNAS supports afp and a host of other sharing protocols and WHS does not, WHS supports adding any type of drive to the drive pool (I currently have 3 IDE, 2 SATA, and 1 USB drive) and while FreeNAS supports these, there is no pool of space, WHS media sharing is superior by far, and WHS backup features are easier to configure. The only thing I have remaining to test is backups from my mac laptops using Time Machine.
FreeNAS is a great product with a few drawbacks and the price is right. Windows Home Server just gets everything right and with my MSDN subscription the price becomes a non-issue. The biggest plus for WHS is the drive pool and how it is managed. In FreeNAS if the drive you store your movies on runs out of space, you'll have to do some work to add a new drive and get the shares sorted out...with WHS you just add a drive and put it in the pool. Having been a Windows user since Windows 3.1, I am completely blown away at how easy configuration of this system is. Adding drives, removing drives, backing up data, sharing media, it's all there in the console application.
The winner for me is Windows Home Server. Thanks for reading!
![[FSF Associate Member]](https://sites.google.com/site/bscoggins/Home/fsfMemberButton.png){kind=small}
6 comments
Uhmmm... an MSDN subscription doesn't give you the right to run WHS as an actual server. It's for development purposes only. Not that anyone's going to go after you, but, just saying.
Don't worry yourself about it. I've already set up Visual Studio 08 on the box, and I might even get into some add-in development...you just never know.
so you added all of those drives and tossed them into a pool then what happens if a drive fails?
Sound like the drive pool is JBOD with all that entails when you span drives with the folder.
I'll stick with RAID 5 or 50
I have been able to turn on duplication on the shares I want to keep multiple copies of, so in the event of a disk failure (say, like the one I had 3 weeks ago), the data is guaranteed to be on more than one disk. So no data was lost. All I had to do was send the drive in for RMA and when I received a replacement I popped it in and added to the pool. I was right back to where I started with very little fuss.
Firstly, great article. My Q is what if the drive that fails is the one with the OS running on it :| Does it back that up too?
The drive pool is fixed in at least the latest (maybe earlier version too?) FreeNAS. FreeNAS now natively supports Sun's ZFS, so you can use that for media storage and add drives too the zPool as needed. I haven't used it yet, but I plan to do something similar to your previous article with the ZFS trick. I think the UPnP has come a long way since then too.
Post a Comment