I will continue to preach the benefits of Windows Home Server until everyone is using it. I promise. With that said, The Windows Home Server Blog has an excellent top 10 reasons why you should use WHS. The list is simple, to the point, but not totally complete. I would like to add a few of my own if that’s okay.
11. Torrent friendly
It’s easy to turn your WHS into a torrent monster. Just install utorrent – or any other program I guess – and setup a network share on the server that the program watches for new torrents. This way you can initiate a download from any network-based computer by just dropping a torrent into the share. Remote Desktop Connection makes it easy to manage everything from any computer including OS X machines.
12. Stream even more media
WHS has streaming software built in but you can turn it off and install more powerful options like PlayOn and TVersity. It’s the perfect solution since your WHS is probably turned on all the time already.
13. DIY
My first WHS was a random collection of old PATA hard drives ran by an AMD Athlon 1900+. I think the largest was a 250GB out of seven drives, but WHS easily combines all the drives into one RAID cluster on any hardware.
[via MS Windows Home Server]
LOVE my home built WHS. Used an old pc and bought 2 new 1TB drives. Great backup solution. Great streaming media solution. Great remote access solution. Great price. I’m with you on this, Matt!
I was just thinking about doing this. Guess its time to get my feet wet. Great article!
Hey don’t forget you could get a decent Media PC right now off of WOOT for like $289 that’s pretty darn cheap.
Big James
Here “are” the first 10.
Since I’m getting ready to give up on DirecTV and Cable, this might be a great idea on how I can store everything I want to watch locally and rewatch it whenever I want.
I’d stay away from #13 on this and use all the same disk sizes and speed and go with either RAID 0 or 5. JBOD is scarier than Dracula.
It works well for me and everyone else that uses Windows Home Server.
An explanation is needed as to why I would want to part with my hard earned cash for WHS when I can have a better setup for free.
Wow, backups and the ability to create shares. Looks like a big waste of money.
I think WHS rocks as well. I no longer have to do all the manual backups I used to do with USB drives, I can stream to different TV’s audio, video and pictures from one shared drive, I can add additional drives easily if I want to expand, I can recover deleted files easily, even if my wife empties the recycle bin, I can restore a PC after a dead hard drive in less than an hour (thank goodness I haven’t had to do this one yet!), there is so much more to the WHS servers than just backups and shares.
I have some additional information as well here,
Windows Home Server Info if you want to read my additional thoughts about why I chose it over other options.
The combination of WHS, My Media Center PC, and a couple extenders makes my whole house rock! For peace of mind backups and easy of access for all my date (to my wife and kids – read only…) WHS is a great product. Microsoft got the ease of use and usability right the first time. Who says don’t buy a 1.0 product?