I successfully installed Windows Home Server on a 7 year old Athlon 1800 with 512MB of RAM and two ATA drives (100GB and 200GB). My first concerns were: would the BIOS support booting from the DVD drive and was it a USB 2 card in there? Thankfully yes on both counts. One day I will save up for one of these lovely machines from tranquil-pc: http://www.tranquilpc-shop.co.uk/acatalog/HOME_SERVERS.html. Atom power devices with Terabytes of internal storage, expandability and very low power consumption - think half a light bulb, and even then they can be sent to sleep during the day when you are out of the house. But for the time being, I am extending the life of my home built tower...
It performed a large number of reboots and the aged machine took a long time to get through the install so when it got to applying updates I switched off the screen and went to bed. All very uneventful.
Originally I was using Robocopy scripts to mirror data between the two drives. I had to copy this data off on to a USB drive because installing Windows Home Server formats all drives.
Next steps:
- Selectively bring back data and put it into a new folder structure.
- Install the WHS client on wife's laptop and hope that iTunes is happy to use the shares as libraries!
- Install Jungle Disk for Windows Home Server to backup my data into the cloud.
- See whether I can get Windows Media Center to happily consume content from Windows Home Server.
- See whether I can get XBOX 360 to consume content from Windows Home Server.
- Buy a sizeable external HDD so there is plenty of space to back up the laptops.
- Configure backups of my laptop and wife's laptop - AC powered, but hibernated/sleeped laptops should wake-up and backup in the middle of the night.
A useful link for Windows Home Server addins: http://www.wegotserved.co.uk/windows-home-server-add-ins/