By Philip Churchill on July 06th, 2009
Reviewed – Acer Aspire easyStore H340
DesktopReview.com has a review of the Acer Aspire easyStore H340.
The review goes through the specifications and looks at the build and the design of the unit. The setup and features are taken a look at as well as the performance of this small unit.
You can read the review here.
Share this WHS Article with Others:
At first glance this looks like a real cool and well priced WHS box. At second glance some small things become apparent that may well sway the decisions of prospective users from going anywhere near this neat little package.
My main gripe was the inability to hook it up to a full head (keyboard, mouse and monitor) this seems to be by design and there is only a USB port on the box apart from the power connector. Ok it may be possible with some intimate knowledge and a pletora of usb to VGA and usb hubs etc etc to do this but so far I have not seen any indication that this is possible or easy.
WHS is not always easy to RDP or install the connector from so there are times when you need better access to the wee blighter and again lack of I/O can be a problem.
When compared to the HP offerning I would take the HP over the ACER any day.
My present whs is a home built box and I have it close enough to my main use box to be able to use a KVM switch.
For some people the acer may work out but from what I have seen and read the majority of users posting on the various whs sites are semi or pro IT people and the acer seems not much more than a glorified NAS. Again I do realise there is NAS and there is NAS but WHS is more than that. Acer might have been able to save quite a few more pennies by using a linux variant (no i am not a linux fan) and reached out to the NAS fans who swear that this is better than WHS.
Maybe there is another ACER in the pipeline with proper IO I do hope so as that is the one I will take a proper look at. As it stands this is a pretty expensive but limited nas and I cannot qualify it a a “proper” whs box in my humble opinion.
The greater percentage of WHS machines will be headless, and so won’t have screen, keyboard and mouse connections. Manufacturers really don’t want to encourage day to day usage of a WHS machine by connecting these kinds of devices – it is after all a server, and not a PC.
I have a problem now having lack of keyboard, mouse and monitor. I accidentally installed Firewall and now I cannot RDP to the server because it might need to accept something on the server. But how can I accept it now since there is no keyboard, mouse and monitor interface.