Eric B. Rux series on "Coming Home to Windows Home Server" continues with part 27 where Eric takes a look at the TS Mini from Asus.
The ASUS TS Mini is a good Home Server. The included add-ins really add value to this already inexpensive device. There are plenty of USB and eSATA connections on the back of the server for external drives (more than the HP models).
You can read the post here.
Kelvyn Taylor of THINQ.co.uk has a review of the Acer EasyStore H340 Home Server:
One of the few four-bay Windows Home Systems on the market, the EasyStore H340 does its job well. It’s decently priced, too, for a four-bay NAS system with 2TB of storage thrown in, but be prepared for the eccentricities of the OS. The even better news is that the price has just been cut by 50 quid. It’s also worth considering for small office use, where the built-in remote access and set-and-forget backups come into their own.
You can find his review here.
Website "lifehacker" has a post on how to whip your music’s metadata into shape by using tagging software.
The good thing about doing this is that your music will be better organized on Windows Home Server and easier to search.
various tagging software are taken a look at including Jaikoz for primary tags and Mp3tag for secondary tags with full step by step instructions, which you can find here.
We last bought the add-in Poca-WHS to your attention back in March when it was in the works of being produced. The good news is that it is now available as a open beta, which is both functional and stable.
The add-in is a pod catcher which runs on Windows Home Server, without needing a user to be logged in to the server all the time. Once installed you go to the settings screen and configure one or more folders that the downloaded pod casts will be saved in. Once these folders are configured you then go to the main screen and setup the RSS Feeds.
Version 0.6.10.0331 can be downloaded from here.
Thanks to the Home Server Show website for the heads up.
We earlier wrote about Windows Home Server appearing on the Designing Spaces TV programme on both The Learning Channel and Women’s Entertainment but it is also available 24×7 streaming on the Designing Spaces website, which you can find here.
One of the online backup solutions for Windows Home Server which I have been using for the last several months is CrashPlan Central.
Although there are other dedicated offerings for Home Server users, such as KeepVault and CloudBerry Backup, I find that these can work out expensive for my 500GB of data which needs to be backed up the the cloud (e.g.KeepVault $432+, CloudBerry Backup $75+). CrashPlan Central allow you to back up unlimited data for a flat fee of $54 for 1 year which works out at only $4.50 per month. The only drawback is that CrashPlan do not have an add-in for Windows Home Server and network shares are not supported – But all is not lost. MSWHS reader Daniel has written a post on how to properly setup CrashPlan for WHS where the shares are mounted for backup, (which is the way Microsoft recommend for backing up the files correctly) using the Windows Home Server built in Task Scheduler and a small .bat file.
You can read Daniel’s post here.
One of our readers Thomas Schindler posted a comment to our "MediaSmart and Twonky Media – Still High CPU Issues" article, with a solution to the problem.
The latest update from HP for the Twonky Media Server is version 5.1.1 whilst the version from TwonkyMedia is 5.1.2 which rectifies the high CPU utilization issue.
Tom used this following simple fix to get version 5.1.2 onto his MediaSmart Server, which remains licensed:
Remark: as long as you only exchange the two exe files, the license that comes with the HP WHS does not complain.
Add-In developer Andreas M who is mostly known by his Advanced Admin Console Add-In has a Windows Home Server developer tip.
The tip explains how to communicate between your SettingsTab and your ConsoleTab which is needed when an end user makes changes to the settings on the settings tab and clicks either OK or Apply. Andreas explains how to notify your console tab of these new settings, using code which you can find here.
Register Hardware is a website dedicated to hardware product news and reviews who have a 4 page review of the Asus TS mini Home Server.
The units vital statistics are taken a look at as well as its data throughput, which you can read about here.
This weeks episode of The Home Server Show podcast has Greg Hayes from Raxco, the company behind PerfectDisk talking about defragmentation and especially about PerfectDisk for Windows Home Server.
You can find episode 84 here.
