Tuesday, August 26, 2008

Another inexpensive to operate home server: HP EX470

I had mentioned earlier that I was using a Thecus N5200 as a home server to provide power efficient 24/7 storage for all my photographs, videos and music files. After almost four years of use I had amassed so many photographs (sports photography is a hobby and a typical game will consume 700 or so photographs) that I was starting to worry about losing the entire Thecus box (not to a single disk failure which the RAID array would recover from, but losing the disk controller or box -- recovering files from dead RAID arrays borders on the impossible).

As luck would have it, HP had announced their MediaSmart Server based on Windows Home Server. The 500 GB EX-470 seemed a perfect entry vehicle to start with. I purchased one from Newegg and populated it with two additional 1 TB drives.

Performance testing indicated that the throughput of the HP box was about 2x the speed of the Thecus, with almost no difference between read and write speeds. Finally I had a server that was taking advantage of my Gigabit Ethernet network.

In addition to being a darned fast storage device the server also acts as an automatic backup device for all my windows based machines. Finally I don't have to nag my wife and kids about backing things up to the server -- it all happens automatically. With our desktop and laptop computers taken care of, the only thing missing is support for our two Macs (which can't use the automatic backup).

Add the fact that the box is setup for media sharing, and has full time virus scanning, and you have a winner product.

Power monitoring indicates that the EX-470 pulls about 70 watts 24/7, slightly more than the Thecus consumption of 60 watts. However there is a good reason why. Microsoft has determined that RAID arrays are too difficult for the average home user to maintain -- especially when something goes wrong (like a controller crash). They designed the Windows Home Server to store all the files in a fashion that allows you to plug the drive into a standard controller should the need arise and easily find the files. They also provide automatic "mirroring" of the files to another disk should you enable that feature for a directory (so you mirror just what you need, not an entire disk).

These two features require a bit more disk access on the part of the EX-470, which may need to move a file to balance storage, or to duplicate it if it is mirrored. That translates into a bit more power consumption over time.

The cost to operate the HP EX-470 with three drives is $0.31 a day or $9.53 a month.

No comments: