As part of his keynote address on Sunday at the annual Consumer Electronics Show, Gates showed off Windows Home Server (more info at Ars) - a consumer device to serve as a central storage place for digital photos, music and other media. The first products are due out later this year from HP and others. The goal is to get devices that can cost less than USD 500. In the first of a two-part interview, Microsoft's chairman talks about why the average person wants a server, why they won't need a degree in computer science to run it and what hurdles remain before consumers reach the true digital home.
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Member since:2005-07-06
Member since:2005-07-02
Multiple drives is preferable (if more expensive), as having data in two different places can be a bit more complicated, especially for stuff that changes (home accounting data, for example). You'd need a versioning system, or at least rsync, to manage it. It can certainly be done, but it's a bit more complex.
I got the idea that the device is destined more for centralized storage than backup anyway (though it would certainly be useful for that as well).
Member since:2005-07-08
The server can have multiple drives for redundancy, or the data can be both on the PC and the server ensuring the data exists in at least 2 places.
So? The client also can get multiple drives for redundancy - it can even become a "standard practice" when buying a pc - and it's way cheaper than a separate server. And local filesystems can also do internal backups and versioning and all that, without buying a extra server, you know.
And if you want to replicate your data...why replicate it in a "server"....when the other computers in your house could use their unused disk space? Vista could add techonoloy to enable other computers in your house to store encrypted backups of other computers in your home...*THAT* would be interesting
Aditionally, since the server needs to store backups from *ALL* the pcs it means it'll need to have enought storage capacity...your disks in your personal pcs may be half-void but hey, because WHS needs to do backups of the half-filled part for N different computers you may need to go to the store and ask for a extra disk for your WHS server. Weeeee.
Backup devices are certainly useful in many cases, I'd see why you'd want something like WHS in a office. But I don't understand why people would buy WHS for their homes at all, not even enthusiasts. The one useful idea behind it for homes seems to be the fact that you can access the files while the another pc is powered off. And frankly, I'm just not buying a separate and expensive server + pay a extra license OS for that.
Edited 2007-01-09 01:04
Member since:2005-07-08
Member since:2005-07-02
Member since:2006-12-07
Member since:
2005-07-02
Anyone that has digital media or documents and wants to ensure they won't lose them due to a harddrive failure[...]
Except of course if the server hard drive fails. ;-)
I guess the ideal solution would be a solid state HD, but with the kind of capacity you need for this type of device it would cost over 1500$!!