The Homeserver
Some time ago, I have bought myself a home server. That piece of technology was interesting because of two things:
- I wanted to access the same data from my 3 computers when rendering with Netrenderer (the network rendering client of Animtion:Master).
- Higher datasecurity than working with plain USB harddrives.
I could have bought a simple NAS, but I wanted something with 4 drive slots and Windows OS, since I wanted to run A:M Netrenderer (works great) on it and wanted to be able to just pull the harddisc out and plug it to my Windows computer to secure the data.
I was not really deep into homservers (and still aren't) when I bought the Acer easyStore H341 Homeserver with Windows HomeServer but in the end I have not regrad the purchuase.
The biggest problem I have faces was the performance. Some time after starting the home server the network harddisc started to slow down massively.
But today I have fixed the problem. Now I finally got what I wanted to get.
The quite slow Atom processor in the device is just not very well suited to handle different services at the same time. But since I only need it to run as a file server I just got rid of everything on it. Including the iTunes-Service and many other stuff. The only thing I left on is the backup service. Now it runs very very smoothly.
Since he is not connected to the internet, I even got rid of the virus protection software (since a firewall is running and the data is only coming from save computers with virus protection software should not happen to much there.
All that increases the speed massively! So if you really do not need those services: Deactivate them!
The write speed may not be suited to edit high definition videos directly on the system, but with write rate of 40 MB/s and up it really is fast enough for anything I need in the 3d graphics department.
If you are a A:M user and you only need it for those thing I told you about: You can buy it without a doubt if you get rid of the services you do not need...