TZO has a special with HP, the service cost 9.95 a year after the first year.

TZO has a special with HP, the service cost 9.95 a year after the first year.

Giz did a hands onthe other day. Looks decent, though I didn’t catch if it’ll stream video to my Xbox?

@David – both versions of HP’s WHS come with four drive bays.

@bluemonq – Although the corruption bug is a bit of a problem it doesn’t effect system backups, only files that you edit in place on the server when you have two or more drives and duplication turned on.

Mike, so far I haven’t been able to get a straight answer about what happens to the hard drives if the *Drobo hardware* fails. I know that if I build a hardware RAID array and the RAID controller fails, I’m screwed unless I have spare controller, and sometimes even that won’t help. Do you have any further information on that? Would I pretty much be out of luck until I get another Drobo? It’s questions like that that make me stick to a software RAID, even if the performance isn’t quite as great.

As David alluded to, you don’t get the simple, centrally -adminstrated backup abilities. It can still handle backups from multiple PCs, but you’ll have to deal with it client-side. Then again, with all the trouble that WHS has had…

Also, FreeDNS offers free dynamic DNS service. DynDNS does too, as long as you’re not picky about your host name.

While nice and inexpensive, I think the next such item I buy is going to be the Drobo. It has some of the same features (hot-swappable/addable HDDs) in a very easy RAID-like package. Yeah, it’s quite a bit more expensive, especially with the network add-on, but I definitely feel it’s the product to beat.

If I recall correctly from posts at other blogs, this is Linux based and differs in functionality from the their Windows Home Server offerings. Depending on your needs, this may still fit the bill. Also, this device is limited to 2 drives, while their others have 4 bays (at least on some of them).

D.