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All hard  drives will eventually fail. Some earlier than others. As some readers may remember, The Big WHS lost three of eight new Western Digital Green 1.5TB drives earlier this year within a three month span, leading me to procure more and more Hitachi 2TB 7200rpm drives. Recently, I experienced my first Hitachi drive failure when a six month old drive started dropping from the Areca controller and started seeing rising error counts. One of the advantages of Windows Home Server is that pulling WHS drives and recovering data is a very simple task. I used my latest drive failure experience to take some screen shots for a guide on recovering data off of a WHS disk. Continue Reading

Microsoft Windows Vista and Windows 7 contain a benchmark utility called the Windows System Assessment Tool (WinSAT). The Windows Experience Index is more or less a GUI version of the WinSAT scores that provides the user with a simple way to run the test, and see a summary of the results. With Windows Home Server V2 Codename VAIL right around the corner, Microsoft has given WHS the ability to stream video and transcode video in real time. While streaming may require relatively little CPU utilization (from what I have seen approximately 24% of a single 2.8ghz to 3.0ghz single core), transcoding requires much more CPU power to deliver a smooth experience. Initial guidance by Ayca Akguc on Microsoft’s forums indicates the most transcoding CPU power currently envisioned for VAIL is equivelant to a WinSAT CPU score of 6.6. While the WEI GUI provides a simple subscore, some users would rather see the raw output. This guide will show how one can check their CPU WinSAT score for VAIL compatibility. Continue Reading

Many Windows Home Server (WHS) users use their machines as remote desktop gateways. Although remote desktop connection is functionally great, one annoyance sometimes rears its ugly head, the inability to reboot or shutdown a PC through RDC. Here is a screenshot of what this looks like:

Remote Desktop menu does not include restart and shutdown

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Microsoft Windows Home Server allows for multiple user accounts, and each user account can be set up with different permissions to various folders. This can be an invaluable tool to restrict access to documents and folders on a WHS. First the list from least to most access is:

1. None – The user cannot view or otherwise modify files in the shared folder.
2. Read – User can view files, and do things like open the files, but cannot move, modify, add, or delete them.
3. Full – User can open, add, remove/ delete, modify, move files and sub-folders Continue Reading

How easy is it to use one PC to initiate a manual backup of another PC using Windows Home Server? Extremely. This guide will illustrate.

Here’s the video.

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After recommending WHS to a friend I got a note saying it was running really slow for pulling data off the server, even though writing data was fine. As this friend is not so technically apt, I decided to setup quick test machines, one running Vista 64 the other WHS. Both were using a Dell Perc 5/i raid card and two 500GB 7200rpm Western digital drives in raid 0 (I would never do this in practice, but these were solely built for test purposes.)

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