Microsoft bigs up its new Home Server

November 6th, 2007 by Giles Smith

Today, several big-name web retailers unveiled a machine from Hewlett-Packard, which helped develop the new OS, and a second is on sale straight from pint-sized hardware manufacturer Velocity Micro. If you order now, you can get your hot little hands on one in late November or early December.

Find out more…

HP MediaSmart Server

The Server is designed to be an all in one ’solution’ for you home media needs. It will stream media to any device supporting the Windows Media Connect protocol meaning you could use your xBox to watch films of listen to music on your tv. It can also be simply configured to automatically back up data from any windows machine on the same network.

Whilst other hardware vendors have embraced the new OS (I say new, its just Vista basic with some extra software) Microsoft have chosen HP to run its flagship.

It runs an AMD Sempron 1.8Ghz with 512Mb RAM and comes in several storage sizes; $599 for 500Gb and $799 for 1Tb both of which don’t have any RAID and seem fairly expensive to me, but I built my own server with 1Tb RAID5, P4 2Ghz and 2.5Gb RAM for around the same price as their entry level version. But I am running Fedora 7 which costs infinately less than Windows… also my box will work with a far greater variety of devices as I am not tied down by the Windows Media Connect protocol (which as far as I know, only works with an xBox)

Microsoft also wants you to know that more Home Server products are on the way from several other vendors. Fujitsu Siemens and Iomega will soon introduce their own Home Server machines, and countless software vendors are developing apps for use with the new OS.