s4n1ty’s Blog

HP has a really cool Windows Home Server in a tiny case with 4 hot-swappable front loaded SATA drive bays. This is the smallest and best looking case I’ve seen so far. The biggest downsides are that it comes with 512mb of RAM and upgrading it yourself isn’t the easiest. I was able to upgrade the RAM in about 15 mins or so. I typically can upgrade RAM in about 3-5 mins, but for the HP MediaSmart you have to pretty much take apart the entire case to get to the motherboard and RAM. It only has one memory slot so it’s best to buy either a single 1g or 2g stick. I went for the 2g stick knowing I wanted to install a lot of apps on mine.

I opted out from upgrading the processor as I don’t want to mess with overheating problems and I don’t typically mess with mounting processors anyway.

Due to the data corruption bug I also swapped out the original 500gb drive with a 750gb drive and restored the OS onto the new drive. I also have 3 more internal drives added, but not part of the drive pool. I use one to backup the original drive shares, and another to create shares that I don’t need to have online and the last drive backs up the previous one.

I run manual backups at night so it doesn’t slow me down while I’m working. I could ofcouse lose some data if the drives crashed before the backup took place but that is something I’m currently willing to live with. Once the data corruption bug is fixed then I will add a new drive to the pool and turn on data replication for my extremely important folders.

I will write part 2 later…