acer Aspire Easystore AH340-U2T1H, Windows Home Server w/ Intel Atom 1.6Ghz 2GB DDR2 2TB installed (3 open Bay, Hot-Swappable)

Pros: price
looks nice

Cons: first off 8tb (units max) seems huge but in reality if you use folder duplication its really only 4tb. Then lets say you are backing up 3 computers and they take up 500gb well before you know it you really only have about 3tb of usable space.

This unit comes with the first WHS operating system not whs 2011. my complaints about my unit are ridiculously slow performance poor video streaming and ZERO upgrade-ability with this unit..

Backups are automatically done daily sounds great but it ends up being a waste of HD space and there is NO way to schedule so that backups only get done once a week. (unit does a daily, weekly AND a monthly backup, you can manually delete backups but its time consuming.

There is no automated backup of the server itself. SECONDLY if you plan on using one of the 4 hard drive spaces for your backup drive that cuts your max storage to 6tb.

Other Thoughts: 2gb ram is standard and cannot be upgraded due to motherboard limitations.

3tb drives are NOT supported.

a video card can be added but it takes up the only expansion slot. I ended up having to remove my video card in order to put in a esata raid card so tat I could use 2 external sans digital enclosures.

The processor is soldered onto the motherboard so no chance of upgrading that.

Lastly I tried to load DVDfab on mine so that I could rip movies directly from an external dvd drive. The processor is so slow it takes the unit 24-32 hours to create 1 mkv file. This normally takes about 3 hours on a pentuim 4 3.0ghz or about 35 minutes on my 6 core amd machine.

Pros: Wish I had the opportunity to use it to be able to review the features a functionality of this server, but I never even got it installed.

Cons: Didn't work out of the box. Read the manual online before even opening the box so I could know what to expect. Followed instructions to the letter. When it came time to power it up, it never made it so that it would be possible to install the connecting software on the client pc. When you power it up, the lights on the box blink and go through a diagnostic process. When done all the lights should turn into a solid blue. But in my case the "I" light would never do this. It stood as a purple light which indicates there is a problem. So I went through all the troubleshooting processes to no avail. I finally called Acer to try and get some help. But this is where the worst of the problem lies. Phone support is ridiculous... you call the 866 number and you get an automated answering robot. (cont below)

Other Thoughts: It ask you for the serial number. I give it to it and it doesn't understand so it asks for it again. I give it again. This process repeats itself until it asks for it to be typed in with the keypad, so I type it in and it still doesn't understand. (I almost through my phone at the wall). It finally tells you it can't help you and directs you their website. There website is just as useless. Went their to check and it asks for serial number and luckily it found it but them it tells me my warranty expires 10/28/11? I just bought the damm thing on 11/19/11! Bottom line... this is going back and never buying acer again.

Pros: I used this box with the original OS for more than a year, and had a great experience. Then an added hard drive failed in a messy way (I lost backups, but luckily no data). I had to reinstall the OS, and decided to try WHS 2011. That is now working great too!

Cons: With the Atom processor, this server feels very slow when using the WHS 2011 Dashboard (or RDC) to manage it, especially compared to another 4-core Xeon-based server I have running the same OS. But then I don't really spend much time managing it. As a file server, the Acer is very responsive when accessed from any wired client. And as a backup server, who really cares about the speed?

Other Thoughts: With WHS 2011, I really do miss Drive Extender. Here's how I set up my drives: A fast 2T hd in slot 1, hosting the OS partition (C:) and a data partition (D:) for my working shares. The other three slots have slower 2T green drives -- E: for video & music shares; F: for client backups; and hd4 (no drive letter) for internal server backups. Works for me.

Pros: It's a great form-factor device. And it's pretty quiet. With knowing how to swap out drives (I got this same one from Neweg on Sept 15, 2010). I had it up to *TB total drivespace, and running like a champ when it wasn't having other issues.

Cons: the NIC is extremely unstable. I've had to send it in multiple times to get the mainboard replaced due to a failed NIC. This is very common and you can read about ot on the forums. Now, out of warranty, and a failed NIC again, it's almost $300 to repair ($200 for the service, plus shipping both ways).

Other Thoughts: I would save yourself the trouble and spend a little more for the HP Proliant MicroServer instead. For the same price, you get a box not much larger, with video-out, and supports up to 8GB of RAM where the Acer's only support up to 2GB. You don't get the hot-swapability, but it's a far more reliable box.

Pros: Quiet, sleek, simple to set up. I love this thing! Definitely recommend it for simple mass storage and to backup all pc's in your house every night. I installed crashplan.com on it for online backups although its not officially supported through the WHS console. I also installed vnc and logmein.com because i have seen a couple occasions where i couldnt get the console to connect and remote desktop wouldnt either.

Cons: Couldnt connect to the console and remote desktop a couple times. Had to connect with vnc and reboot it to get that working again, however, the server and shared drives were working during that time.

Pros: - Hardware is good outside of the Hard Drive
- OS is ran from a place that can be changed

Cons: - Hard drive was dead on arrival, too many errors to operate and each time SMART was ran more errors were reported.
- OS takes one of the bay slots
- Ethernet is not recognized as Gig via Ubuntu

Other Thoughts: I had a 80GB HD that I installed Ubuntu on via VMWare and then installed the HD in the box. It works like a dream outside the ethernet capped at 100Mbps. The thing is only shut down when upgrading software or power disruption in my house.

They really should have moved towards Linux on this box. With the right tools I have a web server, DNLA server, NAS and more. It's more configurable than Windows but that comes with more complexity.

I highly recommend this product. Just wished the HD was good, 2TB drive down the drain. Actually wished they would sell this without the drive.

Pros: Probably works well if you aren't planning to use it as a file server. If you are just putting daily/weekly backups on it, then I imagine it will work fine.

Cons: The WHS model is based on Windows Server 2003, and you have to be somewhat familiar with how share permissions work if you plan to do a lot of advanced file permissions (different users have access to different things).

I work with Windows Servers for a living and I still had issues getting WHS to work correctly through the console application. It took a lot of tweaking and manual intervention via RDP to get things working right.

Drive Balancer is a poor substitute for true RAID. When it runs it will take your performance down, and it appears to have serious issues when a disk is > 80% capacity.

Right now I have 3x 2TB HDD's in mine, running full duplication (so 3TB effective storage). About 2.5TB of that are used, and my performance has gone to hell. I get constant skipping when streaming media and a reboot takes several hours (no joke).

Being a headless system, it makes troubleshooting REALLY difficult, especially when 80% of the time you can't connect to the console or R

Other Thoughts: I high suggest avoiding this system if you are looking for a cheap media server. It will work good for a while, but once your disks start to fill up, the Drive Balancer of WHS will cause major performance issues (just google it, lots of people are experiencing this).

Acer is usually a good brand that I trust, but just stay away from this. It's more of a shortcoming of WHS than Acer, so it's unfortunate that they have this product available as it gives them a bad name.

Pros: I've only had this for less then 24 hours before I put it back in the box for RMA.

Cons: WD 2 GB hard drive was throwing a S.M.A.R.T error.
Very little documentation on it. Most information is from blogs or message boarts.

Other Thoughts: When I recieved the item I followed the instructions to configure it. It took a while to get an IP. When it finally did I was only able to ping it.

After many reboots I was able to connect to it using the connector software. When I got to the screen to set a password I lost connection to it. It was still pingable though.

After more reboots I noticed only the networking light would come on. The hard drive lights and i icon would no longer light up. I was not able to get it into recovery mode by hitting the button on the back either.

I put the hard drive in a different computer and the Intel Matrix Storage manager alerted me that the drive was giving a SMART error. I then ran the WD tools and it too confirmed the error. I then ran chkdsk on it and it had some bad sectors. Checking WD site the drive is no longer under warranty.

Boxed it back up and requested an RMA. Gave it two stars instead of one as the issue is the drive, not the server. At least for now.

Pros: Small form factor, hot-swappable bays, generous supply of USB and SATA ports to add drives to storage pool.

Cons: Essentially non-existent post-warranty support. When I needed technical assistance I was forced to pay $149 "for five incidents within a year" (essentially $150 for this one incident) and the contractor supplying the "service" was a generalist. No one on their site had any knowledge of the H340 at all, and no one could assist me. I am forced to replace the unit, may lose 4Tb of data if there is no upgrade path, and must now dispute the $149 credit card charge.

Other Thoughts: Not a bad piece of equipment, but Acer support is abysmal. Stay away.

Pros: Looks kinda nice. Is relatively cheap.

Cons: Ok, so ask yourself how you plan to get your data onto this box. I hadn't. If you use the "handy" USB one-touch backup, all of your files are placed in shares determined by file type - your folder structure will not be preserved. So guess what - all of your album art? Dumped into the photos directory. Brilliant. Next - move files over the network? Far too slow if you have a lot of stuff. Next - install Advanced Admin Console (yes, you have to install this to access individual folders and usb devices like you would if it was a regular old windows machine). Now you can find the hard drive you've plugged into the usb port, and begin to manually move your stuff over. For some reason this is excrutiatingly slow - slower than a normal usb transfer as far as I can tell. Expect to be working on this for a couple of days with ~500gb of data. Now that its all over, ok, fine, it's basically an external, networked hdd.

Other Thoughts: Honestly you would think that there would be an efficient way of getting all of your data on this thing. If you simply install a hdd into one of the bays and set it to storage, that hdd will be erased, and the existing data on the other drive will then be distributed across the two. Hmm. How is that useful? You can install additional drives and set them as backup. I have not used any other of the limited features, maybe to some users they are cool. Please if someone has had a smooth time using this box, post some specifics. How about something more than "does the job, worth the money."