Hardware Asus TS Mini Windows Home Server Review

I've built 4 WHS over the past year and it does everything it says on the tin. This ASUS Mini isn't the best solution if you are dipping your toe for the first time. My current WHS works perfectly and looks after all the pcs in the house. WHS isn't just for file sharing, its for dedicated backup of every machine as well so don't just think of it as a media server.

Cant wait to see what version 2 comes out like.

 

Yeah Linux is a pain - but learning a new OS is the best game I've ever played - and it's free! There's a lot to like with the enthusiasm (but not BELIEF) of Linux peeps as well...

I'm only running three Ubuntu machines at home - two of which are dual boot... everything else is windows 7 now (except the old xp laptop...)

 

I was somewhat troubled by this review considering I had a TS Mini (2TB version) in the mail at the time.

I just got it and set it up, but at least in my first test it fared much better than the benchmarks here. I copied some photos (3725 files totaling 4.78GB = ~1.28MB per file, so somewhere between the "small file" and "large file" tests) from my desktop to the TS mini using TeraCopy which reported a bit under 30MB/sec average.

I'll do some more tests and report back, but so far not as discouraging as the "poor performance" claims made here would indicate.

 

@salty

Yeah, I dropped a note to the site editor asking them to further look into the machines network performance if they still have it available. Those network numbers just look really bad and I honestly think either a driver issue (NIC, chipset) or something with the article writers gigE network is causing this. That hardware should be capable of much more than that.

 

Ah, I see your post above... yeah, it's a Realtek NIC, I didn't upgrade the driver (it is version 5.736.728.2009 dated 7/28/2009), and I don't see any update for it or any other drivers in the Windows Update log.

I haven't tried to reproduce their tests yet but my real-world data copying has been fine. Well, most of the time I've been copying off my old server and limited by its 100Mbit NIC. Now I've got a USB2 drive connected to my desktop, copying files to the server over the gigE network. 300GB of mostly large files (~20MB each) with some tiny ones (a few KB), humming along about 35MB/s... might be limited by USB2. I'll do some other tests when I get a chance.

Otherwise, I've been pretty happy. This is my first experience with WHS and everything seems to be working well (win7 libraries, streaming to PS3 and 360). I'm not thrilled that print sharing is not "officially" supported but after some messing around I got my printer working.

I'm thrilled about the power consumption, 25-30W according to my kill-a-watt, with not much difference between idle and load. The box it's replacing was 80-110W... and a lot slower, noisier, etc, so it's a win/win.

 

Hmmm, you should have tested more than just files on a windows box, I just skipped through but many people have a mac (for the girlfriend) and may have printers on the network. Also as above the gamers will possibly have a connected console...

 

I agree Teq, although Windows is undoubtedly the dominant client OS currently, Microsoft has never been keen on interoperability with other systems. As consumers increasingly move towards hybrid client environments (Windows + other OSes), I would like to have seen WHS put to the task with other OSes.

Out of curiosity, does it come with Exchange?

 

A WHS will typicaly get 70-80MB/S (well my HP EX-485 will) untill you throw data redundancy (Demigrator) into the mix.
At which point write speeds will probbly drop off to around the 30-40MB/S range depending on if your CPU can keep up with the tombstone calculations.
Even then those read / write speeds for the Asus TS are shockingly bad, theres definatly something more going on there.

 

Although I haven't tried it myself. I believe it offers Mac's all the same services apart from backups. You would have to point the backup location on the Mac to a folder on the WHS. I am assuming the same for any other OS as well. Microsoft shouldn't be forced to accommodate other OS but it's good to see they can all run on the same WHS.

 

sorry didnt read the whole article or the comments so if its been mentioned just point me to it ^^

anyhow is WHS still limited to 32bit or is there finally a 64bit version?

 

Current version is 32 bit only.

I believe the next version is going to be 64bit only and based off Server 2008 instead of 2003.

 

I am completely bemused as to why the reviewer keeps going on about RAID support. The whole point of WHS for me is that the file/duplication duplication gives me secuity against a server disk failure, but it does that over what ever disks you throw into it rather than requiring you to buy an array of identical disks and then upgrade the whole lot when it runs out of space.

In my case I built my current Home Server from cheap as hell ML110 G4 with three of 500Gb disks. When that ran out of space I bought a 1.5Tb drive, stuck it in and told WHS it should add it to the storage. As it happened I wanted a 500Gb for a build so I then asked WHS to remove that drive and (after it had moved all the data off it) took the drive out. I've since repeated this process once, but when I next want to will probably just add another drive and go to a 4 disk array.

Each time I need more storage I can buy whatever drive comes at a decent price, the current chassis has space for 4, plus a pair of 5.25 bays which could be converted if I add another SATA card. By the time all that lot is full I could used external storage or move the lot to a bigger Chassis.

Now if this was a raid setup I'd be always stuck having to buy gets of matched disks at greater cost for little real benefit.

As for printer sharing, my printer is networked already (ip5200r) so I can't really comment.

 

Someone please tell me it's not using that shagged-out file system, NTFS.

 

Nothing wrong with NTFS

 

I think Venares is onto something with demigrator except it seems to hit me much worse...

I am using TeraCopy to repeatedly copy a 2.5GB file to the server. I have 8GB RAM on the client so the entire file should be cached there. I'm watching the "Networking" tab of the Task Manager on the WHS desktop, and TeraCopy reports instantaneous speed as well as overall time/speed. Typically I'll see the rate bounce around between 30-60MB/s, overall around 1 minute to do the copy, ~40MB/s..

However, every once in a while the speed will take a BIG hit, down to 10MB/s or even lower, and if I look at "processes" in Task Manager, sorted by CPU%, demigrator.exe will be #2 (behind idle time which is more or less always #1 even when doing the copy) It will stay that way for a while and then go back up. This happens whether I am writing to a duplicated share or not (I guess it still tries to balance the disks either way). So, I think this is a generic WHS issue, as evidenced by this thread:

http://forum.wegotserved.com/index.php?/topic/8335-demigrator-exe-again/

I don't know if it explains these review results, given their test machine was 1x500GB and I have 2x1TB... does demigrator have anything to do on a single-disk machine? And I don't know if it's any worse on this ASUS machine than any other WHS machine.